I won’t go into a “Bad design” rant…… The reason these steps were invented and are used is to allow a door over the wheels. (There is no space to stick the standard fold up steps.) This greatly increases flexibility in design. However, in this particular setup there is a problem: With the slide out the door cannot open far enough to let the stairs up or down. In addition, by the nature of their design the stairs have to be FULLY down for the door to open or close. So here’s the scenario:

You pull into a rest area with the long RV parking spaces along and next to a sidewalk. You have the room to open the slide on that side… but since the stairs cannot go all the way down due to the curb you can’t close the door…… You also can’t put the stairs back up as the door won’t open all the way with the slide out…..

There are a few solutions….. Operate the slides from the outside with the stairs up, reaching through them…. A pain. Or, open the slide, then the other side as far as you can, but enough to get from the garage to the living room, then close the door side slide, bring the stairs up, close the door and open the slide again standing inside… three movements of the slide where you only need one. Madness.

(In addition to this there are the limitations on slide operation discussed HERE)

Lastly, if you don’t lower the levelers the think creaks/clicks. Makes sense. Coach is sitting on the suspension and moving, stairs are solidly on the ground. So there is movement at the hinge, and thus noise. Mildly annoying. (Aft stairs don’t have this problem as they hang in the air and don’t sit on the ground.)

So I came up with the following: Make the stairs removable. There’s the entry in the back, you don’t really need two sets of stairs, unless maybe when you’re parked somewhere for a while and you have guests in the garage whom you want to give some privacy. Now you can reach or step up there via the wheel and operate the slides. The stairs are held to the top bracket/hinge with eight rivets:

So, to re-state the mission: In order to get to the fridge/sink I need to open the large salon slide. But before that moves the opposing slide moves first. In or out.As we all know, finding 14′ (plus clearance) wide parking in a truck stop or rest area does not happen very often. So in that case I need a foot or so on the big slide and another foot on the bedroom. So I need the keep the smaller hydraulic slide from moving.Talked to Heartland and they were not willing to discuss ANY kind of modification. “As per engineering….” prefaces every statement. They were also not responsive to my request for schematics.The next call to LCI was better, although he also had no data on my particular system. They just sell the bits to Heartland. He did say to look for a lockout valve. Pressure comes from a single electrically operated source on the pump then goes to a splitter with manual lockout valve(s). Here slides can be locked out. Haven’t found it yet…. Has anyone? Are they installed on our units?He also explained that if there isn’t one the slide with the least resistance goes first. Simple as that. So in this case I would have to install a few valves to lock out the one slide.He also explained that if I were to open the little (“first”) slide against a tree, it would stop and the other one would start. This gave me the idea that I can simply install a mechanical lock on the small slide……. Any (educated) thoughts on that would be appreciated.The quest continues.