Avion truck campers - Hundreds of photos
Without going into too much painful detail, we had a mishap several week-ends ago. While working with sand bag crews on the Mississippi River, the truck and camper fell into the flood waters as a road...
Forum Discussion
Bedlam wrote:
I did not deal with any RV's that were metal framed with metal skin. All of mine had ground runs to a central point. Even the ones that had aluminum siding over wood did not attempt to use the skin as a return path. So your exterior is the only return path? I am sure you can fashion additional ground leads to the skin, but have taken a resistance reading between the skin and the negative side of the battery yet?
A number of brands in the mid-early 70s did the skin ground method of the clearance lights and tail lights (KIT, Dynacruiser, Conestoga to name a few lines I've helped folks diagnose ground issues on that all stemmed from that grounding link breaking or working loose over time).
Usually, there's a clamp block that a bare aluminum conductor connects into fastened to the skin and then tied into the ground wire bundle running inside the camper that connects back into the camper's pigtail connection.
Amerigo even did this, using the aluminum screw strip that ran around the perimeter of the roof to ground the clearance lights into, with a wire that ran back to the main loom.
It was a cost savings measure as it was all low voltage, and saved on the amount of wire needed to wire up a camper.
On several, they also tied that big ground connection into the 110volt safety ground to ensure that the RV's skin was earth grounded when the unit was plugged into shore power.
