Pop-Up Campers, Tent Trailers Repair

A pop-up is really two structures joined by a mechanism. The lower box is a shallow trailer body with the galley, dinette, and storage in it. The upper roof is a separate panel that rides up on four scissor arms driven by a cable and winch or a screw drive, and the canvas simply spans the gap between them. That mechanism is the defining maintenance item on the vehicle. Lift cables are steel running over pulleys under constant tension, they corrode where they turn, and they fail one at a time. When one goes, the roof lifts out of parallel, which twists the scissor arms and bends the roof frame. Owners often keep cranking through that resistance, and the repair goes from a cable set to a roof frame straightening job.

The bunk end decks are the second failure. Those platforms slide out horizontally and are supported at the outboard end by a cable or a strut, so the deck itself is a cantilever carrying two adults. They are almost always plywood, and they sit under canvas that gets wet. In Southern California the wetting is not usually rain, it is condensation and morning dew at Big Bear Lake or Idyllwild rolling down the inside of the canvas onto the deck edge. A pop-up stored folded with damp canvas rots its bunk decks from the outboard edge inward, and the first symptom is a soft edge under the mattress rather than a visible stain.

Canvas itself has a hard life here. UV load in the high desert around Victorville and Lancaster degrades vinyl-coated fabric quickly, the coating goes brittle, and it splits at the fold lines rather than in the field. Then Santa Ana grit works into the zippers and the fabric abrades where it folds against the roof edge. We replace canvas sets, but the more important part of that job is checking whether the roof edge that the canvas folds against is still true, because a bent roof rail cuts a new canvas set in a season.