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Replacing slide seal on HWH salon slide
#1

As I posted about a month ago, the seal on 540's salon slide blew out. Driving out to Miami from OR or WA state wasn't really going to be an option for us. But as has been stated before, there appears to be zero history of anyone other than Newell replacing the seal on the salon. Lucky us -- an expensive job AND we get to be pioneers! On the plus side, we were in one of the few other places in the country where I felt we could probably find someone capable of doing the job -- not too far from Eugene, OR -- land of Country Coach and Beaver coaches, with lots of people in the area who worked in the service centers for those coaches for 20+ years.

I called pretty much anyone from Bend to Portland who appeared to have experience with large coaches, particularly those mentioned on HWH's service center web page. Unfortunately, HWH could not give me any additional information as to experiences with the places they had listed -- ie did they have experience with slides, leveling systems, etc. I also did a lot of research on Country Coach and Wanderlodge forums. After about a week, we settled on Oregon Motor Coach in Eugene. They have done the seal replacement job on a number of Foretravels, which apparently also used the HWH flat floor.

Before the nitty gritty, I would say that I highly recommend OMC if anyone needs work done in the area. They were very professional, thorough, and they did not complain or show any reluctance to the fact that I shadowed them all day for 2 days (we had a few other small things done while we were there). Oddly enough, there were 2 other Newells that were there, a 2006 for an air leak and a 2008 for a roof A/C replacement. Both other owners seemed satisfied with the work done as well.



And now for the actual job...

I spoke with Mark Merritt (sp?) at Newell the week before we took it in so that I could be as educated as possible on the procedure. He explained that there would be 1 of 2 ways that the slide needed to be disconnected from the rams to pull the room out of the coach. Either:
a) With the floor down, look underneath it -- if you can see the threaded end of the rams, you can disconnect it there.
b) Otherwise, there will be a connection to the rams in 2 places -- 1 in the front passenger side wheel well and 1 in the ceiling of the bay behind the mid-entry door.

I asked him if there were any teflon glides or anything that we should replace while the room is out being that this is a (known on wood) once in a very long time thing. He indicated that there were 5 teflon glides, so I had them send me 6 (they were only like $1.50).

He said that we would need to remove the top valence, front wall and rear wall of the slide room in order to get it out (not entirely true in our case, we did not need to remove rear wall).

Once at OMC, I helped guide them on room disassembly being that I had already had to remove the top valence and front wall myself once before. I figured I could at least save them the time I had spent figuring that out before. Based on the information from Mark, we also tried to remove the rear wall. We seemed to find all of the screws, however the wall appeared to be pinched at the top by the ceiling and wouldn't pull out. As we could visually see and physically feel that the front face of the wall did not extend past the aluminum outside of the wall, we decided that the slide could come out without removing it. I wish I had known that up front as this was probably an hour trying to get that wall out. The one thing on this end which did extend past the wall was the brush. The aluminum holding the brush extended about 1 inch above the curved corner of the top of the slide. There was enough room to merely bend the aluminum back to prevent it from extending past the slide.

Once the inside was ready, we extended the slide all the way out but stopped the extension just prior to the slide pins engaging.

The threaded ram ends were not visible under the floor, so we checked where Mark had told us and easily found them. One was in the bay rear of the entry door and one behind a panel in the front passenger wheel well. The panel was riveted in place. I believe the bolts on the ends of the rams were 1 1/8".

[Image: 20180821_102942.jpg]

[Image: 20180821_103014.jpg]
Luckily Tom had provided a piece of information to me that Mark at Newell had not -- the new slide seal needs to be placed around the slide before supporting and removing the slide. Because it is basically just a big inner tube, there are no ends and the seal is the correct length for the salon slide -- no cutting, no joining. Once you have something supporting the slide, there's no way to put the tube around the slide. So, we put the tube around the slide before supporting it. With how much it hung down, it seemed too long, but it's just an illusion.

OMC lined up a fork lift centered on the slide. Long, padded 4x4's were placed on the forks that extended most of the way across the room. For extra assurance and maneuverability, they used a floor jack under each end of the slide with a piece of padded plywood on top as well. This allowed some extra maneuvering and also helped provided additional support of the ends of the slide room.

[Image: 20180821_120647.jpg]

Once the room was supported, the bolts were removed from the ends of the rams. OMC had about 8 guys come over and watch/monitor various places while the slide was pulled -- inside the coach, each ram end, each corner of the slide. The forklift then started to slowly pull the room out. After maybe an inch, the coach started to lean as the lift pulled, indicating something was catching somewhere. They called Newell and they indicated that in earlier coaches, there is a piece of angle iron in the center of the slide that is used to actuate the limit switch at full room extension. This was easily found in the non-pass through bay right above the center of the slide. Just a short piece of angle iron bolted onto the chassis. After removing this, the slide easily came out the few inches needed to access the slide seal.

