The Tale of the Busted Slide

What do you do when your RV slide goes out and won't go back in? If that happened to me, I'm sure I would first utter an expletive, make sure I wasn't the cause of the malfunction, then break the news to the wife assuring her that I wasn't the cause of the malfunction. How then do you get the slide back in? 

We'll that depends on your RV I guess. My Class C has a screw drive mechanism controlling the slide. If the electric motor goes bad, the slide can be cranked in. The slide on my father in-law's Class A however, is powered by hydraulic's which poses the question. What happens when the hydraulics fail? As we found out tonight, you can not just crank it back in. It will go in though, but it takes some HE MAN strength..and that's where I come in.

1-2-3 PUUUSH!!!

Tonight my son and I were summoned to lend some man power to get the rear slide pushed in on my father in-law's crippled Winnebago. The plan was simple...push the slide back in. So the three of us gave it a "1-2-3 PUSH!!" and the slide hardly budged. Hmmmm. At first it was like pushing on a brick wall expecting it to move. Uh...not gonna happen.

With each push, however, it moved a tiny bit. So we kept pushing then taking a break. After a few pushes, it occurred to me "Why am I not taking a picture of this for the blog?" So on the next push I stepped away and snapped this pic of my father in-law and my son pushing without me. If you think that looks hard, try taking this picture without laughing. Finally, after about 10 minutes of pushing, we got it pushed all the way in. "WHEW!!"

So how did this happen?

Well this is one of those moments when you say to your wife "I'm so glad this happened at home and not on the road." While loading up the RV before a trip, my father in-law opened up the slide in the back bedroom and heard an awful noise. A hydraulic line had just busted under the bed spewing hydraulic fluid on the floor and under the slide. After realizing what had happened, it was time to break the unfortunate news to the wife. "Trip cancelled honey."

Then the call went out to an RV repair guy. The guy showed up, surveyed the damage and said "I don't want to take this one on. Sorry." Alright now what. So a call was made to an RV shop who said they could fix it if he would bring it in to the shop. Driving it down the road with the slide out was definitely not an option, so he had to figure out how to get the slide pushed back in. SUCCESS! 

Final thoughts
If there is a moral to this story I think it is this: Unless you want a real RV adventure, make sure all of the equipment on your RV is in proper working order prior to hitting the road. The 20 minutes spent checking everything out will give you valuable peace of mind. There are negative aspects to owning an RV, but let's try to avoid those if we can. Don't you agree?