There’s no real fix.
At least your breakage is starting at the back.
I’d be more worried from the front as it could catch some air and cause failure.
Ultimately the worst part is that the hinge can fail along its length very quickly in my experience.
Based on my experience when my hinge failed I would remove the panel completely or cut the hinge to separate the panel from the frame as I wouldn’t risk the panel being held by a compromised hinge.
As much as I like the ‘idea’ of this hinge, I would really like to see a different replacement.
Get a ratchet strap and duct tape ASAP. I wouldn’t want that to fail driving.
I posted my field fix in a link above somewhere. Other people also had good field fixes posted higher in the thread. Welcome to the club.
Sorry to see another one.
@Slowboater Drill a hole (maybe 1/8" or 1/16") through the hinge at the tip of the crack to stop the propagation. It’s been a while since my solid mechanics class, but the stress concentration is inversely related to the radius at the tip of the crack, the sqrt of the radius, or something like that. The point is, as the radius decreases the stresses at the crack tip go WAY UP. If you drill a hole at the tip, you can increase the radius by one or two orders of magnitude and thus decrease the stress significantly. This should stop the propagation. I’ve done this before in other places where cracks have shown up and it works.
Please let us know if you do this and if it works, as I think others might benefit from someone finding a temporary solution to slow the crack growth. I’d slap some duct tap on the crack after the drilling to prevent water intrusion. Good luck.
Didn’t even make it to the new house as I thought before I had another hinge failure.
I thought it’d be the passenger side again, but nope, it was the driver’s side.
First failure was right before my birthday (yay me, awesome present) and 5 weeks after my first hinge failure he we are again.
Luckily I implored all the hinges be sent to me, and GFC did just that.
So no, there won’t be a repeat of the duct tape door again. I’m just out the time to fix this that I had planned on using for work on the new home.
Thankfully there was no near miss head shot this time either. First hinge failed while I was closing it. This driver’s side hinge failed without me touching it while it was opening. At it’s peak I heard a snap and there you go. This failure is starting at the front. The previous at the back. Basically everything was the opposite. Can’t wait to see how the rear hinge fails.
It sure would be helpful if the owners (Graeme and Wiley) of GFC would address the hinge issue directly in this forum. Do they think that there’s no problem? Do they think that the sealant will prevent anymore failures? Are other fixes in the works? If more failures occur, will they just keep producing campers with this problem unresolved?
What happens if a door falls off on the highway and goes through someone’s window?
I believe that @Mike_GFCUSA is speaking for the company at this point. From all his postings, it seems they think that they have solved the problem with better alignment and the sealant. I think that every hinge failure thus far has been on campers with build numbers <100, so either they’ve fixed it or the problem only starts happening as the hinge ages. If the former is true, I don’t know what they can say beyond what Mike has said. You can’t prove a negative. If the latter is true, we’ll start seeing posts about failures with build numbers that increase with time. We haven’t seen this happen yet, so I am a little hopeful. The cold should exacerbate any problems and with winter on it’s way, we should know more in a few months.
Just as a reminder for everyone, they said previously that the new hinge install method started in the early 100s.
I am in charge of the warranty program and while on the forum I try to keep it a little more casual (helps those who don’t necessarily want to speak out, to speak out) I am speaking for us in terms of what we are doing to fix any issues. I have actually posted a ton more information in this thread about what we are doing. We do believe the sealant has cured our issues with the hinges breaking or failing. The Terason has alleviated the stress put on the hinges by the crown seal. That does not mean we are not working to improve it further. As previously posted we are also working on an adhesive for the hinges currently that we believe will keep them aligned better in all directions than the hinges do and may add even more strength tot he current design. Of course we have to test this, you cannot just “have a solution” all of a sudden. It has to be thoroughly discussed, debated, implemented, changed, re-implemented, tested, changed, etc etc before it can be offered as a solutions. This is the same thing we did with the new sealant that we use. We did not just google sealants and pick one and throw it on, which is why after the hinges started failing there was a gap in time until we had a solution.
As was previously stated in the paper that @ace7196 posted, these hinges, once operating correctly are absolutely the right choice. Obviously we tried and tested other materials and hinges before coming to the living hinge. Every one of them had their issues and of course none of them would be above failing.
@philosopo had a camper that unfortunately I found out left the facility without the hinges being replaced which is why they failed with the new sealant. Not a single camper, with the new sealant has failed if it has also had new hinges as well. We weren’t aware that hinges had already been stressed to a point of no return, so I implemented a practice of adding new hinges and all new gaskets to the camper during sealing, making it more of a refresh as opposed to just a “re-seal”. And I have been working with him to get his camper to where it needs to and should be within our means.
So with the new sealant, and no issues on any campers with the new sealant AND new hinges we do believe we have corrected this issue. Of course there may be a hinge break in the future, saying that there will never be a failure would be the same as any automotive manufacturer saying that nothing will ever break on their car ever, no matter what because they did one recall. If you have had an issue, you know we have done everything we can, including breaking our own warranty policy to help get it fixed and we are new, small and still learning so I do appreciate everyone’s patience as we figure it all out.
I forgot to add in my post, the door that broke was the one that I would use all the time, significantly more than other other door.