[Image: 20180821_150802.jpg]

Newell had indicated that if the seal was original, there should not be any adhesive to be cleaned out of the seal track. If it had ever been replaced before, the old adhesive would need to be cleaned out. Fortunately, there was no adhesive. Once the old seal was pulled out, they cleaned the track out with a solvent.

Newell also stated that the seal was directional. I forget how they stated the inside versus outside was identified, but in the end we found that the new seal was symmetric and Newell confirmed that the current batch of seals does appear to be symmetric.

The bottom of the slide seal is done first. The feed hose for the seal in 540 goes through a hole in the square tube of the chassis just adjacent to where the slide seal pressure regulator and solenoid sit in the large pass-through bay. The new feed hose was thicker than the original feed hose, so they needed to drill it out a bit larger. The bottom of the seal is done from outside the coach. The slide is pulled out just enough that the top of the slide clears the side of the coach. This allows for the slide to be lifted/tilted up a bit to provide enough room to work on the bottom of the seal from outside.

Basically, the seal is lined up in the track and every once in a while some adhesive is applied to keep it in place. Unfortunately, I did not pay attention to the spacing of the adhesive at this point. Newell had stated that about half the tube would be used. The seal is slightly long and does need to be "stuffed" in -- it is not stretched within the track.

Once the bottom of the seal is completed, the rest of the replacement is done from inside the coach. Note that it was very tight between the floor and the coach wall to get the seal in. In our case, we put LVP flooring in, so care was needed when stuffing the seal between the floor and the track to make sure no damage was done.

The rest of the seal was just like the bottom, stuffing it in and adhering periodically. Newell indicated that only about an hour is needed for the adhesive to set. In our case, it was the end of the work day, so it was allowed to set overnight.

Before we connected the slide seal air line back to the coach, I had them verify proper pressure from the regulator. I wanted to make certain that the original seal failure was not caused by a faulty regulator delivering too much pressure to the seal. The last thing I wanted was to immediately blow up the new $1160 seal.

Unfortunately, we found that the teflon glides in 540 were riveted into place. And there was no room to possibly remove the rivets and get the old glides out. And if we had been able to do so, we would not have had room to do anything to fasten the new ones in, although I question whether any fastening is required as the weight of the slide should always be present. It's possible we could have forcibly removed the old glides and just relied on weight to hold the new ones in place, but I did not want to find ourselves in a situation where fastening was required but impossible. As the old glides appeared to be in good shape, I opted to leave them alone.

Everything else was just done in reverse -- push the slide in slowly while making sure that the threaded ends of the ram were lined up with their respective holes, put the room back together, remount the piece of angle iron and put the ceiling panels and access panel back in place.

Honestly, it's not rocket science. The most time consuming part is taking the room apart and putting it back together. Pulling the room is just a matter of supporting it properly and pulling it out slowly to make sure that nothing is getting caught.

Total bill was about 15 hours of labor. I believe that Newell does it in about 10. Those extra 5 hours were well worth the cost of diesel and the time to drive out to Miami and back.

There are some additional pictures in this gallery as well:

http://newellgurus.com/gallery/thumbnails.php?album=160

Paul
Coach #540
2000 Double Slide, Bath and a half, Average sized fan for its age
Fulltiming for a while around CO
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#2

Outstanding post Paul!

Steve Bare
1999 Newell 2 slide #531
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#3

very cool. since i have to do mine and am going to do it in my shop at home, i am building a slide support cart similar to what newell has.

tom

2002 45'8" Newell Coach 608  Series 60 DDEC4/Allison World 6 Speed HD4000MH

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#4

i took that panel off that the ram was in for paul....it was empty.  

so i looked for the ram nuts with the floor down.  i found them but not sure how to release the ram.  the shaft has a nut on it, then appears to go into a nut welded to the frame.  

tom


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2002 45'8" Newell Coach 608  Series 60 DDEC4/Allison World 6 Speed HD4000MH

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#5

from what i can tell from talking to folks....on mine i will take the black blocks off seen in my pictures....then back the locknut off the ram and then spring the ram until it unscrews from the welded nut on the slide. doing either both sides at once or back and forth. also, removing the limit switch so the slide can come out.

rear slide is a much more involved process

tom

2002 45'8" Newell Coach 608  Series 60 DDEC4/Allison World 6 Speed HD4000MH

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