Rant about construction

[lsbrodsky]

I am nearly finished with my project to upgrade to Lithium batteries and will create a separate post for that. This post is my huge disgust at what I discovered about construction during this project. It will be my only rant.
I now have a profound respect for individuals who do these projects.
First, Airstream has incomplete documentation of as-built. OK, for electrical you can trace most of it, but not all. Ideally drawings and schematics would show everything; they do not.
None of the wiring has labels, there are no cable ties or harnesses. They have splices, some of the wiring is undersized for its application, and they do not even stick to their own color code. For example, they spliced a black wire to the green solar negative wire.
Then when they finish this hodge-podge they just cram all of the wires against the wall of the trailer and install a plywood divider so you cannot access or see the wiring. Seriously, all of the wires going to the DC bus, the ground bus, and excess lengths of wire are just pushed together.
I suppose it is the nature of the game that I had to remove all of the bed plywood to gain access to the electrical area.
If I had to work on this stuff for a living I would need serious medication!
I know, a normal owner would never need to access this or know about it, but for the price of an Airstream, I would expect better. Certainly every car and every boat does a much better job.

Rant over,
Larry

[Bruce B]

I had similar observations when I first began looking at our then brand new Airstream.
Coming from the auto industry and being a recreational sailor I was accustomed to much higher build quality in electrical systems.
I've spent a fair amount of time cleaning it all up and now I'm happier.
I remember unscrewing a speaker and finding about 15' of extra speaker wire just piled up on top of the speaker... "What's that buzzing sound..."?
Bruce

[AWCHIEF]

In my opinion few rants here are justified. But in this case I agree 100%. Many of the construction and finishing techniques used by Airstream are so industry nonstandard as to be ludicrous. They should send their design engineers for a short training period to the marine industry to see how to do electrical and mechanical systems right.

[IanPoulin]

I was at the factory this past week for service, and on Tuesday took the factory tour. More than one of us in the lounge afterwards remarked on the significant number of workers on the floor who appear under the age of 25 or so.

While I don't mean that youth has a lack of care to the job they undertake, the OP does show in my opinion an apparent lack of experience seen first-hand.

[lsbrodsky]

My project is now done and the next owner of my trailer will see labels, cable ties, and drawings for everything that I modified or installed. All of my new wiring and some of the old now has ampacities for the loads. I am really not proud of how I wired the tongue jack since I could not remove the old battery cable; I just attached to it and installed a marine breaker instead of the fuse. I doubt the Airstream method is only an workforce age issue. I suspect it starts with design, but is mostly driven by a strategy of the quickest build time possible. Why should they care? None of these complaints affect sales. Oh well, look for my completed project post.
Larry