Another day, another service center

On Wednesday, we drove from Fyda Freightliner in Zanesville, Ohio, to Custom RV Repair in Elkhart, Indiana.

When we got to Conroe, Texas back in April, when we tried to put the passenger slide out, the slide unlocked, but wouldn't move. At the Cajun Rally in New Iberia, Louisiana, Carl did some debugging, determining that the motor could move the slide (he hooked it to the controller for the bedroom slide), but it still would not put the locking pads back into place. 

We had contacted Newmar Service back in the fall asking to be scheduled for service in May -- but they were booked out beyond May at that point. We were on a waiting list in case of a cancellation, but had not been called. I called them again (we were originally planning to go in just for slide "maintenance", not due to slide failure). I let them know that we now had a slide failure and asking if there was any chance that we could get in for an appointment in May -- no chance. They recommended a couple of repair places near Nappanee -- one was Custom RV Repair. We had gone there with a slide issue in 2020 and the technician who worked on it was very knowledgeable and able to diagnose the problem quickly; he identified the part we needed, we drove to the factory service center in Nappanee to pick up the part, and he fixed it the next morning. Based on having great service when we went in 2020, we were hopeful that they would be able to quickly determine the issue and get us going.

We had originally had an appointment for service there on Monday -- but once we realized that we would need to stop at Freightliner, we moved the appointment -- and we had to move it a couple of times as the service at Freightliner took longer than we anticipated. Then Freightliner got us finished finally more quickly than we anticipated. We had let Custom RV know on Wednesday morning that we could get there after they closed on Wednesday for service on Thursday morning, and they were very accommodating. 

They have a parking space next to the building where we could plug in for 30A electrical service. When we were there in 2020, the technician was able to just work on the problem there where we were parked.

They are on County Road 6 in Elkhart -- a pretty busy roadway most of the day.

Our visit this time was not as great as our first visit. The technician that was assigned did not give us a lot of confidence that he had worked on a problem like this before. It seemed that he may not have worked on motorhome or, at least, not on Newmar slides before. He took Gracie into the shop and did a good deal of debugging on the problem, determining that a couple of lock boxes were the issue. Even though we had offered (multiple times, to different individuals) that we would be glad to drive to get the parts to save someone else needing to do that... they didn't ask us to get the parts - one of their personnel drove to Nappanee to get the parts. The technician installed the parts on Friday, but they never totally resolved the problem. 

The good news is: the slide goes out and back in. The bad news is that the front locking mechanism does not lock and it seems that something else might be broken.

They were upfront with us about their inability to totally fix the problem. We decided it was "good enough" and that eventually we will need to take it somewhere else (maybe back to Nappanee) to get it completely fixed.