Rating of Travel Trailers?

subcamper wrote:
The problem with travel trailers (and other RVs) is the manual assembly steps at the factory.

If you ever go through a tour of an automobile assembly plant, you will see how engineers designed tooling, bucks, alignment pins, robotic high-precision screw tigthening, etc. this was all done to remove the human element in assembly, especially in critical areas. That's why cars are so consistently built. Every car has a screw in exactly the same place and tightened exactly the same amount.

RVs aren't produced in large enough quantities to justify the expensive assembly tooling that cars use. Therefore the assembly quality is highly dependent on the individual working on it. Esssentially they are "one-offs" built using some general guidelines supplied by the manufacturer. The guy with the staple gun or screw gun might put 5 fasteners or 2 fasteners (and maybe none of them will actually hit a stud underneath). With this type of assembly, it's impossible to produce consistent quality. You might get a "good one", while the next buyer might get a "bad one".

If you could look under the underbelly covering of two trailers of the same model you would see different wire routing, variable number of fasteners and fastener locations, etc.

All this makes it difficult to rate the quality of travel trailers. In some cases a manufacturer might be so sloppy that so many of their TTs are poorly built that it does stand out, but in general all the manufacturers seem to produce TTs of erratic quality. The best you can usually hope for is that the problems aren't major and something you can fix as you go along.

Steve