Well, everything checked out fine with the volt meter. Battery holds under load and is charging fine.
So I struck bad battery/charger off the list.
Moved to looking further into something binding. Spent about an hour, manually cranking, shoving, leveling, checking seals, checking wires, cables, cords, slide rails, measuring, etc...
Nothing was binding or catching. Struck that off the list.
Moved to the motor itself...
Upon inspecting the motor before taking it out I noticed the battery wires were tightly wrapped around the motor making it hard to get to the mounting bolts. I also noticed that the wires were wrapped tightly around the end of the shaft where you would mannually crank it!!! There is a keeper pin in the end of the same shaft and it's a miracle the wire had not got tangled in it and rolled up in it (and ripped out.)
So I'm sitting here thinking about what an idiotic way that was to route a wire because sooner or later it would A) catch the keeper pin and rip the wire out or B) the spinning shaft would wear into the wire.
I figured option B would take quite a while because of the slow speed of the shaft and the fact that slidouts dont get run in and out alot...but I would definitely reroute it in a more practical area.
As I could see no damage I assumed those were dodged bullets and continued to assume the brushes in the motor were bad, so I proceed to take the motor out and VIOLA! Once out the battery wires unwrapped and now hung loose and there was a worn spot over an inch long in the hot wire right were it was wrapped around the shaft!
It would be like running the brake lights to your truck around your drive shaft to keep em from dangling. GENIUS!!!
The sad part is that this was routed this way from the factory. It was wrapped around the motor and shaft very tightly and zip tied in place even.
I can only assume that the genius at the factory thought that the shaft spun at such slow RPM that it wouldn't wear into the wire. Either that or they knew it would, but would take a long time and they would get service fees for fixing it years down the road!
Anyways, lesson learned. These camper manufacturers are light years from being up to ISO 9000 quality standards or even shade tree mechanic standards.
I patched the wire up and used heavy zip ties on the frame rails to keep the wires from dangling. Works like a champ now ๐
