RVs and Motorhomes Repair

A motorhome is two vehicles fastened together. Underneath sits a chassis engineered by Ford, Freightliner, Spartan, Mercedes, or Workhorse, with its own suspension geometry and load ratings. On top sits a house built by a coach manufacturer out of laminated sandwich panel or aluminum framing and screwed skin, tied to that chassis at a limited number of points. Nearly everything that fails on these units fails at the interface between those two structures. A hard expansion joint on the 15 through Cajon loads the chassis, the chassis twists, and the cage above has to absorb that twist somewhere. Over years it absorbs it at the weakest opening, which is usually a slide, a compartment door corner, or the seam where a fiberglass cap meets a laminated sidewall. Southern California compounds it in a way most of the country does not. The same coach that sat at 118 degrees in Indio in August is parked at 6,700 feet in Big Bear Lake under snow load in February, and it spends the drive between them on grade. Adhesive that softened in the desert never fully recovers its bond strength, membrane that shrank in the low desert pulls at its terminations, and the freeze cycling in Victorville or Hesperia opens whatever the heat already loosened. We diagnose motorized RVs with all of that in mind, because the repair that lasts here is not always the repair the manufacturer manual describes. All work is performed at our Yorba Linda facility.