TheSwanStory.com - Big slide-out floor scrape

Big slide-out floor scrape

In our Fuzion 429, we had noticed that underneath the big slide-out (the one that holds the fridge, oven, and couch), the black material was being torn away from the plywood floor. The entire slide-out is supposed to slide on a threshold (not rollers!) and lately, as we put the slide-out in and out as we travel, more and more of the material was being torn. This was happening primarily on the "heavy" side of the slide-out (with the fridge) but was also happening, to a lesser degree, on the "light" side.

That black material (DARCO) is supposed to be slippery enough that it will glide right over the threshold. If you have watched our fix for the water-damaged wardrobe slide-out floor, you will remember that there was a hard black panel (not DARCO) and there were rollers under that wardrobe slide-out, not a threshold. Why didn't Keystone use rollers on all slide-outs? Who knows.

Here is the material being torn away from the plywood.

Pulling back the dust flap, you can see the solid threshold behind it. There is really no room in there to put in rollers even if we wanted to. We would have to take out the entire slide-out to get at the threshold.

We want to give the threshold something more solid to ride on, so we went to a local Lazy Days RV center and started asking questions. Their tech, who rebuilds slide-outs, recommended "BLK SLD-OUT REPAIR PANEL". This is a hard material like we have under our wardrobe slide-out but is 48" long by about 7" wide and has a "wrap around" edge.

We also purchased an adhesive to bond that panel to the DARCO on the belly. We were unsure if the adhesive would actually adhere to the DARCO since that stuff is supposed to be slippery (to slide across the threshold), but it worked! The product is "Miracle SPM-1330".

We jacked up the "light" side of the slide-out first. The floor is not particularly stiff, so as we jacked it up, the middle part of the slide-out floor was bowing up. We kept the jack as close to the edge as we could. A better approach would have been to jack up the slide like we did for the wardrobe floor replacement (i.e., jack up using the frame of the slide-out).

We wanted to know how long the repair panel needed to be, so we inserted a simple flat ruler and made sure the inside edge of the ruler was even with the inside edge of the floor. From this exposed edge of the ruler, we measured to the outside of the floor. We measured 29-1/2" and, to give us some play when positioning, we cut the panel to 29".

We sprayed the adhesive to the underside of the slide-out, right on the DARCO. We masked the area off so we didn't get any over-spray. We wanted to make sure we didn't cause any of the DARCO to become sticky that still had to slide over the threshold.

Then we sprayed the adhesive on the panel and pre-caulked the edge that will go against the side of the slide-out (on the fiberglass wall).

Here is the panel installed. After reinstalling the screws, we caulked the exposed edge to make sure no water could seep in there.

As we had the "heavy" side of the slide-out jacked up, we cleaned out any dust that might have been between the threshold and the dust flap. Look what we found! Seriously! A chunk of inside trim had fallen in there and THAT is what was tearing up that black material!

After a couple more stops, our solution seems to be holding up. We looked at the slide-out on the other side of the RV, the one that only holds the loveseat, and there is a little "roughing up" of the black material by that side's threshold but nothing damaged yet. Even though we bought two more repair panels for this slide, we'll hold off applying this fix to that particular slide-out for now.