By Barry and Cindy 1997 U270 4/20/2009
Years ago we added a lock on our bay slide Joey Bed to keep it from accidentally unlatching. An accidental release of bay slides is a known problem because a moving slide will crash through a bay door. It can happen on turns and is much worse if the bay slide is heavily loaded. We put the wing nut on before every travel.
Others with this safety bolt have drilled a cross hole in the end of the bolt and put a cotter pin in this hole after putting wing nut on a bolt. This assures wing nut will not come loose and fall off during driving. Added safety.
Over the many years, twice our Joey Bed right front bearing has disintegrated. Have to empty everything off the bed and pull out all the way, then lift over stops and lift out whole Joey Bed. A two-person job. Bearings are removed with a single nut. Very easy to do.
I have searched this year for Joey Bed parts and found that NOTHING is available as Joey Bed has gone out of business and it seems no one is supporting all the customers out there.
When our bearing broke years ago, I was able to get spare bearings from a Joey Bed installer at an FMCA show. And it came in handy a couple of months ago when replacements were needed.
I think that these bearings must be available from a bearing house, but they have thousands of types. Our bearings have to be rated at over 1,000 pounds of static load.
I had a bottle jack sitting outside the Joey Bed and when I pushed in the slide, our Joey Bed latch hit the bottle jack and the latch split apart. Not being able to find a replacement latch, I repaired our split latch. Barry and Cindy 1997 U270 36′
Most bearings have numbers on them which can be used by parts houses and bearing sales to either match or cross the bearing to another manufacturer. If all else fails, take measurements of the bearing and use that information to track down equivalents. My guess is that the bearings are pre-lubed ball bearings and are sealed. John Cooper 1991 GV 36′
I replaced a few individual (4 or more as I recall) rollers on my Joey bed, several years ago.
When FT Nac didn’t have the replacements immediately available, I just took the removed roller bearing assemblies to NAPA and they had a standard and heavy-duty replacement bearing choices for me as well as overnight availability (in Nacogdoches). Our Joey bed is a “Heavy Duty” model that goes full width and only slides out curbside. It has some massive load bearings for the first two curbside bearings. The original bearings were “standard” and I replaced them with Heavy Duty. Problem solved! Neal Pillsbury 1998 U270 36′
(Another version of a Joey Bed Lock below) I drilled and tapped the holes to install (would have had to remove many heavy things to do otherwise on the bottom angle…) Dave Katsuki 1999 U270 36′
I took some pictures of the Joey installed safety latch mechanism, that anyone could duplicate without much effort. It works very well, using a standard Linchpin on a chain tether and a tapered post with a hole for the Linchpin.
Neal Pillsbury 1998 U270 36′
Our latch would not work because a spot weld was broken on the latch (see picture). To fix the problem I drilled a hole behind the latch, a little larger than the head of the self-drilling screw head, pulled it in place with a wire tie and put in the self-drilling screw. It has worked fine since. Hope this helps.