Leaking bedroom slide

May, 2010 update:

Whatever Lazydays service did to the bedroom slide, it was ineffective. We made the trip to Forest City to let Winnebago factory service address this issue and our punch list of mostly minor issues. Winnebago installed a new seal kit in 2006 and that completely fixed the leak! Hooray. Still a good fix.

Summer, 2005

As former long-term boaters, we have had more experience that we care to admit in chasing down leaks. My quest for a "dry" sailboat became an obsession and I spent many hours on the problem(s) and used way too many "boat" words while actively engaged in problem solving.

Fortunately, leaks in an RV are not potentially life-threatening like they easily could have been in the boat. Leak-proofing a coach should be magnitudes easier than it was on the sailboat. Imagine how we felt when our >$200,000 purchase had a nice stream of water running down an inside wall at the forward corner of the bedroom slide.

Being a fairly handy person I thought I would try to temporarily stop the leak until we could take the coach later in the year (or spring of 2006 to the factory) for service. I was fairly sure that other things would need attention, so I wanted to shake down the coach and get everything fixed at one time (what a nice dream.)

I don't like to ask for directions and I don't want to admit that I can't fix something; so here is a first for me - no matter what I tried, I could not stop the leak. Sometimes I made it worse, sometimes I made it a little better, but I never could fix it <sob.>

I threw in the towel (ha-ha, get it?) and made an appointment for service where we purchased the coach, Lazydays in Seffner, Florida.

It seems that this particular leak is a fairly common problem on this coach; Lazydays apparently applied a Winnebago-supplied engineering fix consisting of new gaskets and the addition of a flat metal bar trim strip. This is my conjecture - I have no way of knowing if this is really a Lazydays-designed fix, or an official Winnebago fix.