Quality...

2gypsies wrote:
Rodz, sorry you're having issues with your Canyon Star. However, this is very, very unusual for a Newmar product. They are highly praised among motorhome owners. We owned ours for 10 years with no problems.

They're selling lots of motor homes. When production goes up, quality goes down. At that point, it's all about numbers.

Rodz, sorry you're having issues with your Canyon Star. However, this is very, very unusual for a Newmar product. They are highly praised among motorhome owners. We owned ours for 10 years with no problems.

Very unhappy with Newmar. My Canyon Star started out good. Then some things went very wrong. It will only run the furnace for 3 hours when dry camping. Needs more and better batteries. I questioned Newmar and they said it's working as designed. They said I bought a coach, not a motor home. A coach is designed to be driven and plugged in, not used for overnight dry camping. I was quite shocked at that response. The first time I dumped the black tank I got an unpleasant surprise. The gate valve was glued in the open position. When I removed the cap, the tank emptied all over everything including me. I've had so many things come loose or just quit working I can't list them all. A few weeks ago I had a guy flag me down to pull over. My tail lamp assembly had fallen out. There was a few feet of wire pushed inside the rear body panel. That wire pulled out and the tail lamp was beating the******of my nice new MH. Now it needs to have the rear panel repainted, wiring repaired and the broken lights replaced. I like the MH but I'm very disappointed in the assembly workmanship. They need some better engineering and quality control. I've owned several motor homes and expect some things to go wrong. But this is ridiculous.

The only thing we dislike about Lazy Daze units is that they don't have slides. We could never do it.

pnichols wrote:

Cloud Dancer wrote:
Large Class A diesel pushers is all that I would consider buying.

Not considering your preference for a large Class A ... what's you opinon of:

1) Lazy Dazy Class C motorhomes with their all aluminum walls and roof?

2) Coach House Class C motorhomes with their one piece molded fiberglass exterior shell?

I'm not experienced, nor savy, on Class C units. But, all I've ever read, or heard, about Lazy Daze was very positive and complimentary.

Cloud Dancer wrote:
Large Class A diesel pushers is all that I would consider buying.

Not considering your preference for a large Class A ... what's you opinon of:

1) Lazy Dazy Class C motorhomes with their all aluminum walls and roof?

2) Coach House Class C motorhomes with their one piece molded fiberglass exterior shell?

jmtandem wrote:

You guys that keep talking about us not being able to define quality............. you are getting on my nerves. Many of us can tell if a car or a motorhome or a house or clothes or shoes or vacations or jewelry or.....etc, etc is of good, or excellent quality. And, some of us even know where to find most of these items. SO, read my lips, speaking for myself, I have NEVER been able to afford the highest quality. I have always looked for quality that I can live with, and that I can afford. It pretty much describes every material thing that I have. This includes my nice big motorhome. It's a keeper, now that I've redone some of the bonehead design deficiencies and fixed most of the factory screwups. There's no need in describing all these negative discoveries, heck it was designed/built back in 2003. By now, they probably produce a better product. I'll never find out.

I would not let anything said on the forum get on your nerves. I certainly don't. We all define quality differently. Heck, we all see the world differently. I don't own an Airstream. But, to me, something that has been manufactured since the mid 1930's and 65-70 percent of those products are still on the road at least gives me some kind of clue that they probably were and possibly still are made well. I like things that last longer than the payments. I also expect everything complicated like an RV with two water systems, two electrical systems and something that bounces down the road may have some initial break in issues. So do nuclear subs, so do Boeing jets and most other products that are complicated. That in no way defines quality to me and apparently neither to you as you fixed some initial stuff and now your RV works just fine. It would be nice if those that made RVs actually used them. Maybe we would have better bathrooms and more workable kitchens, but they are what they are. Prevost makes a good product, Arctic Fox is considered by many to be a cut above normal RV quality, so are Eagle Cap, Chalet, and Alaskan campers last decades with minimal issues, and many like Montanas as they say they are the best selling fifth wheel. There must be something right about them. But, rarely, is anything as RV iconic as Airstream. So, I used AS in my analogys and discussions. If people disagree with me, so be it. I could not care.

