As promised, here is my final installment on this thread.
First, I want to give props to the customer service people at Fleetwood, in particularly a kind woman named
Joy. I have worked with Joy in the past to find part numbers, etc., and she's always so friendly and helpful. This time she went above and beyond. I shared the pictures of the broken part, and she was fantastic. As I said earlier, I'm past my 1 year warranty period, so Fleetwood couldn't replace this free of charge. She put me through to
Sindi in parts, and Sindi was able to provide part numbers and pricing. This part is officially called a Travel Clamp, and it is made by HWH. HWH uses that motor that I posted a picture of, but they build the who clamp mechanism so it's officially an HWH product. I ordered the part on my own tab from Fleetwood and paid rush shipping to get it.
MEANWHILE..
Joy at Fleetwood didn't give up. She contacted
Mitch from HWH, showed him my pictures, and Mitch was surprised and disappointed. So much so that he
insisted that he send me a new part for free! So I canceled the order from Fleetwood (had to pay a small fee) and I received a new Travel Clamp part from HWH.
If that is not a company that stands behind their product, then I don't know what is!
So a shout out to Joy and Sindi at Fleetwood, and Mitch from HWH. Top notch customer service!!
Now to the repair... The mosaic picture below shows the old/broken part next to the replacement one, and you can see how the motor was supposed to be attached to the bracket. In that picture you can also see that Fleetwood installed an aluminum spacer bar to position the travel clamp the correct distance from the sidewall of the full wall slide. This was just sticking to the travel clamp with a little DEP, so I could just pull off the spacer bars and relocate them to the new one. You can also make out some gray DAP around the area where the travel arm comes out. This prevents water from entering the FWS when the wall is extended, and it needs to be applied to the new one too.
The install was literally a 4-bolt install. In one of the pictures you can see the shut-off switch (lower left of the mosaic). When the arm is pulled all the way in, it touches a metal switch and shuts off the motor. When it extends out to lock the wall for travel, the motor draws more amps as the resistance increases until an internal switch shuts off the motor.
With this design, there are no adjustments to be made. That means 4-bolts out to remove the broken clamp, 4 bolts back in to replace the new one, and it's done. I tested the operation a couple of times and everything worked perfectly.
So.. if you have the HWH travel clamp in your RV and it needs to be replaced, here's my advice:
(1) Call your RV manufacturer or HWH to order the new part. There is a "right" and a "left" clamp, and the determination of which one you need is made from the OUTSIDE of your RV looking at the slide-out. The one on the right side of the slide-out is the "right" clamp, and the other is the "left."
(2) Find the access panel that gets you to the travel clamp. In my case, it was 4 small wood screws that held on a felt-wrapped access door.
(3) Remove the old travel clamp using the 4-bolts and also unplug the original motor from the 12v switched power supply.
(4) Check to see if your original clamp had a bead of DEP (or similar) like mine did, and if so, apply a fresh bead of DAP sealant around the foot area of the new unit.
(5) Replace the new motor using same bolts and same power supply.
(6) Test the system.
In my case, everything went smoothly and I'm good to go. Hopefully you will have the same!!