We discovered that the new to us Airstream has spongy floors in the rear bedroom. A little research revealed that this is typical of our model and Airstream even has a TSB on how to properly seal the area that leaks, which is where the bumper storage box meets the trailer.
Today was my appointed time to tackle this project which should have been fairly easy had not some moron at the AS factory reamed out the screw heads making it virtually impossible to get the screws out of the belly band. I get ahead of myself.
First off I removed the rub rail molding. A simple snatch and pull operation. It will need replacing because apparently the molding comes with a stick on backside which is a once only application.
Molding off and now the reamed out screw heads. After several attempts I settled on using my Dremel to grind off the heads and with a
tug the belly band pulled free. You can see by the photos there was zero attempt to seal the joint and water has been saturating the sub floor in our bedroom for years.
I cleaned the area very thoroughly with alcohol, let it dry and then applied a heavy band of Vulkem 116. AS says use Sikaflex, but I already had the Vulkem. It's not as messy as Sikaflex anyway.
Now sometime in the next year or so I will tear the bedroom apart and replace the rotten floor. A simple bead of sealant at the factory would have prevented this. I hope they learn from these things.
Linear Mode
