RV Frame Flex The Real Problem!

how's it going I'm Jared Gillis today I'm going to be answering the questions that I've been getting about frame Flex on RVs and really the problem that that's kind of exploded into and I have some strong opinions on this topic some opinions that I think would be good for RV manufacturers to address and then also opinions and thoughts of what I think we can do as RV owners as somewhat of a fix I even called some RV manufacturers because I wanted to see what their response was to the Fram Flex issue and I was I was pretty surprised on a couple of accounts of things that I heard but I think that you'll see that there is a balanced approach that you can take to this so to start off we need a good definition because all frames do flex and that's not necessarily a bad thing and it has multiple different names that are out there failure Flex whatever it is tomato tomato let's get a good definition in 30 seconds of what frame Flex is and where the problem lies frame Flex is the front portion of the fifth well usually where you go from the chassis to the upper deck to the hitch and there's usually compound in problems the compounding problems create additional stress in this area that leads to broken welds causing this front hitch to move somewhat independently from the rest of the RV creating more flex and movement than should be there and is safe to be able to tow with at that point these broken structural elements need to be repaired immediately the simple version is broken structure okay now good news and bad news here who is this typically affecting so you'll usually see more frame Flex on the much larger fifth Wheels the 40t and plus maybe the toy haulers the much larger heavier fifth wheels that are out there they're a little bit more susceptible to this and it's definitely not the majority of them it's a smaller number of it but this is obviously an issue that has has come up and multiple people have had the issue and it's not with just one manufacturer I know Grand Design's kind of taken the brunt of this conversation but it happens across the board to a lot of the manufacturers that are out there you type in one of the main manufacturers you put in frame flex and you're going to find that people have had issues with this in the past and I have zero affiliation with grand design or with Lippert I haven't worked with them on any projects or anything like that we do own a grand design but we bought it ourselves through a dealership now a common denominator with a lot of these RVs that have the same problem is a Lipper frame and so one area that I would point you to is uh big truck big RV JD he did a phenomenal job going there and giving us a peak behind the curtain giving you the the manufacturing process talking to the engineers seeing where the steel came from uh definitely I'm going to put a link down in the description to be able to check that out because if you want to dive into this more that's definitely a place that that I would start he a lot of respect for him for what he did and some of that information gave me the idea for what I'm going to do for the fix for R RV to kind of minimize the risk of having it happen to us I think we have the precursor of moving towards that direction I'd rather Old Barney f it and nip it in the bud I had an aha moment when I was watching the big truck big RV V videos at Lippert and they were talking about this area and so this area is really crucial you have to look at the structure as an overall super structure so you have the chassis from Lipper and then you have the rest of the structure coming from Grand Design and how that attaches to the chassis is of extreme importance from what I understand and the engineers from Lippert will send over recommendations to the RV manufacturer and how their structure needs to connect to the chassis of the RV and that part confused me a little bit because in my building in the past when I was a general contractor if you had something from an engineer and you had that blue stamp on there there was no deviating away from how that was engineered and how that structure needed to be put together if I wanted to change something I had to go back to the engineer have them change it if I had a recommendation or something that I wanted to change in there they needed to make sure that it fit their calculations fit inside their engineering they would again blue stamp it again and then I could take that to the city and then I could build it so there was a lot of steps I could not deviate from where the engineer said how this needs to work together and from what I heard is that the super structure needs to tie together this area does gain strength from the wall being attached to the chassis and that's where I I think we need to watch out for the precursors before we have the overall frame Flex issue if you can catch it in the beginning it's much better than trying to catch it in the end when more things have fatigued and more things have broken so this is the section that we're talking about that is really critical we have the wall attaching to the frame and in this section right here we have lag bolts and I can take and actually twist this lag bolt just with my hand it's it's definitely loose and this is an area that we had a problem with before and I tightened these down and they kept coming out I ended up putting a plate down below really cheesy plate but it stopped this wall from moving and these from backing out but you can obviously see that these aren't doing anything so I did call Grand Design and get a fix for these and theom Commendation was for me to replace the 3/8 lag bolt with a/ in lag bolt the pair of them but I wanted to dig into here and see if there's something more that