While preparing to leave the Four Mile Creek State Park campground recently, the big front driver-side slide-out started to come in crooked — the front side didn’t move, but the back side came in. This is very bad — apart from a potentially difficult and expensive repair, we could not move our coach with the slide unable to retract.

Here you can see that the front side of the slide was almost fully extended:

But the rear side was mostly in:

Looking underneath, the arm was twisted:

That was the end result of our efforts: we stopped after a moment when we realized that it was coming in crooked, and tried re-extending and re-retracting a few times, to no avail; we stopped when it got that skewed, and we couldn’t re-extend it again.

Time to call for professional help! I looked on the RV Help site, and found Brian Villa (Villa Mobile RV Tech). He was enjoying some Sunday time with his family, but was willing to come help us, arriving within an hour or two. We spent some time investigating, trying to narrow down the cause, and eventually discovered that the hydraulic reservoir was empty, and when we added more fluid, it immediately leaked out over the top of the fuel tank:

Unfortunately it isn’t easy to see the front hydraulic piston, as it’s above the big 150 gallon fuel tank, but we’re pretty confident that the piston seals have failed.

The next day, the tech got some caps for the hydraulic hoses, and capped off the two hydraulic hoses for that slide (here’s the first one capped):

He also disconnected the slide from both the front and back pistons (this is the back one):

Little bolts that hold the slide to the piston:

We were unable to push the slide in manually with just the two of us, so he used two jacks to raise the slide a little (as it has to go up before it goes in):

We also recruited some extra “muscle” from the campground maintenance staff and other campers, and between six of us we were able to manually push the slide in — once we got it over the first inch or so, it slid in the rest of the way very easily (with a little gravity assist by tilting the coach using air leveling):

With that in, Brian built some bracing out of 2×4 boards to hold it in, since the hydraulics were disconnected. On the front side of the slide, there was a very sturdy structure on top of the slide:

Even screwed into the slide itself:

A simpler but still sturdy bracing above the slide on the rear side:

Plus a board bracing the bottom on the front side:

Thanks again to Brian for getting us back on the road!

To make it even more secure, I later added a heavy-duty ratchet strap on the rear side of the slide in the basement:

Plus a board under the couch feet, so they’re not hanging in the air (they sit on the floor when the slide is out):

And finally a couple of cabinet jack support poles adding extra bracing on the rear side:

Perhaps overkill, but we were continuing to travel while awaiting an appointment to fix it.

I initially made an appointment at NIRVC in Tennessee, which is coming up next week, but I discovered that the manufacturer of the slide cylinders, HWH, is not far off our planned route in Iowa, and they said they would be able to repair the cylinder and restore the slide (plus check the other slide and jacks), much cheaper than NIRVC would be able to (even if NIRVC had ordered a replacement part in time). So we’ll be heading to HWH in a couple of weeks. Hopefully they’ll be able to fix it as easily as they indicate!

Update: it turned out that HWH wasn’t willing to fix the issue, as they thought we’d have to drop the fuel tank to reach the piston. But it wasn’t a wasted trip, as they were able to sell us the required part. We later took our coach to the Oregon Motorcoach Center in Eugene, Oregon, and they were able to successfully fix it, accessing it through the back of the battery compartment.