SLIDE OUT ROOMS

The area we have been contacted about most is our use of slides to create more space. It is a no brainer for us, if you can expand at will this long narrow tube, why wouldn’t you ? Having said that we think the use of slides is still a grey area in this country, although more and more are now being fitted, usually at considerable cost. One thing to remember though, if you go cutting big holes in the side of a monococque coach you had better be planning on doing something to beef it back up. We have done this in consultation with an engineer who has been in the transport area all his working life and it has been quite successful.

The first 2 we fitted to the front of VP used an imported kit from  a firm called Liftco in the USA. I liked this style as all the weight was taken on the vertical members on each side of the opening. It means you end up with a floating floor 75 mm above the rest of the coach floor but after a few days you do not even notice it. It was fairly easy to fit though the instructions leave a lot to be desired, but hey we are Aussie boys that never read the instructions till we get stuck !

The bedroom slide was designed by William and uses a material called supported rod. Basically it looks like ladies waist handrail, but you can get roller bearings that wrap right around it. Each side of the king size bed slide out has four of these bearing supporting the whole slide room which contains the bed. This allow us to move it out over a metre, opening up over half the floor space in the bedroom for foot traffic. We would not be without it. This one did not require additional bracing as it is over the webbing connection the front and rear module together. We did purchase the liftco external rims, just to keep the look. With this one, as the pics show, we made a frame that was bolted to the supported rod and built the “house” on it. The addition of a 24 v motor and a chain driven jackshaft completes the slide out.