I could do more than just the two lag bolts so I wanted to rip off the carpet my wife has really wanted me to start on that and tear off the plywood and see what I can find out behind it little destructive but I think it might be worth it that is exactly what I was looking to find there's two holes two lags being held in there but there's 1 2 3 4 five holes where lags could go in there the question is do they have wood backing in there so that they would bite I guess we'll find out so I first needed to get the holes drilled through for the OSB and then I also needed to enlarge the holes going through the steel per Grand Design's recommendation to the half in size lag bolt and then I really needed to make sure that I measured very carefully because I added a piece of luon here and so I wanted to have the proper length lag because you can see that that wood filled framing really is not that deep at all so you don't have much of a window to be able to have a decent size bite into the wood and also not stripping it out so because of that I also wanted to make sure I wasn't just kind of biting into it and pulling the wall over so I clamp the wall tight to the chassis I even used these 2x4s and 2x sixes so I can make sure that the wall was as tight as I could against the chassis cuz once you start tightening these lags down if you start to strip them out you don't have much of a chance of it holding much if anything and so having two of those in there if they were overtightened they wouldn't be doing much you hit a pothole and it's game over at that point so the five of these and being really careful not to strip it out I think is going to make a difference now while it was nice to tear it all apart and see the holes that were missing lag bolts to be able to put them in there it doesn't have to be this destructive on the other side I could put screws to find those holes and then put lag bolts into those Holes without having to tear everything apart but I also wanted to put that plate back underneath on the one side I'm going to use rivets because I want to see how they do and how they hold up and the other side I'm going to put screws because if I use this on other areas of the RV the rivets are a very low profile that might come in handy but overall I think this is going to help out and think that it probably should have been this way from the get-go okay real talk time here let let's boil this down because I think there's some key takeaways and some conclusions that or opinions that I can draw from this cuz I'm almost thinking that was a bit of phase one I actually might like to open up this underbelly and see if there's something else that might be lacking that I need to bring up to Snuff and so the question is also on those five lag bolts that we had here do the RV engineers at Grand Design say that two is adequate in their calculations but for me when it wasn't holding properly and there's five holes there I would like to put in the lags for those five holes and the is it from Lipper is that their recommendation to put five in there or is that just kind of the the standard that they put there and then it's up to Grand Design to meet their calculations those are those are questions that I I do have but it goes bigger than that and I'm not trying to say I have an entirely huge problem here I'm not even losing the seal on this and I think that really cheesy plate that I put under there and now replace with something a little bit more substantial I think did make a difference it allowed the wall to stay close to the chassis and those lags to stay somewhat in place even though they didn't have a bite into that wood but allowed it to carry the structure the way that it needed to so where I don't think we caused any other damage now something that I should have said here is that Grand Design is one of the only companies that came out and released a statement about frame Flex it gave you like a frequently asked questions things to look for and a way to contact them if you were having issues with your frame which I do appreciate that I can still appreciate that and ask these questions why did I only have two bolts when there was room to have five bolts there might be an answer to that but I think they were missing but there are things that we can do as RV owners because on the other side looking for a balanced approach here there are things that as RV owners we can do to cause these scenarios to happen to the RV so let's get back to that and that makes me think of some of the things that we can do as RV owners that kind of take responsibility for some of these failures that are out there I'm not saying all but I'm saying some that are out there number one uh if we don't kind of pay attention to our RV we let something that might seem somewhat smaller insignificant a loose lag bolt you may not think much of it but it can lead to a much larger consequence I mean that goes across everything on the RV if you leave a small hole in the roof you're going to get water penetration and you're going to have large damage on your RV so number one paying attention number two I think there's a lot more RVs out there that are overweight Than People kind of realize and I did a video on this uh to try and make this as as easy as I possibly can because it can be intimidating to go and weigh your RV but if you've never weighed it you don't know if you're over under or uh what you can put on or how it's balanced and we weigh R RV often my family is a little bit annoyed by it how often I do like away but it's something that I want to know and I want to know how things are distributed throughout the RV the other big item is modifications to the RV when you start changing the pin box or different structural elements