brady seal install

[davidbrady]

Hi Kurt,

I've never done an LX. For some reason I had it in my head that you owned an LXi. Should be essentially the same procedure but the location of items may be different. I have detailed pics of my LXi installation, but nothing for an LX, so yes, it'd be great to do an LX pictorial.

You can reuse the HWH retainer strip, but new retainer is available from Roger Anderson at DRI or Ryan Saari.

You also need some supports to support the outside of the slide body once you remove the plates connecting the slide to the HWH Rams. Here's what I used:


I padded the stand with a section of 2x4. Notice how the slide body is only extended 6 inches or so:


Something to keep in mind is that the slide body should never be reversed in mid position. In other words, fully complete the motion from fully retracted to fully extended and vice versa. As a safety precaution I disabled the lock solenoid pigtail at the HWH slide solenoids. This isn't strictly necessary but it definitely eliminates the possibility of a locking pin piercing the slide body. In the above photos the slide exterior lower body panel is already removed.

First thing is to get the old air seal out. To do that you need to:

(1) dump the suspension and put the coach on its HWH jacks,
(2) locate the HWH slide control solenoids and unplug the "lock solenoid" pigtail (optional),
(3) disconnect the awning arms swing them up and tape them off at the roof,
(4) fully extend the slide and remove the lower body panel (a dozen or so sheet metal screws),
(5) fully retract the slide and then extend it about 6 inches,
(6) locate the HWH air seal manifold and close off the air petcock, at this point you may want to pull a power wire off the Thomas air compressor,
(7) place your jack stands, bottle jacks, and padding under the slide as shown in the pics above,
(8) with the slide body supported unbolt the exterior plates from the HWH rams,
(9) climb inside the bus interior and remove the necessary interior panels to get to the upper plate bolts - there's four of them on each plate, 3/4" wrench, remove the plates,
(10) jack up the slide body slightly to allow insertion of supporting shims or platforms. I used platforms:


Those strips of plastic are polyurethane. The platforms are kind of overkill. You need some sort of stripping but the platforms aren't really necessary. I've seen George Morris and others use strips of the polyurethane inserted between the slide and the body work like this:


What's not shown in the picture are two glide strips that are screwed to your interior floor. These strips are lined with the same material. You need to jack up the slide body far enough to place polyurethane strips between the slide body and the top of the glide strips. This is the bearing surface that you'll use to push the slide body in on. I used platforms, two of them placed on the floor from the interior side to rest the slide on and to serve as a bearing surface. Continuing... Step:

(11) insert your polyurethane bearing surfaces, it's a lot easier if your bottle jack padding isn't obscuring the interior glide strips,
(12) lower the slide body onto the bearing surfaces and push the slide body into the interior of the bus. Push it in far enough to fully expose the air seal. If you go too far you'll push the slide off the roller tracks - don't do this!
(13) the air seal should now be fully exposed and ready for removal.


More to come, stay tuned...