Luxury Destination Fifth Wheel Repair and Frame Work

A forty five foot motorhome at a similar weight spreads it across a long wheelbase with three axles. A luxury fifth wheel puts a comparable mass on a kingpin and one tandem axle group, which means the region around the spring or trailing arm hangers is carrying a concentration of load that nothing else in the recreational world matches.

Add the full time factor and the rails never get a rest. A weekend trailer is loaded for four days and emptied. A residence is loaded permanently, with books, tools, food, water and a washer, and the frame is under that load continuously for years. Cracks appear in the rail web near a hanger, not at the pin, which surprises owners expecting a pin box problem.

• Comparable mass to a large coach on a single axle group
• Load is permanent rather than trip based
• Cracks appear in the rail web near a hanger
• An enclosed underbelly hides all of it from view

A trailing arm independent system rides far better than leaf springs and it has considerably more wearing parts: a bushing at every arm pivot, shocks that actually damp, and rubber springs that take a set over time. None of that is unusual on a vehicle. It is unusual on a towable, and it is almost never serviced.

The consequence of worn bushings is axle movement under load, which produces tire wear and a trailer that follows a little off line, and eventually loads the hangers unevenly. When we have one of these in for anything underneath, we check arm play and shock condition, because the suspension is upstream of the frame complaint on a lot of these trailers.

A six point auto level system has two front jacks and four rear, and it is powerful enough to lift a twenty thousand pound trailer. Controlled as a system it is excellent. On a sloped or soft site, where one corner sinks and the routine lifts hard to compensate, those jacks can apply a genuine twist to the frame.

Owners describe the symptom clearly: at one particular site the entry door will not latch and a slide will not come in. That is a frame under torsion, not a hardware fault, and the correct response is to relieve the levelling and re-set on pads rather than adjusting the door. Repeated over years, though, it leaves a set.

A residential refrigerator weighs roughly three times what an absorption unit does and stands on four small feet. A stacked washer and dryer adds a spin cycle that puts a cyclic load into the same spot. Both were accounted for by the builder, and both are then subjected to five years of sitting on identical points while the trailer is levelled slightly differently at every site.

The deflection shows as a floor that has dished under the appliance and, on hard flooring, as a crack running out from a corner of it. Reinforcement under the appliance footprint is the fix, and it is far less expensive than the flooring replacement that follows if it is left.

On a weekend trailer a slide is out for four days at a time. On a full time unit it is out for months, which means the opening carries the room's weight continuously rather than intermittently. Sustained load produces creep in a way that intermittent load does not, and the threshold edge is where it concentrates.

With tile or rigid plank flooring the result is a crack line at the threshold. We stiffen the threshold before replacing the finish, because a new floor over an unmodified opening cracks in the same line, usually within a season on a unit that is lived in.

Structural, frame, body and interior work bills at $210 per hour with body supplies at $5 per body hour and paint supplies at $55 per paint hour. Hydraulics, suspension hardware, appliances and electrical work is $260 per hour. Measured assessment is $285 per hour with a one hour minimum, credited in full against an authorized repair.

The complication with full time owners is that the trailer is their home while we work on it, and frame and underbelly work is not compatible with occupancy. We schedule these as blocks with a firm start date rather than fitting them around other work, so an owner can arrange somewhere to be. Rancho Santa Margarita owners should plan the 241 to the 91 at this length.

A 45 foot luxury fifth wheel at thirteen feet four over the air conditioners clears our sixteen foot doors and paints whole in the sixty foot booth. The distinctive requirement on these is underbelly access: the enclosed heated underbelly has to come down to inspect the rail web at the hangers, and that is done with the trailer supported on the frame at ride height rather than on its own levelling jacks. We never assess a frame with the trailer sitting on its hydraulic jacks, because the jacks are frequently part of the problem.