Fifth Wheel Repairs

The mobile tech arrived shortly after 7:30 yesterday morning. The good news is that he spent about 3 hours replacing the leaking hydraulic line with a new, heavy duty line. He ran the line under the coach and had it operating flawlessly.

The bad news is that, after an hour of trying different ways to adjust the slideout controls for our bedroom slide, he couldn't move any of the cylinders or connections to be able to make any adjustments. There has to be something else wrong with the slideout that cannot be done without taking it apart. That requires a trip to a an RV shop and means that we will have to take it - probably to the Orangewood RV Center on Bell Rd in Surprise, and have them diagnose and repair the problem.

I had hoped to be able to show photos of the before and after, but it looks like I am able to only show the before:

You can clearly see the 1.5 inch "gap" at the bottom, which results in cold air constantly entering through the bottom of the slideout. Throw in dust that comes in on the windy days, and it is a nuisance. That was only the beginning of our problems yesterday.

At about 4 PM, I decided to try to close the slideout and reopen it to see if maybe the work that the tech did may have affected the slideout, which is also on a hydraulic line of its own. The pressure within the system should once again be "balanced" with the new line on the stabilizer creating even pressure throughout the system. I couldn't get any different outcome, and while pushing out the slide, I heard a "pop" and didn't think anything about it - until I went try to level the fifth wheel from the day's work on the stabilizer and discovered that nothing worked.

It seems that one of the other hydraulic lines somehow wrapped itself around the hydraulic controls while closing the slideout and pulled them off their platform and caused the fluid to drain from the system. I immediately called the tech who was still in the area and he returned to try and see what happened. The net of this problem was that a different valve was damaged and needs to be replaced.

In the meantime, we will have no use of the hydraulics until the valve is replaced. The concern I have is that the tech is saying that the problem was not caused by any work he did to replace the old line and blamed consequential damage, but the fact is, nobody else touched that compartment all day. It seems strange that the problem should occur, after six years of use, only after someone was performing work on the system. We'll see how that turns out.

Josie did our laundry yesterday while the tech was trying to figure out a solution so that chore is done for the weekend. No other plans are made at this point, but we haven't had a real opportunity to plan anything, so that will be done this morning - the final day of January, 2014...