Dinette rattling loose from floor

[webwrangler]

I'm now on my third attempt to secure the dinette seat in my 2005 Rockwood 2104. This is an aluminum frame trailer, and the dinette is framed from the same material. Vibrations and rattling have caused the original screws to work loose and the holes to be unusable. I have been known to take the TT down some washboard roads to go fishing!

On the last go-round, I used subfloor adhesive to glue the aluminum frame to the floor and the side of the trailer where the seat back is attached. I also put plastic anchors in the floor before re-attaching to the floor with bigger screws.

The glue wasn't such a good idea--it stuck great to the vinyl flooring, but pulled the vinyl loose from the subfloor. It held for a while where the seat back attaches to the wall, but eventually it gave out, too. Alignment was a problem with the plastic anchors; I discovered that I only got a screw into one, with the rest of the screws going into the subfloor like the original installation.

So now I'm looking at using toggle bolts on the seat back. It turns out that the seat back is aligned with doubled-up vertical aluminum square tubing. I think two toggles into one of the wall tubes should hold there with some loc-tite on the threads.

I don't want to just put screws in the floor again, even if I put them in new locations. It seems to me they'll eventually pull out again. I've thought about bolts all the way through to the underside of the trailer but I don't know if the underside is durable enough to hold the nuts, even with washers. It appears that I have the subfloor, some styrofoam insulation under that, and a layer of some kind of paper or cardboard covering the underbelly (!) The underbelly is not enclosed.

Does anyone have a suggestion? I would like to make this the last time I have to fix this; the wife is not on board for a new TT and I have a lot of trips in my future.

Thanks!

[CavemanCharlie]

bobndot wrote:
Thank you for the pics , good job .

I agree. Thanks for the follow up

[bobndot]

Thank you for the pics , good job .

[webwrangler]

Next step was to cut out some 1/2" OSB disks using the same hole saw I used to cut away the bottom layers. Then I inserted T-nuts into the disks, and ran bolts through the dinette frame bottom and into the T-nuts.



At the side where the dinette attaches to the wall, I had to ream out the aluminum where the two uprights met, in order to get the toggles in. I discovered that if I moved that location in order to drill only one wall upright, the table wouldn't fit on the seat edge without a moving the OTHER seat also. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that I didn't weaken the wall.

Toggles ready to go in:

All bolted down:

And sealed up underneath except for one:

The dinette seems really solid now! Hope I don't get any leaks underneath. It doesn't seem as if much water will hit the underside directly but I don't really know. Never crawled under there after towing in a rainstorm!

[webwrangler]

Well, I finished my project. Some of you suggested a strip of metal or wood the outer underbelly covering; that would probably have worked too, but I decided to cut away the styrofoam and bolt just through the subfloor. It would have been too major a project to try and find a joist and put something in that would attach to that.

A few photos as promised.

Here's what the side attachment point looked like before I started:


The manufacturer had just a couple of sheet metal screws going through the side of the seat back and into the space shown here between the two wall uprights. My last 2 attempts to fix it were just attempts to do the same thing and expecting different results. Glue on the wall is also from my previous attempts.

And the "core" I pulled out from the underside using a hole saw:



I discovered that the subfloor in my TT is only 1/4" thick:E! Glued to that is 1 1/2" styrofoam, then 1/8" luan, then a black fabric that looks like landscaping fabric. I'm hoping it's waterproof. Here's one of the holes I cut:

[westend]

If you can span a joist space to use whatever bolt-backer you are trying, you'll be golden.

[myredracer]

deleted.

[webwrangler]

I can get to the underside of the trailer. Putting some wood or metal in place to take some of the torque and pressure of the bolts sounds good. I think I'm going to poke around underneath and see if I can clear away the foam and paper to expose the subfloor from underneath. If I can do that, then I can bolt through the dinette and the subfloor without having the styrofoam as part of the equation.

I was thinking of using a hole saw to cut out a plug of styrofoam. Then I could glue it back in after the bolts are in. Have to be careful not to saw a hole in the subfloor, though...;)

Bobndot, the toothpick and glue method was my first attempt a couple of years ago, and it didn't hold up to the vibration. In this attempt, I did insert some plywood into the tubing with subfloor glue where some welds had broken, so I could put a screw through to hold the dinette together.

I will post photos if I come up with a good solution.

Thanks everybody!

[bobndot]

This was a problem around 2005 where wood inserts were not used inside the alum tubes.
Fixes i have seen was to insert a a round dowel into the tube by cutting the tube to insert the dowel so the screw can bite.

sometimes, filling the screw hole using a toothpick soaked in wood glue or using a golf tee, hammered into the screw hole might give you enough bite to hold things together.

You could also, rebuild the whole dinette using a wood frame and tie it into the alum with angle iron.

[westend]

You might try through bolting with a board or aluminum plate underneath the floor to help take the torque of the fasteners and the dinette.

[ScottG]

Any chance you can get to the underside of the floor and bolt all the way through?