HONEST 2 YEAR REVIEW OF OUR 2020 LANCE 1985 RV

we have owned our 2020 lance model number 1985 for two years what do we love about it what don't we love about it and would we buy another lance in this episode of travels with delaney welcome back everyone my name is patrick and if this is your first time here at travels with delaney i'm so glad you found us we're a channel all about rving and living life to the fullest now in this week's episode i want to talk about our lance model number 1985. we bought this in june of 2020 which means now we have owned it a full two years and honestly we have really put it to the test easily over 20 000 miles over the first two years of ownership and so today what i want to do is share with you things we like about the rv things we maybe don't like and issues we've had and answer the question at the end would we consider buying a lance again in the future in terms of what we love about this trailer there is a lot to love about it number one the fit and finish on this trailer has been excellent the minute we walked in for the first time we just literally fell in love with the interior design of the trailer it's super spacious for a 23 foot trailer with having the one slide out it really opens up this living room we also love the fact that it's a walk around queen-size bed it has a decent sized kitchen with a little bit of countertop space so plenty of room for us to make meals inside when we want to and we really like the fact that the whole back end of the trailer is dedicated to bathroom space so it's large enough that you can actually go in and shower get dressed do everything you need back there and so overall the layout is perfect for us we also feel like in many ways the construction quality on the trailer is decent i've actually had a couple people up on the roof of our trailer before comment about how solid our roof is compared to the roofs on their rvs we also love the fact that it is a four season trailer which means we can actually take this out in the winter months in northeast indiana and we stay nice and warm and have had no issues with that so overall we have enjoyed this and it tows really well behind our 2017 toyota tundra now even though we've had some major issues with this trailer and we'll talk about both the minor issues and the major issues in a little bit we do still feel like the overall build quality is pretty darn good for instance we've noticed that the quality of the cabinets has held up well over the two years fact one of the things that i've noticed is over this two years even the shelving is not showing much wear and tear with all the pots and pans getting drug in and out even things like molding around the edges of all these cabinets it's just the fine points that we've noticed with the lance trailers over other trailers that are out there on the market now we've done quite a few modifications to the trailer to make it even better for our situation and one of them was kind of a force modification the reason we do not have the stove and oven anymore is there was a recall on the propane fittings for our particular stove and you just could not get parts for it so ultimately what i did was i just removed it completely installed this cutting board and built a shelf down below and now we've actually found this actually works better for our situation we have an induction cooktop that sits right here that i pull out when we want to cook things in a skillet or a pot and pan and then down below we actually have a ninja foodie nine in one air fryer toaster oven combo pull that up here and we can bake anything we want plus we can airfry with it now those do run off of electric and so if you are boondocking we do have to use our 2000 watt inverter on board we've taken down the original backsplash and put in subway tile we've added wallpaper and lots of little accents and this has really become our home away from home the dinette was not something we really wanted in this trailer in fact our trailer came with a convertible sofa under the queen bed and we were really excited about that but after two years of use i can honestly say we never use the sofa anymore now we know some owners of this model that absolutely love the convertible sofa and they use it all the time and so it really comes down to what works for you we didn't think we'd ever use this dinette and yet we practically live in it this dinette is big enough that four grown adults can easily have dinner here and we love that because a lot of times we camp with friends when we first bought this these were some of the most comfortable cushions we have ever had in an rv over our 17 years i will say though after two years of use the foam is finally breaking down originally when you would sit down in here the foam would really support you but after two years of sitting here working watching tv having dinners now the foam has really broken down and you feel yourself sinking all the way down to the bottom now in regards to things we don't like about this trailer it really starts right here at the tongue and it deals with the tongue weight and actually the overall weight of the trailer now originally when we bought this i was looking at what was stated in the brochure for this particular model but when we actually picked up the trailer and we started weighing it using cat scales and other devices we found out that the numbers in the brochure weren't even close to what this actual model comes in at so for instance our tongue weight ends up being somewhere between 800 and 960 pounds depending on how we load it and whether we carry water in the fresh water tank the overall trailer according to brochure was supposed to come in around 4 200 pounds but when we actually went to the dealership