The lift system — our camper’s Achilles’ heel. Welcome to Week Five of our camper renovation, where you go to crank your camper up when you notice one corner isn’t budging. Well that’s exactly what happened to us. The cause? Years of use, no maintenance, and Pop n Lock Patty was just tired.
Assess the problem
Diving into the repair was a blend of guesswork and crawling around on the ground a lot. We figured out that one of the cables had unraveled because the clamp had rusted causing it to break in half off of the cable.
Repairing
Now this is where you will crawl around a lot because to repair this the camper needs slack in the lines to repair. For that to happen the camper needs to be down if not all the way than as low as possible. You will have to crawl into the camper through the doorway and in ours the lift system is on your right running along the front of the bunk end on the floor. When we reinforced the cover for it when we did the toilet install we built it where the lid can be raised up to be able to reach in to the system.
With the camper lowered you will want to pull the slack out of the cable line but you will need to make sure the tension in the line matches the other cable lines tensions. I say this because if the tensions are different than when you go to raise your camper it will lift wonky if that makes sense. Which isn’t good for your camper, the weight won’t be distributed equally which can put a strain on the four posts of your camper (keep in mind that the front of the camper should lift a 1/2 inch higher than the back to allow for a drainage pitch).
You will than need to run your cable through the eyebolt keeping the tension needed (as you can see which one it belongs too) and place the ferrule and stop around the entire cable and crimp it tightly.
You will also want to take this time to check the other eyebolts and cables and ferrule and stops to see if they need any repairs made to them. We noticed that the middle eyebolt was stretched out as well and was about to come undone (you can see it in the upper right picture how it looks stretched out and isn’t closed at all like the other eyebolts). So I guess you could say it’s a good thing this happened while we were at home!
Once you have everything repaired go give her a crank and see if everything is lifting equally. We cranked her up a little at a time with a level placed on the roof at different spots all the way around to check for the pitch from front to rear.
Look at you out here cranking things out on your camper repairs!! …..yeah yeah I know cheesy but I don’t care. There’s always room for a laugh.
As always in closing I want to thank you beautiful people for always coming and hanging out in our little corner of the world. We hope you come back next week because we are going to show you how installing flooring is going to make it a lot easier to walk on and clean up in the camper. Besides who wants to keep looking at a stain directly in the middle of the floor……
