5th wheel rebuild from major water damage
The Before part 2. The duct tape was used to get it home from Oklahoma in January. It is a 2006 5th wheel 32' bunkhouse. Bad repair job from previous owner They used close to an inch thic...
Forum Discussion
I haven't posted for a long time mostly because the "last" step of putting on the fiberglass front cap that should have been easy ended up being a nightmare.
After all the time and work we did on the 5th wheel this one step proved to be just about impossible to overcome. Talk about depressing
From a distance it doesn't look like there is anything wrong. But if you look at the cap along the bottom, the left side is slightly higher than the right side.
From the side you can really see the problem is.
It's only about 3/4 of an inch but that might as well have been a mile.
You can see in this photo of the side that the wood framing extends slightly past the aluminum siding making the front cap not able to lay flush with the siding.
We are not only out of square side to side but also the angle across where the two parts of the front wall meet. They should have been exactly lined up with the siding.
You can also see that once the cap is in place the walls of the RV are about 1/2-3/4 inch wider than the fiberglass cap.
this is the other side (passenger) You can see we have the same problem here, the wood structure was a little better.
Unfortunately that didn't make much difference. Because the entire structure was off the only way to get the cap to sit even somewhat was to have it on crooked. This then makes the area where the bend is to not fit to the angle of the wood structure. It really is a mess.
We tried and tried to figure out a way to get the cap to lay flat enough to get trim on it. But it just would not. No matter what we did it just wasn't going to fit. We even tried to find wider trim but could not. This is such a critical spot for water penetration it had to have trim or we would have water damage.
The only other option we could think of was to take all the interior wall pannels down to expose the studs and try to take it apart and rebuild everything. This would be basically redoing everything we have already done but now instead of the rotten wood it would be new and super strong. Remember from our last posts that everything is screwed, glued, and stapled??? At this point after all the hundreds of hours we have put into the project we just wanted to be done.
We had come so far but now had hit the brick wall. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Time to call in a professional.
To be continued...
After all the time and work we did on the 5th wheel this one step proved to be just about impossible to overcome. Talk about depressing
From a distance it doesn't look like there is anything wrong. But if you look at the cap along the bottom, the left side is slightly higher than the right side.
From the side you can really see the problem is.
It's only about 3/4 of an inch but that might as well have been a mile.
You can see in this photo of the side that the wood framing extends slightly past the aluminum siding making the front cap not able to lay flush with the siding.
We are not only out of square side to side but also the angle across where the two parts of the front wall meet. They should have been exactly lined up with the siding.
You can also see that once the cap is in place the walls of the RV are about 1/2-3/4 inch wider than the fiberglass cap.
this is the other side (passenger) You can see we have the same problem here, the wood structure was a little better.
Unfortunately that didn't make much difference. Because the entire structure was off the only way to get the cap to sit even somewhat was to have it on crooked. This then makes the area where the bend is to not fit to the angle of the wood structure. It really is a mess.
We tried and tried to figure out a way to get the cap to lay flat enough to get trim on it. But it just would not. No matter what we did it just wasn't going to fit. We even tried to find wider trim but could not. This is such a critical spot for water penetration it had to have trim or we would have water damage.
The only other option we could think of was to take all the interior wall pannels down to expose the studs and try to take it apart and rebuild everything. This would be basically redoing everything we have already done but now instead of the rotten wood it would be new and super strong. Remember from our last posts that everything is screwed, glued, and stapled??? At this point after all the hundreds of hours we have put into the project we just wanted to be done.
We had come so far but now had hit the brick wall. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place.
Time to call in a professional.
To be continued...
