Large Kitchen Slide Adjustments 3650BH

Bones

Well-known member
OK all. I have used the camper this season and I think there was some damage from the drop and it knocked some things out. I am having what I think are some slide adjustment issues. I think the dealer ship adjusted the slide and completely F#@& it up somehow. How, I don't know but after doing some learning and watching; things are not right so I am just going to go at it and see if I can get it fixed. The only pain is that to adjust and check half of my slides go in or out before the slide I want to move moves. Ha. Ok here we go. Over the last few times I noticed the center of my large kitchen slide was sagging in the center when retracted. I don't know if this is normal but I don't seem to be able to find anything on the internet about this yet. Here is a pic.
IMG_20150916_172454.jpg

I have not had luck with some pictures on rotation here. As you can see there is a gap between the wall and the seating booth.

When I retract the slide the top hits first and then still pulls in the bottom which raises the floor. I don't think this is right and when I looked outside I can see the top is jammed in and the bottom hangs out slightly. Here is what my slide rams and arms look like before I started to adjust them.

IMG_20150916_172139.jpgIMG_20150916_172124.jpgIMG_20150916_172147.jpg

As I look at these rams they do not look right and then I noticed it appears that they have been screwed with because of the dis-colorization of the pates in reference to the slide bars. This tells me that they were messing with the slide. So I am going to attempt a fix. I measured the slide distances from the bottom of the slide to the top of the slide bars plate and they measured over 5 inches. This caused the slide to come in nose down and come dangerously close to the floor and ripping it apart.
One thing to note for others who question adjusting their slides is that once I backed off the bolts and started to move the adjustment bolts there was hardly any type of pressure on the slide bars so in my opinion once the slide is out and sitting in it's spot the bars just help keep things in place and become important when you extend and retract the slide. Correct me if I am mistaken.
I adjusted the bars up to about 4.5 inches on each side. When I retracted the slide it came in almost even so I think some adjustment is still necessary. I will adjust more and see if I can keep the slide from lifting up on the floor when retracted but be tight against the camper. Here are some pics in the closed position after I made adjustments.
IMG_20150916_175156.jpgIMG_20150916_175206.jpg
These are towards the front of the camper

IMG_20150916_175229.jpg
This is a picture of the rear.

The top of the slide is still really tight against the camper so I definitely need to adjust more to get the top off of the camper a bit. If you look at the rear of the slide you can see the compression of the gasket is really off now too when compared to the front. I think I just discovered that the slide is also crooked but not severe enough to show itself. So I did a bit more investigating. The slide gears and teeth all count out the same so they are good but it appears that the bolted section to the slide arms appear to vary greatly on their bolted lengths. when referenced to the I beam frame for squareness.

Here is a close up of the front. It measures from the frame 11 3/4 inches from the I beam to the end plate

IMG_20150916_175116.jpgIMG_20150916_175132.jpg
If you look at the slide arm closely the gap between the bolted bracket and the end of the arm is 12/16 inches

Here is a picture of the rear section. It measures 12 9/16 inches from the I beam to the end plate

IMG_20150916_175252.jpg

The gap between the bolted bracket and the end of the arm is 1 7/16 inches. Ouch!! So I am assuming that now I will have to unbolt that piece and push the corner of the slide in to get it to sit correctly and go out even and retract even. I counted teeth on the slide arms to make sure they were adjusted correctly and to ensure that neither one of them jumped teeth and they are out correctly. My slide arms are now almost even with the slide and don't appear to be bending downwards like they were initially.

I ran out of time for the day and time for me to keep the camper on the driveway before I anyone the neighbor, only one I annoy, so I left the slide retracted in this position and took it back to storage. When I get all of these adjustments made I will adjust the stroke of the hydraulic ram to get it to retract nicely so that it is not compressing the living daylights out of the seals and adjust so that the slide goes in and out evenly and level not dragging on the floor.

