Itasca Class C Overhang Movement

pnichols wrote:
Ron,

????

We've went miles and miles out in the desert at 7-10 MPH on extreme washboarded roads - plus slowly along some just plain ugly tipped and rutted desert road surfaces. For instance and including traveling on the "Not Recommended for RVs" road leading down to the valley floor of Monument Valley right alongside the special jitneys driven by Native American workers taking tourists down there.

Our overhead cab bottom cannot move relative to the cutout cab roof it's rigidly attached to without ripping or distorting something in that area. In fact, the cab-roof/cabover-bottom interface logically should be designed such that the steel cab roof structure helps to rigidly support the overhead structure so that it can't flex up or down on it's own. From what I can see the two are designed to be joined together and remain together as one structure. In our Itasca Class C there is no distortion or deformation in that area after after 12 years of ownership on and off smooth roadway surfaces.

In a Class C the proper marriage of the coach structure to the chassis frame - relative to the proper marriage of the cab structure to the chassis frame - is a whole different situation from the relationship between the two separate structures that exists when a slide-in truck camper is held down by 4 to 6 tie-downs while riding in the wiggling bed of a pickup truck.

Of course, we don't store hundreds of pounds of stuff in our Class C's cabover bed when traveling either - as the bed has to be handy to be used every night for sleeping - but the person (me) sleeping in it does weight over 220 lbs.. :)

Chances are very good that the side walls of your RV are quite similar to those of this 2001 Itasca 31 C Sundancer. The frame can break from the stress, as this one did. There is not that much strength in the cut out van cab roof Everything depends on keeping water out and preventing rot.