[Richard]

Paul,

If you will look at the picture of the two support rails. The prototype was a hot mess that we fab using the original support and making a truss. Ugly but it proved the point. If you look carefully at that mess, you will see rather large holes in the square tubing. We don't know why Newell did it that way. The large holes were on both sides. So the 5/16 bolt had to have a washer to keep from going through the hole. The washer was free to slip around inside the hole. That made it real tough for the support to rigidly attach to the aluminum in the slide out.

The truss was not our original plan. We ordered, or so we thought, a piece of aluminum tubing 2 1/2 by 1 1/4 that would just fit in the available space. After waiting a week, a follow up call to the supplier revealed the tubing was not coming any time soon. Therefore we went in a different direction and made a solution with the supplies we could obtain locally. I think the aluminum tubing would have been a more elegant, and certainly less work, solution. But you can't use what you don't have. For future readers, if you decide to go the aluminum tubing route, plan carefully how you will attach the hook.

One of things that we discovered that I just didn't think about was how much force the slide seal exerts on the top of the slide. The hook is an absolute necessity to keep the roof from deflecting. Bill's roof is approximately 144 inches long, The slide seal has a minimum of 1 inch width at it's contact point. So that's 144 square inches of contact. At a conservative slide seal pressure of 10 psig, the slide seal exerts 1140 pounds force on the roof of the slide. We discovered that while trying to unbend the roof to mark the drill holes. It wouldn't budge upward. Until we released the pressure on the slide seal and then we could move the slide ceiling upward to install the brace with a level ceiling.