If anyone has any experience or suggestions please feel free to comment I welcome them. Hopefully this will help someone experiencing some slide issues and helps them with the process. This takes a lot of time to do as you don't want to just move everything all at once and jamb something up.
 

wdk450

Well-known member
" The only pain is that to adjust and check half of my slides go in or out before the slide I want to move moves."

If you have hydraulic slides, there should be a set of manual valves at the hydraulic pump allowing you to move just 1 slide.
 

Bones

Well-known member
" The only pain is that to adjust and check half of my slides go in or out before the slide I want to move moves."

If you have hydraulic slides, there should be a set of manual valves at the hydraulic pump allowing you to move just 1 slide.
that would be nice but I only have one switch and the lines run in parallel and they move one slide at a time. I don't have the valves at the pump for that but It would be nice because I could have isolated all the slides except the one I'm working on. I will double check on that though to make sure. Thanks
 

Bob&Patty

Founders of SoCal Chapter
I know that BH's have knobs at the pump to shut off each slide. If the top is touching the side and the bottom sticks out. You need the adjust the vertical bolt's down to correct this. You also have the loosen the bolt's on the feet that connect to the slide. Try lowering both of them 1/2" and then run the slide in and out several time and check the fit. Do not lower them tooo much as it does not take much the change the angle. I did all mine.....sent you a PM.
 

Jesstruckn/Jesstalkn

Well-known member
I don't think I would mess with it unless you know exactly what your doing... Find an expert and pick his brain. From here they look good, and I think you want the top to hit first, then the bottom to pull it all in tight. You could end up doing more damage then good if you do it wrong... Just my opinion.
 

avvidclif

Well-known member
The gear driven slide outs are harder to adjust than they appear, been there done that. Each adjustment affects others. Mine was electric but the gear drive looked the same. When coming in it rode level and the top touched and then the floor kicked up as the bottom moved in to seal. I would suggest you contact HL and make sure of the slideout system you have. Then go to http://lci1.com/support-center and look up the parts, service, and adjustment info for your unit. All of their hydraulic units I found use cylinders and from the gear drive on your they may have used a hydraulic motor in place of electric???

Oh, the factory knows how to adjust them and tweaking over time as things settle in I would consider normal. The amount of movement evidenced by the rust marks is not tweaking but in my opinion someone who didn't know what they were doing. I would, just me now, probably move everything back to factory and start from there.
 

Bones

Well-known member
The gear driven slide outs are harder to adjust than they appear, been there done that. Each adjustment affects others. Mine was electric but the gear drive looked the same. When coming in it rode level and the top touched and then the floor kicked up as the bottom moved in to seal. I would suggest you contact HL and make sure of the slideout system you have. Then go to http://lci1.com/support-center and look up the parts, service, and adjustment info for your unit. All of their hydraulic units I found use cylinders and from the gear drive on your they may have used a hydraulic motor in place of electric???

Oh, the factory knows how to adjust them and tweaking over time as things settle in I would consider normal. The amount of movement evidenced by the rust marks is not tweaking but in my opinion someone who didn't know what they were doing. I would, just me now, probably move everything back to factory and start from there.
Mine are hydraulic and the gear system you see is what is used to keep everything on track. Lippert only uses one hydraulic ram on one of those arms and it pushes out on that with the mechanical gear system keeping the rest of the slide in track. I know of the system you are talking about and I do think those are electric and you can see the gear slots on the side of the slide. My slide is the big slide and I think it was damaged slightly when they dropped my camper but me trying to prove that will be impossible, so I am just trying to fix it before it breaks something because it does look like they were messing with it. And thanks I did reference lippert as well when I was looking up all possible slide adjustment scenarios. Heartland will only give you one slide adjustment "I think" that had long past when I finally got my camper back. Heartland helps me out a lot with my warranty parts. I definitly agree with you on the person who messed with the slide to begin with. I don't really know what they were up to but it was not good.
 
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