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Shower Door Debacle
We're full timers, on the road now in our seventh year. Our shower door has been a constant source of leaking irritation. We noticed someone on the Forums who posted about their Nautilus shower door system using a flexible poly roll up screen that self squeegees, and decided to deconstruct our troublesome shower door and install this promising replacement.
Tearing out the old door which had broken during our travels, and had to be lifted up to open, was a chore to remove but doable. Carrying the old door to the trash instructed us how its weight had added to our load. The new door is feather light. The instructions are easy and the frame parts can be cut to fit easily into the Airstream frame pocket, however, potential buyer be aware, the instruction sheet does not take into account Airstream's wooden framework in contrast to a porcelain surround. We installed our door with the door closing to the right hand and although we caulked well on the outside and inside, saw significant leaking along the framework's lower section onto the floor. Soon water began seeping into the wood below the door and we called the company engineer to get a solution. They recommended we caulk around all the seams but to no effect. I removed the roll up screen from its cassette and noticed two notches in the lower frame that allowed water to pass through onto and through the Airstream wooden frame support to each side and penetrate the wood. However, I did see that the upper cassette had no such cut outs and mentioned this to the Nautilus design engineer. He agreed to my supposition that this was the cause of the leak! Not a good time to find out!
Asking why this wasn't mentioned in the installation instructions, I was told that they couldn't foresee every installation situation, and I was able to have them send me a new door to install.
Once again I had to deconstruct all the caulk removal and detach the framework from the wall held in place by hard core 3M double sided tape.
I flipped the new framework 180 degrees so it now closed to the left hand and the notches were up on the other side no longer subject to water intrusion, and again carefully caulked the heck on both sides extremely carefully. Water has a nasty way of finding an escape route. This fix has solved the problem and I'm passing this information on to everyone in case they wish to lighten their load, eliminate glass squeegeeing, and eliminate door opening competition between the shower and bathroom.
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