Reed Bingham State Park, GA, April 2026
Especially when they are attached to your RV. No, we are not towing a pool with a water slide; we are talking about the expandable living space. Apparently, the motors have a slip mechanism to make sure they do not break anything when the slide is stuck.
We arrived at Reed Bingham State Park to find the office slide would not deploy. At least it was the office slide, and not the living room. Fortunately, the standard pneumatic slide has a manual deploy mechanism for situations like this. There is a detachable hand crank with a socket for a little T-rod that you crank from the opposite side of the RV. If the other slide is not deployed, you have to insert it through a hole drilled in the RV skirt/fender. The hand crank, hole and T-rod look like this.
When we went to manually deploy the office slide, it looked like this.
See any problems? You know, maybe no hole for the hand crank? The good news is that, now, there is a hole. The bad news is that it is kind of ugly.
We learned a valuable life lesson from this. Do not store your tools somewhere that requires a slide to deploy to get to them. It was a major pain in the rear to get them out of that cabinet where the door was mostly pinned by the slide.
The hole is not as clean as we would like because we have no large metal cutting drill bits. It had to be cut by drilling a ring of small holes and filing the edge. We bought a few potential solutions to make the hole look neater. The small rubber grommet is too small. The large rubber grommet is a bit large. The plastic insert looks about right, but it needs the middle cut out.
The good news is that the hand cranking the slide out about an inch allowed it to start working properly using the switch on the wall. (Note: For reference, counter-clockwise extends the slide for our RV.) (Warning: hand cranking too far out or in can damage the slide, so if possible, use to switch to move the slide.) We retracted and extended it again to see if it bound up again, and it did not. There were some bouncy bridges that might have misaligned the mechanism or maybe a bird built a nest on the slide rail in the underbelly. Who knows.
The hand crank has a spur where the socket is attached. This might need to be filed off to allow it to work with the plastic plug.
And this is what the finished hole looks like. Yes, there is a little hole on the side. Get over it. We will probably will it in with some black Flexseal or Plastidip. The hole does work without filing the spur on the hand crank. It is not as clean as the manufacturer installed ones, but it looks decent at a glance.