to pick it up the official paperwork had us closer to 5 000 pounds and that was before the dealer installed the solar package so with the solar and if you are carrying water you only have a couple hundred pounds for cargo so needless to say we usually cannot carry very much fresh water on board the trailer is only rated for 5700 pounds gross vehicle weight rating and part of that is because there are only 2 900 pound axles on this this was a feature i was really excited about it's a dedicated outdoor storage area that's supposed to be for a generator but again because of the fact that we have such a low cargo carrying capacity i am unable to actually put my generator in here because i need to save every pound possible and so we carry that in the bed of our truck the front of the trailer comes with three 20-pound propane tanks but we've had to remove one of those again just trying to save weight so that we can have room for the stuff we really need another thing we really do not like in this particular trailer is the air conditioning now this is an unducted air conditioning unit and originally they were telling us that it was a quieter unit than the old non-ducted ac units however what we found is it is still loud and so when i'm trying to work from the trailer and i'm on zoom meetings it's too loud so we end up having to shut the ac off let's talk about the issues we've had with our trailer now we've had your basic run-of-the-mill issues that every new rv owner typically will have everything from screws falling out and not knowing where they come from to wires coming loose and you having to reattach to get your lights to work those are pretty common in the rv industry sadly i have to say and so those types of things don't really bother me because i know whether i buy a twenty thousand dollar trailer or a two hundred thousand dollar motor home you're gonna have issues like that but unfortunately with this rv we have had two major issues the first major issue we encountered with our trailer dealt with the slide out now just after a few months of owning our rv our slide out was not going out it would only go out just a few inches and stop and i have to bring it right back in took us a couple months to finally get an appointment with lippert and they took it to their repair center in goshen indiana and what they found was it had been installed improperly it was a little too far out of the tolerance on one side causing the whole slide out to bind and eventually kink up the drive mechanism lippert went ahead and re-centered the slide put in a brand new mechanism and it's been working fine ever since however recently we noticed that right at the bottom the screws are pulling out whenever the slide out is in now this slide out is a heavy slide out and it sets over 12 inches off the floor so when you're going down the road you have all that weight bouncing now i have bought some camco step supports to put under during travel but the big thing is we always have to remember to remove those before putting out the slide out otherwise we're going to do major damage to the floor and possibly even more this is seems to be kind of a known problem with these screws not being long enough and the weight taking their toll pulling your slide out away from the exterior wall the other major issue we have had on our trailer deals with our axles now we knew there was an issue last summer because one of our rear tires was wearing bald on the inside last winter we were able to get an appointment at a dealership and they told me that our front axle was actually bent now i found that odd since it was the back axle we had the issue with so we went back to texas in the spring and they replaced our front axle but when they replaced it they informed me the back axle was also bent dexter has sent us a brand new axle that i have waiting for us at home and we will put that on as soon as we return from our summer travels but that has been an issue with both of these axles being bent now it's not a safety concern but what it does do is it eats through your tires and we've already had to replace three tires on this trailer how did the axles get bad well that's a question that really nobody can answer it's possible we may have hit something going down the road but if you go on forums there are quite a few people that are having to get new axles put on their lance trailers that were manufactured around the time that this one was manufactured and now to the question that i think a lot of you are wanting to hear the answer to and that is would we buy another lance rv and unfortunately for me it's hard to really answer that because part of me says yes i want to because there's so many things we love about this trailer and i do believe at its core it is a well-built unit but on the other hand when we know that the base price of this particular model has went up twenty thousand dollars since we purchased it and with the past experience we've had over the last two years with lance's customer service where it's been basically mediocre at best i would have a really hard time spending an additional 20 000 if their customer service has not improved which at this point i'm not sure it has because our issue is recent if you're not familiar with our rv i'm going to go ahead and pop a video right here for you to watch next where you can check out the full tour from two years ago when we first purchased it and until next time everyone we'll see you on down the road good night

Channel: Travels with Delaney

Views: 55,426

Keywords: travels with delany, travel with delany, travel with delaney, the delanys, lance 1985, lance travel trailer, lance review, lance rv

Id: n2IagufT9BA

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 17 2022