Manual slide retraction procedure

[Basil Shannon]

Does anybody have a procedure for manually retracting the slides on a 40' quad slide? I have two big threaded rods for lifting and retracting the dinette slide. For lifting, I think one is inserted thru a hole in the right forward wheel wheel but my coach has no such hole. I think the other one goes somewhere to retract the slide. I have no idea how to get the other slides in.

We are sitting in beautiful El Paso with slides out, jacks up, Smart-Beds in and a double hydraulic pump failure. So much for redundancy on the Apex hydraulic system. Parts on the way.

[Chuck & Marca]

Hi Basil,
We can relate to this as we had the primary motor burned out and the auxiliary motor wouldn't work. We were blowing 250 Amp fuses one after the other. At the time, in addition to all the slides out, the jacks down, all the Smart Beds were out and we were in Guaranty's lot in Quartzsite trying to transfer our belongings from our 2000 Alpine. We tried the emergency procedures and were unsuccessful so we later asked for a demonstration at Pomona, CA from HWH.

Here is our understanding. The two long threaded bolts (approx. 3 - 4 ft. long are for retracting the dinette slide and go into holes in the little cupboards on the bottom of each end of the slide inside the motor home. You will need two wrenches and two people to work them. But first of all, you need to lift the dinette slide up about an inch. There are supposed to be two holes (one under each end of the slide) to insert two short bolts (approx. 6") vertically and then a wrench is used to turn them to lift the slide. We were unable to find those holes but were assured they were there somewhere. There is a possibility that they were never cut out and are covered by something. Also, the bolts were not included with the longer bolt kits so we don't know what they really looked like.

Now, on to the other slides. First of all, HWH said to release the pressure on all the valves (had to be careful how many turns) and then with multiple people applying steady pressure to the slide one at a time, push them in. It was important to only use steady slow pressure and not try to muscle them in. We tried our darndest on the vanity slide, thinking that would be the easiest one but couldn't seem to get the pressure released correctly and only got it to move in about two inches. At that point, we waited for the new primary pump motor to arrive.

Andy Roehring (sp) at HWH was the one who seemed to know the most about the Apex hydraulic setup and gave the demonstration at Pomona, CA on Clyde and Jeri Hobbs' coach. Perhaps he could help. Hope this helps!