Wednesday, September 7th - Day 69 - More Work on Slide Drive

 Kathy met up with two of her sisters, who live in NW Ohio, today and they attended the funeral of one of their cousins, in Bryan, Ohio. She also picked up some stuff at Meijer's on her way back.

I spent the majority of the day trying to get the faulty slide fully "parked". It should have been easy but.....

The lever you see in the photo below was originally fully encased in a rubber boot. You are supposed to move it CCW to release the brake that locks the slide in place whenever the motor is not running. Today's work should have been simple. Release the brake, put a crescent wrench on the tube shaft that rotates and moves the slide in and out, rotate the shaft until the slide was parked correctly against the coach wall and move the lever back to lock the slide in place. I cut the rubber boot off the motor and no matter what I did the brake would not release.

I removed the unit from the coach. I thought that maybe when the gearbox broke loose from the frame the gears might have been damaged, and that they locked in place. 

The gears looked OK.

I removed the end of the motor to see what I could learn about the brake/locking system. I could not loosen the 4 screws in the black disc, so further disassembly wasn't possible. I think that the black disc with the slot in it is kind of like a brake rotor. There must be an electromagnet inside this assembly that disengages the brake when current is applied to the motor.

As I continued to fool around with the unit I knew I had to missing something. I kept wondering about the "dimples" in the lever, and the recessed spaces in the motor housing. Bottom line ended up being that when the lever is rotated the "dimpled" areas are supposed to move the lever away from the housing. That pulls the pin in the center up, which releases the rotor so that it can rotate. At some time in the past the lever on this assembly had been enough so that it didn't pull the center pin up when it was rotated. Wedging a screwdriver bit under the lever caused the brake to unlock. 

I reinstalled the drive unit, manually retracted the slide to its parked position and reset the brake. I'm not 100% comfortable that the longer bolts I threaded into the broken gear box lugs won't break off the rest the the lug when we are going down the road. I locked a pair of vise grips on the tube that functions as a drive axle to minimize the possible amount it can rotate should the gearbox break loose again.

I emailed Lippert, the manufacturer, (the same company that took many weeks to deliver our trailer axles) to find out if I can buy a new unit from them.

Weather here has been great. We did run the generator for a couple of hours each of the first two nights we were here, so that we could run the AC. The night before last I was much closer to running the furnace than the AC. Todays high was 76 and tonights low is forecast to be 52 degrees. Our kind of weather.

We are still learning about the capacities of our holding tanks. Tonight we both took our 6th showers (quickie showers - turn on the water, get wet, shut the water off, soap down, turn the water on, rinse off and shut the water off.) We have not filled up the gray water tank nor run out of fresh water. Kathy wanted to run the dishwasher tonight so I did drain the gray tank after our showers. 

Today I received the collapsible "water bladder" I ordered from Amazon. Tomorrow I will try it out by going down to my  brothers, putting the bladder on top of the Flex roof, filling it, returning to the coach and gravity draining the water into the fresh water tank. 

God is good. I pray that He blesses you and yours.