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Old 02-14-2020, 11:26 AM   #5
Dave W
Senior Member
 
Join Date: May 2015
Location: Near Saratoga Springs,
Posts: 1,131
I installed Dometic toppers last year on the 4 slides of our 343RL Montana. There are good on line instructions for these toppers and are pretty simple to install. Carefree and LCI Solara instructions are confusing but decent. It averaged about 2.5 hours each to install with the first one much longer - lotsa screws!

Ours came from Makarios but they seem to have recently closed their doors.

The Dometics came with awning rails cut to the proper length plus, hopefully, the correct screws. 3 sets of mine were missing so was given a credit and bought them from Amazon

You can use silicone or as suggested butyl tape. I used both, switching to butyl after slobbering silicone on the 5ers side - oops.

It does require two people to slide the awning fabric into the rails though I did one when I couldn't find my helper.

I extended each slide about a foot as a makeshift table

You will also need two ladders - 8 footers work best.

Read the instructions and understand what needs to be done and in what sequence. Don't even think of pulling the locking cotter pins untill the topper and brackets are installed. One of mine had a spring evidently dislodged in transit. Had to drill out a couple pop rivets, reattach the spring. rerivet then rewind that spring (13 turns)

Buy extra screws even if they ship all of them. The supplied aren't the best as the square drive holes tend to wallow out, especially the larger bracket screws. I used Makita extra hard drive bits. You will need to pre drill for the bracket screws.

Good luck. Not a difficult DIY project, just time consuming
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