on the RV those can lead to possible failures in uh the realm of frame Flex or even other frame issues so making sure that the modification that you're doing is within the structural parameters of what that RV is intended to be used for so you can check back with your RV manufacturer to see if you wanted to switch out something in the pin box to see what is approved for their systems now those are some big things that we can do as RV owners and kind of take responsibility for but on the RV manufacturer side I do think there's things that can be called out and stepped up for the RV industry to to have a better product that's being put out there now I called some of these RV manufacturers and I was surprised by some of the responses some of the responses were uh almost a denial of what's happening I not understanding what frame Flex is or even really understanding the questions some of them were in a complete opposition that any of the RV frame Flex situations you out there or either RV owner caused or some kind of a modification that caused that on the RV so either way pushing it back to the RV owner I think the one response that I was most impressed with was Brinkley they were fully aware of what frame Flex is what people are saying out there and how they're doing things differently to be able to attach their sidewall to the frame to try and mitigate any of the problems that frame Flex show up in other RV manufacturers and trying to hold things to a higher standard so that was their position it was nice to see that they they at least acknowledged it and we want to move forward and not have that better to build it right than have to come back and fix it later now I went from the two lags to the five lags on this wall but I'm just wondering is there something we can do that's better than lags you can see that they don't have a whole lot to bite into and yes this does work on the majority of RVs that are out there and on the road but can we step back and take a look at it and see if there's something more that we can do a better attachment that's going to be a little bit more solid and a little more foolproof I think that's 100% worth exploring number two I think we should have some bolt plates that are on there yes I put that bolt plate that was over here but I also think that we could put some underneath here and tie the structure together in a a way that we're not just hoping that a lag bolt holds on to a very thin piece of wood so that's a combination of the rvu manufacturer and Lipper getting together to see if they can come up with a a better solution moving forward now another Improvement I would like to see or a compelling reason why you wouldn't switch to it is the space saver upper deck area because it's supposed to be 20 30% stronger and give you a little bit more space up in that area I know it's easier to kind of stay in the Rut and kind of do the thing that you are comfortable doing because you've already done it in the past but if there's something that is stronger especially in this area that's coming under some kind of question or scrutiny why not move to it if it's a stronger product so that's definitely a question that I have another thing that has come under question are the welds on the Lipper frame just like on our rig we see some welds are really good and some aren't all that wonderful looking and I do know that the libert guys they go through a certification they have to go through a test so I I believe they do have good welders the question is do they have the time to be able to put it on the floor to be able to get the best welds that they can and put that that product forward the only reason I say that is cuz they said they had about 600 welders and they're putting out about a th000 frames a day and so I know it's not exact numbers but if you're a welder trying to get out two frames a day do you have time to slow down and do the best welds that you can I do think that's a question worth asking so you can see that it's a really a balance between the RV ownership and the RV manufacturers and I I think there is a a connection there when you're talking about frame Flex in general for those that want to say that it's always the RV manufacturer and it has nothing to do with the RV owner I think it's a bit unbalanced and I think if you go the other direction and say that it's all the RV owner and none of the RV manufacturer is a bit unbalanced on on that end so these these things are caused on both ends and there is kind of a meeting in the middle so with this I I do hope that there's some change on the RV manufacturer side and I do hope that this information helps kind of arms RV owners so that they're not worried about frame flex and if they do see a problem they can get on it quickly I'm not saying be a hypochondriac thinking that every time you see a loose screw you're like oh my goodness I got frame flex but I hope some of this information kind of helps arm you so you know what to look for and stop it before it ever becomes a big problem so you're not dealing with broken welds and and larger structural issues on your RV so I think that's going to do it for today I hope you guys enjoyed this video I hope it helped you out in some ways so as always if we don't see on the road hopefully we will see you next video take [Music] care

Channel: All About RV's

Views: 64,948

Keywords: RV, RVing, RV life, RVers, Jared Gillis, Less house more living, How To RV, DIY RV, Learn to RV, Motorhome, Class A, 5th wheel, RV Electrical, RV Repair, RV America, All About RVs, Learn To RV, RV Knowledge, RV Life, AllAboutRVs, Allaboutrv’s, RV Tips, RVing Tips, RV Frame Flex, Brinkley, Grand Design, 5thwheel

Id: -JyiUkjqrHw

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 24 2024