Orphaned Parts

August 19, 2006 by Chris
Filed under: Service Issues

One of this weeks tasks was troubleshooting a non working electric step. When the appointment was first made, I thought “No Problem”, as Kwikee steps are pretty easy to troubleshoot and repair.

But… when the coach arrived, I discovered that the step is a B & L electric step- no longer in business.

My parts software has a breakdown with part numbers (and names), but all parts are listed as “NLA” (no longer available), and there is no wiring diagram for the step. I also searched my old paper manuals (I have some repair manuals dating back to the 70’s), but no luck.

The reason the wiring diagram is so important is that this step works unlike any others I have seen, and the wiring is very much un-intuitive. The motor is attached to an arm which moves the step in and out, the arm rotates through 360 °, and does not reverse. On the other end of the arm is a cam, which has two microswitches riding on it which control the “extended” and “retracted” stopping points- these switched are connected by four wires to the door switch. There is also a medium sized power resistor wired in with the microswitches.

This isn’t a terribly complex setup, but it will take some multimeter work and diagramming to figure out, along with the fact that one of the microswitches is broken, so I’m hoping to come up with a way to bypass it, and make the steps more manual- it just seems overly complicated to do the function that it was doing.

I wanted to have the diagram figured out before posting this, but that hasn’t happened, but once I have it, I will put it here, for anyone else with a similar problem.

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