By Cheri Sicard
The team from Keystone RV Mega Center has produced a great video on RV slide rooms including RV slide maintenance, important do’s and don’ts, and tips to keep your RV slide working and in tip-top shape!
According to our host, Junior, there are three rules to the RV slide room:
Rule # 1: All the way in or all the way out
If your slide is not all the way out, the seals can’t work properly and water can leak in. If you walk on your slide when it is not all the way in you won’t have enough support and could end up doing serious damage.
Rule #2: Keep it lubricated
When it comes to RV slide maintenance, lubrication is key to keeping everything properly moving. Watch the video for recommendations of RV slide room lube as well as a demonstration of where and how to apply it, if your slide has a rack and pinion design. They also show how to lubricate and condition the slide’s rubber seals. (This is the lube he recommends.)
If your slide out is not of the rack and pinion variety, chances are it is a Schwintek (Junior says there are some other brands but they function similarly). These rails need cleaning but not lubricating. However, the rubber seals around them will still need conditioning.
If you are in doubt about which type you have, the video below will reveal all.
Rule #3 Do not fall for gimmicky jack stand slide room supports
Junior says RV engineers designed the slide rooms and the RVs that support them to handle the slide room with weight. When you use a jack stand, Junior says the camper can settle overnight, but the slide room won’t be able to settle with it, so he recommends never using them.
In fact, Junior says that when their repair shop sees customers for slides that are out of alignment, 99.9% of the time jack stands were the culprit. The rest of the time it’s because people are walking in that room when it’s not all the way out.
Additional RV slide maintenance tip: Beware of flip flops!
Junior also said that on more than one occasion a customer would complain about a stuck slide room. Upon investigation, the repair techs at Keystone RV would discover someone’s flip flop shoe had gotten jammed in the slide. The takeaway is that you should ALWAYS make sure to keep the slide free from foreign objects when putting it in or out!
Check out the video for the easy demos and get your slide in shape before next season’s journeys!
##RVDT2112
Level the rig before moving slides out seems appropriate here
How do you lubricate the gears on a polar package with the bottom fully enclosed?
Thank you, Cheri!
This video leaves much to be desired. He didn’t show how to actually get to the inside seals to lube, not a very good shot of the rack and pinion setup and nothing on lubrication of the in-wall slides such as Schwintek.
From #1 above: “If you walk on your slide when it is not all the way in you won’t have enough support and could end up doing serious damage.”
This is confusing. It implies you shouldn’t walk in your slide when it is fully extended?
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of using a slide if you cannot walk in it?
I took this tip as don’t walk on it until fully out.
We have become intimate with our rack and pinion slide on our 2012 Arctic Fox. After watching two different mobile guys fix this shear pin thing, I now have all the tools and spare parts to fix this myself. Wire brushing a ton of Houston rust off the entire mechanism, spraying almost daily with slide lube, and hitting a Harbor Freight store for a larger pry bar, I’M READY! Now, every time we hit the extend or retract button, wifey and I look at each other with trepidation.
Almost agree with the video. And I own a 2017 Keystone. The dining/living room slide is HUGE, both in width and depth. The depth part is an issue. It is a single piece of plastic wrapped particle or chipboard, with no bracing. And when anything moves in that slide there is a LOT of flex. I put up with it for short stays, but when we are stationary for 6 months at a time, I use two stands with an 8 foot 4X4 beam to better support the centerline of the floor. The beam is firm against the floor, but in no way do I try to actually lift the slide. 6 years and the slide still works great.