For those of you who have read my first post and already know about the problem with the living room slide, please bear with me a little while I exposate, expositionate, uh, while I provide a touch of exposition.
Day before we’re supposed to leave: Massive failure of slide including yucky grinding noises, a thunk, and a bent Omega Slide Topper Arm. Slide goes in, but slide does not go out. Day we leave: On the road with no slide, much “excuse me,” “no, excuse me,” and “get the f*$! out of my way!” (Not really.)
We detoured down to Indy to pick up some used Omega slide arms from a guy Richard met on iRV2. He gave us four of them so we can change the both arms on the slide and have at least the pair match. We could also change the arms on the bedroom slide to match, which is another set of Omega arms. Nothing has gone wrong with them, though (yet).
Okay, now that that’s over with, we get on to fixing the darn thing. One thing that we’d been kind of putting off was getting a ladder. We he-hawed quite a bit on that, trying to decide if, yes, we really did need some kind of light-weight aluminum one that expands (a la the Little Giant Ladder) or no, we could get by with the aluminum 8’ that is currently in storage. There was a lot of angst in this decision on both our parts, only heaven knows why.
When Richard got the ladder home, he went up and took a look at the problem. Yep, the arm was bent. Yep, the bent arm was keeping the slide from moving appropriately since it cocked the awning and made the slide hang up at the top. Yep, we were pretty well screwed.
But Richard, ever the premiere problem-solver, decided to give Carefree a call and see if he could talk to someone about it. At the very least he’d be able to talk to someone who’d recommend a shop we could go to. So Richard called and waited on hold to speak with someone. Turns out, Carefree no longer offers support for the Omega Series. (sarcasm)Great(/sarcasm). But they did know someone in Florida we could talk to. (oh yeah)Awesome-sauce!(/oh yeah)
So after speaking extensively with Dave Jones of Florida (Dave, if you’re reading this, let me know the name of your awning company so I can update), Richard confirmed that this was a three man (or two men and a woman) job. Richard got up on Optimus Prime and described the situation to Dave. There were a lot of “yeah”s and “uh-huh”s.
The complicating factor in this project is that the arm in question is the slide right arm, the one that’s spring loaded. So, someone would have to hold the arm while the tension would be released by the second person so that the arm could be removed and the new (old) one put on.
The light was fading and all four of those involved (Richard, me, Dave and our BG friend) decided it would be best to tackle this beast in the morning.
But now we had a game plan. Tomorrow Dave would call Richard and walk him through the procedure. How awesome is Dave?
Richard, our friend, and I went inside for some homemade chili and to discuss the secondary issue with the slide. On the surface, this one seemed not as bad, at least to me. The cabinet to the left of the range and microwave, over the sink, had displaced itself about a half an inch downward. This caused the microwave door to not be able to swing open all the way. And Richard and I were concerned about the cabinet suddenly dropping while we were traveling.
As the guys discuss this issue, we discovered that this problem may be more trouble than I thought. We can’t just manhandle the cabinet back into position because it has wedged itself below it’s support (more on this little gem of engineering later). So now we have two problems: the slide that won’t budge and the cabinet out of whack. Fabulous.
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