What’s up with hinges breaking

[GFC_Taylor]

Hey I just want to clarify a few things:

The rivets have nothing to do with hinge failures. Simply put, if these hinges don’t sit squarely on their mounting surface, weak points can form. Some early campers were built with a foam gasket that had the potential to impede the hinges’ ability to sit squarely. Since discovering this issue we have redesigned the campers to utilize a liquid seal, rather than a gasket, which allows the hinges to sit squarely and remain functional for the long haul.

Wiley, the big dog around here, summed it up earlier in this thread. Here’s what he said:

@WileyDavis

When we began building campers we used a piece of foam seal between the tent frame and the hinge to seal that edge. The issue was that the foam was thick enough to allow the hinge to be installed in a manner that wasn’t perfectly flat, especially at the front and rear corners where it would flare out slightly. This lack of flatness along the hinge line meant that every time the hinge was opened or closed, the pivot line of the hinge had to bend along more than one axis. The hinges aren’t designed to tolerate these multi-axis bends and would eventually start to develop stress cracks (even if you can’t see them, they are there). Once the cracks form, it’s only a matter of time before the hinge fails.

When we switched to the new liquid sealant (Teroson) we eliminated the foam gasket. This means that when we clamp the hinge between the spaceframe and the tent frame, the hinge can lie flat along the tent frame extrusion and is pinched more consistently along its length, preventing the flare at the ends so often seen on the older sealant design. This means that the hinge now bends along one axis, making it much less likely that stress cracks will form. You can see this effect for yourself by folding a piece of paper back and forth to form a pivot line. If the paper is held flat against the edge of a table, the paper will pivot easily along the fold line. but if you add a little bit of curve to the paper, it will resist bending easily and introduce tearing forces. That’s what was happening and what the new sealant eliminates.

We didn’t figure this out right away. We have campers with the old seal design that have been heavily abused off-road without issue. Turns out that the old way we sealed them didn’t necessarily prevent a good hinge installation, it just made it easy to assemble one with a bad installation. Which is why not every camper with the old seal will have failures. And unfortunately we did have a few that got resealed with the old hinges that had already developed stress cracks and eventually failed after resealing.

We have about 400 campers in use now (including test/demo campers and customer builds) and aside from that handful of reseals without hinge replacement, we haven’t had any hinge failures with the new seal design that we’re aware of. If it turns out that we’re wrong about all this (we don’t think we are but it’s always possible to be wrong), we will engineer a new solution and support (via warranty or at-cost replacement parts as applicable) every camper we make as long as we’re still in business.

Cheers,
Wiley

I appreciate your suggestion. It sucks that some of our customers had to go through this, but we are genuinely doing everything we can to resolve these problems for them. Our customers that have experienced problems with hinges will be taken care of through our warrant department on a case by case basis. When we’re able to travel freely we are all looking forward to the Product Improvement Tour that has been in the works.