Oregon Motorcoach Center repair of hydraulic slide-out

We took our coach to the Oregon Motorcoach Center in Eugene, Oregon, for them to fix a few issues, most importantly the broken hydraulic slide-out.

Our front driver-side slide-out got stuck back in mid-June, when we were staying in Youngstown, New York. You can read about our adventures of diagnosing the issue and manually pushing the slide in. In late July we also went to HWH in Moscow, Iowa, the manufacturer of the hydraulic piston, but while they weren’t willing to do the repair, they did sell us the needed part.

All the way across the other side of the country from New York, and many month later in mid-October, the Oregon Motorcoach Center (OMC) was able to fix the issue.

We dropped our coach off at OMC, and stayed (with Paladin) in a nearby hotel. A hassle, but much nicer than hanging out in their waiting room. When they said they’d need a bit longer to fix all of the issues, we headed down to Ashland, where we had planned to camp, and stayed in another hotel.

Here’s the piston we got from HWH:

Disconnected hoses, which I labeled to enable to the techs to reconnect:

Here’s our coach in the OMC workshop:

HWH had thought that we’d have to drop the fuel tank in order to replace the piston, but OMC determined that that wouldn’t be feasible, due to the shape of the tank and how it was positioned above the front axle. But they came up with an alternative (and better) solution: they removed our house batteries, and cut a hole in the back of that compartment, and were able to reach the piston that way. They added a plate over the hole when they finished.

Since they had to remove the batteries, they plugged our fridge directly to the shop electricity; very nice of them:

The working slide when we picked up our coach:

So nice to have that working again! Much bigger inside now.

While there, they also replaced the entry step motor, as previously mentioned, and replaced a connector in one of the headlights. Both good fixes, but the slide was the big one. Four months without that working was frustrating, but at least we were still able to travel.