I’d also like GFC to setup a test setup and actually test a few doors and see what their lifespan truly is. It would be nice to see that the old method failed at 1000 cycles and the new version failed at 10000 cycles. Im sure comparing with the old one wont be done, but there should be some data tied to the claims. A million cycles is not true and that is an impossible claim.
This is a pretty straight forward setup and I am sure Wiley can get is done in a day. Its a fixture, a pneumatic actuator and some breakwire to detect when the door falls off. This is pretty standard in the automotive world for mechanical testing.
Any tips for aligning a new hinge as a band aid fix? The replacement was simple enough. Aligning is a little more finicky. Should the hinge be pushed back, or pulled forward?
This is for those of us who did a temporary hinge replacement ourselves while waiting for full warranty work in the future.
Here is a picture of a brand new rear hinge sitting “flat” on the space frame. The edge is raised because of the welds where the three tubes come together at the corner. I cut all the bulb seal away to try and prevent this. It was like this before as well. I don’t want to take stuff apart again. I might to cut away the hinge portion that sits on the weld.
I don’t expect this to last. I don’t see how a new sealing job fixes it.
Any plans to actually warn or recall any of the ~100 customers with potential time bombs? I’m not saying all will fail, but it will likely be more.
Opening and closing cycles is just one data point. Another one could be the multitude of eccentric vibrations that the hinge is subject to in daily driving. I wonder if these hinges were designed to be installed on moving vehicles? Sure the hinges might be able to do a million, or whatever, cycles under stationary conditions, out of the weather but in a moving vehicle, it could be another story.
So what sucks is when I reached out about my passenger hinge failing, I was supposedly the first to have a failure per statement from GFC. Turns out that wasn’t true.
But within a few weeks of my failure the statement starts coming out to the forum that all sealed campers are good, those that were resealed and had new hinges will be good, but the guys who have neither are rolling the dice?
If mine was one of the first/few then how can such a statement be made so soon after my failure? If it was known, then why let my camper be out in the field knowing there would be a failure, or why did I have to ask for all the hinges when the first one failed on my unsealed, original hinged camper knowing it was one of the few out there that would be susceptible to failure? Why was it such a surprise then that I had a failure when I reached out?
You want some more data for your hinge failures, the hinges fail easily from an upward pressure. You can bend it over and over, pull on it, damn near hang from it, and nothing happens.
How do I know this? Because I tried to rip the damn driver’s side panel off so I could fix it this past weekend. As my image shows, the tear started at the front but didn’t make it through the whole hinge like on my passenger side.
You know I finally broke it? Holding the panel out and lifting up in the same direction as the struts push. Panel shears like butter when given that load. And you know what? That coincides with how my passenger side failed as pulling down on the edge when closing would put a similar upward force on the hinge.
A precedent was set with incredible levels of customer service when I first got this thing, to hear that it’s basically known that my camper is uniquely in a position to break more hinges, no one has reached out to me, and when I decide to sell it and move on from it… no words.
It looks like there could be multiple ways to put incorrect forces on the hinge.
@Mike_GFCUSA Do you have any hints for hinge alignment on post 159-160. See the pic posted.
Probably one of the wisest comments I’ve read on this topic so far.
So you’re saying it wants to flip the fold of the hinge kind of inside out a little or enough to break it?
Do you think re-drilling the hole where the shock mounts a little further away from the hinge would help that?
Reposted from the other forum:
More hinge opinion:
They should be proactive about the ~100 potential failures in the field. Right now it feels very reactionary. They are not even notifying customers that I know of.
They mentioned that Toyota has recalls, which is true. When Toyota has a recall, you usually get a free rental while work is being done. Maybe a loaner gfc for people getting warranty work done?
They are taking back units for warranty work which is the right thing to do. Going a month or more without the product paid for and expected is a tough ask even if the warranty work is free and fixes everything. This is even more true if the product is used all the time.
Other ideas could be a mobile warranty team, or combine the install delivery with warranty. This was already mentioned somewhere.
In my experience/what I observed, the hinges will flex forever and you can even pull on them too without issue.
But when there is a load upward? Well both hinge failures occured from that.
The passenger side, as I went to close it, the struts acted like a fulcrum, and the hinge failed in spectacular fashion, ripping across its length, and very nearly causing me to get hit by the panel now swinging on the struts.
The driver’s side failed right when the struts hit max extension and gave that last little upward push to their max.
I have no doubt the hinges were tested for millions of cycled.
But I doubt the hinges were supported in the same way as they are in the campers or were subjected to the loads they experience from the struts or during usage.
Again, just my opinion.
It sucks because changing these hinges is such a stupid process with this sealant. The whole damn thing is glued together, and really doesn’t go back together the same way unless you trim everything away.
Say what they want about my camper having been sealed with original hinges. It took I think 8 months for the failure (sealed at the beginning of the year). The side I used least failed first. 5 weeks later the driver’s side fails, the side I use the most. To me that closeness seems more like an environmental/load thing.
Understand that there is constant upward pressure on the hinges even when the panels are closed from the struts. They’re never in an an environment absent some load on them.
They didn’t notify me that they knew my camper would be more susceptible to hinge failure based on how they resealed it.
I found that out here.
Weeks after my first hinge failure.
Can you shoot those to me via email? I am on the road currently and will be able to better explain that there and can repost it here.