Many that own RV's see them as one step above sleeping on the ground. If that is an RV to them, that is fine. They don't get on my nerves and I learned long ago not to expect everybody or even anybody to agree with me. And I have not been disappointed.

Well, I did NOT mean to imply that I'm a nervous wreck due to what people say in these forums. I used (get's on my nerves) as a figure of speech. It was what I used to emphasize my message. And, yes I know we're all different, and we also see things differently sometimes. For example, this thing about Airstream being of such high quality, is something that's not important to me. Large Class A diesel pushers is all that I would consider buying. In this group of motorhomes, for 2003, the ones that were offered with the features I wanted, and that I could afford, narrowed the field to ONE. Basically, I screwed up in trusting Newmar that they could satisfactorly manufacture and install their first all-fiberglass roof (on a Dutch Star). Heck, my previous motorhome was a 1995 Vectra, which had a no-brainer excellent all-fiberglass roof. Even, when I sold it, that roof was maintenance-free, and had never leaked one drop. IN other words, IMO all Newmar had to do was copy a 6 year-old roof design. I assumed too much, and I paid for it. Obviously, Newmar knew right away they had a problem,.....which I'm sure they solved,....for themselves.
In the RV industry, most of the field testing is done by the consumer. I well understand that, now.

The deployment of "Little Boy" over Hiroshima failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, so another one - a plutonium bomb called "Fat Man" was delivered over Nagasaki after the primary target of Kokura was obscured by cloud cover.

And prior to the atom bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the deployment of incendary bombs, later we called them napalm. Since most Japanese cities were not built with steel and brick they burned easily. Entire cities were destroyed by fire before the big bombs. Napalm also sucks the oxygen out of the air and that worked to our advantage when using it to try to secure islands as the Japanese would be in caves but the oxygen in the air was being depleted so being in a cave was not necessarily all that favorable for them.

Skid Row Joe wrote:

jmtandem wrote:
If the Japanese had Airstream quality during WWII we would be speaking Japanese and driving Toyotas. Fortunately we had Airstream quality and won the war. Back then Americans were proud of what Made in America meant. And we now proudly drive Rams and Fords and GM products.

I believe you're incorrect about several things here. American product quality did not win the war. Using Airstream as an example doesn't make any sense in that discussion.

The massive supply chain of goods, higher skills, and luck won the war. The Japanese Zeros as an aircraft were superior in almost every way to the American built, heavier aircraft. The only thing that let the American pilots prevail were their superior skill levels of air to air combat.

I doubt whether we'd still be speaking Japanese, as Germany was the leading Axis Country.

FWIW, the supply chain of goods used in the American cars and trucks are heavily foreign based origin as well.

You're welcome for the history lesson. :)

Not sure who taught you history, but "The massive supply chain of goods, higher skills, and luck" had nothing to do with how the war with Japan ended.

By the time the atomic bomb was first successfully tested, the Germans had already been defeated. Japan, however, vowed to fight to the bitter end in the Pacific. MacArthur favored the continued conventional bombing and then an invasion of Japan called Operation Downfall. It was estimated to have a U.S. casualty rate of over 1 million, so Truman decided to use the A bomb.

The deployment of "Little Boy" over Hiroshima failed to elicit immediate Japanese surrender, so another one - a plutonium bomb called "Fat Man" was delivered over Nagasaki after the primary target of Kokura was obscured by cloud cover.

At noon on August 15, 1945, Japan surrendered. The formal agreement was signed on September 2, aboard the U.S. battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

So they lost the war because we bombed the snot out of them.

I agree with the OP - RV quality stinks. I don't need a picture as I visited all the dealers within a 100 mile radius and settled for the best of the offerings.

4X4Dodger wrote:

We know quality when we see it. Or do we? Are we sometimes fooled by what we think is Quality?

I know this: Quality can exist at many different levels and price ranges and in different ways. And in RV's DISCERNING Quality is not easy for sure.

WORD.


just to add a bit...to say "quality is in the eye* (*value judgement) of the beholder," reveals a big clue to the subtle nature of Quality: it is both rational (discernible), as well as emotional (one's held values). even the terms discernible and value each involve a mix of reasoning and feeling.