Vegas 25.6 Slide Issue

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This may apply to others or not. As I was prepping our 2018 Vegas 26.5 for a trip, I discovered a couple of slide rollers were broken off. In the Vegas 25.6 the slide includes the bedroom and the dinette, everything on the driver’s side behind the driver’s seat. There are 3 rollers under the bed. Two of these were broken off.

What I found were each roller has 4 screw holes for mounting. However, when installed only 2 of the holes were utilized, upper left and lower right. See pic 1 of remaining roller.

The screws penetrated 3/8” plywood and then metal tubing. The screws were the standard 1 inch self-tapping screws used throughout the motorhome. Both screws had actually snapped in one mount and one snapped in the other with the weight seeming to wrench the remaining screw out. From the looks of things I surmised that the rollers had been broken for a while.

Of course, in order to re-install the rollers, the slide had to be lifted about 1/4-3/8 of an inch. Not sure of how I was going to lift the slide and knowing that we were about to depart for a visit to grandchildren, I opted to punt. I closed the slide, finished packing the vehicle and awaited the DW to arrive from work so we could depart. (keeping my fingers crossed that the slide would continue to work for the next couple of nights.

I purchased some larger self-tapping screws after arriving in El Paso, but still had not figured out how to lift the slide. Then the day before departing, while picking some scrap wood up from a project, I saw the answer to my lifting problem. I took some pieces of diagonally cut 2x4 and forced them into the opening between the slide bottom and the metal tubing, lifting the slide the required height. See Pic 2

Due to previously planned events, I was unable to mount the two rollers at that time. I decided to wait until we prepared to depart the next morning.

After completing breakdown of site, I installed the two rollers using all four mounting holes. I also put two more screws in the remaining roller. When remounting one of the rollers, my drill rubbed against the wiring for the slide motor. I noticed that it exposed what I assumed to be the grounding shield of the wire. See Pic 3

I had the wife start the retraction of the slide as I watched the slide come in for 2 inches and stop. She moved it back out and tried again, with the same result. I checked to make sure there was no obstruction and had her try again. Same result. I climbed under slide to access the slide control module and ran the diagnostics. The diagnostics initially said that battery was dropping out under load. I checked batteries and they were at 12.7 volts, voltage dropped to 12.5 when slide motor engaged. Went back and ran diagnostics again. This time it indicated that the slide motor was shorted out. I went back to the wire my drill had rubbed. After closer look, I determined that that the exposed wire I thought was a ground shield, was actually one of the five wires in the encasement that had been cut. I patched it with a piece of wire, wrapped it and had the wife retract the slide. It came in without a problem. We were able to depart with only a 2 hour delay.

This was longer than I intended, but if you have a slide I would strongly recommend you find your rollers and check to see if yours are mounted with only two screws. And if you have the full side slide, I would recommend you put in larger screws.

Mike