Slide Out Problems - Worth It???

[Sarjon52]

Hi. I have a 2004 Winnebago Sightseer 30B with about 21,000 miles - hardly used but now it has a front slide-out problem. It is sitting at a repair facility where I live so I survived the failure of the front drive, being able to push in the front end of the slider to catch it up with the rear drive that works fine. Taking the drive assembly out we found the accuator totally stripped out or at least the inner threaded part broke loose inside the tube and the motor frozen. Gears in the gear box are pristine. I am waiting for the machine shop to pull the gear attached to the acme threaded shaft so it can be removed and the accuator removed from the shaft and we can see what actually happened to the threaded part inside it. This is a VonWeise drive, Lippert-Kwikee system that is obsolete. I now have the drive at a machine shop to build a new accuator tube with an acme thread sleeve insert and the motor will go to a motor repair shop.


Is this 18 inches of extra space worth the headaches? No. I will probably just test it to make sure it works for when I decide to sell the Motorhome and just not use the slider anymore. I had slider issues with our trailer that had the cable slider system. What a piece of you know what! - tiny motor with a tiny gear that was very fragile and breaks.


I think I'll stick with hydraulic sliders in the future.

[creativepart]

It’s fine if you decide to not use the slide after it’s fixed. That’s up to you. But it sounds like you know for resale that you must get this fixed.

By the way, hydraulic slides are better but they can be just as prone to failure as most of the others.