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Even someone "familiar with the basics" would have trouble with this situation. If that slide topper is like the Carefree ones on my Vegas, they're a disaster waiting to happen.
This is a heads up for ANYONE with Carefree slide toppers or awnings.
On our last trip the rear slide started making a snapping noise when moving in or out. I had my wife put the slide in while I was outside looking for what was making the noise. As she was running the slide back in, the topper front cap fell off and landed at my feet! The screws had fallen out, if it hadn't fallen off right then, it could have easily fallen off on the highway and gone through somebody's windshield. Or worse, the entire topper could have come off since at that point IT WAS HELD ON WITH ONE SCREW. The front and rear caps only have two screws, one into the bracket and one into the topper roller. Either one of those falls out and the topper will no longer be attached to the RV at that end. (You still have the fabric itself of course, but there isn't any set screws holding the fabric in the RV channel so you can easily slide it right off.)
The screws in the caps aren't the only design problems either, which is probably what cladouce is talking about. I'm assuming he's talking about the brackets that hold the topper to the slideout. On the Carefree's that are on our Vegas, there are 6 screws in each bracket going into the slide. A few months ago I noticed several of the screw heads were missing. The screw heads had snapped off. I replaced almost all of the screws in those brackets with larger screws.
Fast forward months later to when the topper end cap fell off... I went to take the brackets off and found that 7 screws were broken. Almost all of the broken screws were on the bottom row of the brackets. Even a few of the larger screws I had just put in were broken. That tells me that there is excessive force from the slide fabric tension pulling on the brackets, trying to rip them off the slides. The brackets are simply shaped wrong. Instead of being wide across and short vertically, they should be much longer vertically to have better leverage against the twisting forces. Basically just a bad design.
How to fix it? The same way I fixed the main awning on our Vegas when half the screws on the brackets pulled out and the awning started tipping super low on one side. (The Vegas 27.7 has I believe the longest awning Carefree makes, it's 20 feet long. Think about the forces a 20 foot awning would have on it when extended.) I removed all the screws, cleaned the surfaces of the RV side and the brackets, coated them with marine epoxy (3M 5200 slow cure) and then riveted the brackets on with 1/4" x 1.5" steel rivets. The epoxy over that amount of surface area will absolutely help hold the bracket to the body of the RV, and the steel rivets are a better solution into the thin steel plate and aluminum tubing than trying to screw into it.
I would probably do the same with my slide toppers, IF I were going to put them back on, which I am not. The fewer poorly attached, big, heavy items that can fall off my RV and cause a highway pileup and possible deaths, the better.
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