Be Prepared!! Charge your cordless drill.

[T11ravis]

Had an interesting Sunday afternoon after I couldn't retract the slides on my 300mp. Hit the button... nothing.
Spent almost an hour crawling around under the frame searching for the manual override (how hard could it be?) before I checked my ego and Googled it. Found a great video in about 1 second. :o
Piece of cake right? Grab my 1/4" hex socket and cordless drill only to realize the battery is dead. :banghead:
A somewhat quick job took an hour or two longer than it should have due to my negligence. Turned it by hand for the first hour or so, that was a lot of fun.
Battery will be charged from now on!!

[Festus2]

Travis -
When you turned the crank by hand for "an hour or so", what portion (fraction or %) of the slide actually came in? How much faster was the retraction when using the cordless drill?

Is this a large living room/kitchen slide or a smaller bedroom one?

[T11ravis]

Both slides were out at the time. On mine, the bedroom comes in first followed by the larger living room.
I maybe got the bedroom to come in 4-6" at the most by hand, I stopped measuring when I realized how long of a task it was going to be.
Once I got the drill fired up my wife said she could actually see the slides move but even then it was much slower than under normal power.
I think I'm going to get a second drill battery just to make sure I have enough juice to do the job in the future.

[bsmith0404]

This is good info to know, I know how to do the manual bypass, but never considered how slow the process would be. Thanks for posting.

[{tpc}]

This is one reason I picked a cordless with a 30 min recharge time. I figured if I forgot, it wouldn't take long to recharge even to half full if I had to.

Its not the beefiest of cordless drills but so far I have only used it on my x-chocks and stab jacks. Works fine on those. :)

[sw342]

Its why I don't use a cordless. I always carry with me a 50' extension cord and a corded drill. Fire up the generator and plug it in. I always carry a second generator anyways, so if the 5500 doesn't want to play for some reason, I always have a backup.

[T11ravis]

Its why I don't use a cordless. I always carry with me a 50' extension cord and a corded drill. Fire up the generator and plug it in. I always carry a second generator anyways, so if the 5500 doesn't want to play for some reason, I always have a backup.

I used to carry a corded drill as well when I was racing. Not last weekend though... :D