Jim@HiTek wrote:
Although this is a year old thread, it's important that owners are aware of a major fiberglass roof weakness. Winnebago roofs are notorious for having the roof peel back in strong winds, and it has happened to Winnie's sitting on dealers lots right after delivery from the factory as well as aged Winnies. Their roof to sidewall attachment method simply isn't good engineering practice and yet it seems they don't want to give it up, or improve factory inspection, preferring to insist it's the owner's lack of maintenance that causes it, or to even deny it happens. Roof peelback in windstorms or on the freeway has been happening to Winnie's since they invented the attachment method.
Not being a big fan of hard work on a rooftop, I opted to protect my roof with a DIY solution before the rig gets caught in a windstorm. And the best solution I've found is using 2" wide Eternabond tape along the edges. Here's my blog post about it: Fiberglass roof...
Sorry, but having owned two older Winnies so far, I just don't believe a lot of your claims. As the scientific community likes to say, "the plural of anecdote is NOT evidence". The fact that a small number of any product has issues, clearly does not make that product "notorious". I have seen issues with older Winnies, and peeling roofs, on several occasions. Far less that a 1/10 of one percent of all Winnie products I have observed in use, BTW. Oddly enough, a quick view of a rig with a peeling roof, from 30' away, typically makes it quite clear that the roof is just one of many issues on a coach that clearly been abused, and neglected.
In other words, "oh look, it's a twenty year old Winny that looks like it a mobile meth lab, and has the sheet beat out of it. But the roof is peeling due to the crappy Winny design, NOT from ignoring all maintenance for the last decade, right?"
As for you claim that it even happens in dealer lots to new units, absent printed proof from a reliable source, I'm not buying it.
Finally, In travelling hundreds of thousands of miles in RVs over the last two decades, I have seen exactly zero peeling roofs on any class A, while it was rolling down the highway. When it comes to travel trailer and 5ths, I have seen rubber roofs that had air forced under them and were inflated like balloons, literally too many times to count. I have owned two obsessively maintained trailers that suffered roof leaks, and my two Winnies were/are as dry as a ghost fart. Strictly anecdotal indeed, but it has lead me to conclude that I'll take a glass roof over rubber, any time.
