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Compartment door latch broke…Oct. 2025
I was warned before I took possession of this RV by the prep tech to never let the basement doors slam shut, because these plastic ramps can break. I’ve been careful over the years to not let that happen but of course sometimes I’d lose control of a door and it would slam shut. But I lucked out and never broke one…until now. Sucker snapped right off. I looked for a repair method but didn’t come up with anything.
I considered making a repair but since the break wasn’t clean, it would be difficult to line up any screw that I tried to join the piece with. Then the problem of being able to screw it down. So basically, the assembly is a gonner.
What I ended up doing was Googling RV basement door latch and was able to find an exact replacement for my model and year RV. Etrailer has all the stuff.
Anyway, the old latch is held in place with rivets so those need to be drilled out preserving the original hole diameter.
There is a rod connected to the lift handle mechanism seen below so that cover in the middle backside of the door is removed, and the rod disconnected from the latch mechanism. Then the compartment trigger latch is pulled out, the rod removed and hooked to the new trigger latch, the rod worked back in, attached to the lift handle mechanism, and finally the new trigger latch is riveted in place. So yea, a rivet tool with the right sized rivets is necessary. Bigger sheet metal screws might have worked but it was easier to use rivets.
Here’s a shot of the lift handle mechanism, the cover, and the rod.
And here’s where all that stuff goes. The rod comes into the space from the right. The lifting unlatching mechanism drop down from the top in this pic.
And here the latch is in place before the rivets. Took under an hour for the job. And with shipping the new trigger latch only came to $16.
Compartment door gas strut came loose…Oct. 2025
The gas strut on the first passenger side basement door came loose the other day. I don’t recall it being loose before that happened. You can see that the wrap around corner bracket is held by pop rivets. There’s 11 rivets in total. I don’t know how the ball bolt assy is held on but it has a threaded section. Threaded part has a size of 5/16″ – 18 TPI. I don’t know what happened to the nut? Or if the bracket is supposed to be threaded? What I found is that the hole is slightly larger than the ball bolt assy with no visible evidence that it had been threaded. I’ll test that with a different ball bolt on a different door some other time. I’m concerned the nut will be difficult to re-tighten it there is one since I can only access the outside of the door. The steel of the bracket is reasonably thick, the depth from the surface is over 1″ so it’s a good candidate for a Rivet Nut type fix as recommended by an iRV2 poster. The threads were kind of rounded off on the ball bolt so I used a 5/16-18 die to refurbish them. This is the threaded end of the ball bolt still held by the gas strut.
I couldn’t tell if the hole had originally been threaded or not. No one on iRV2 volunteered the info of whether or not they are or if there is a nut on the inside that came loose. ‘Tis a mystery I guess. I wasn’t about to unbolt a different one to check either, for fear of losing the nut if there was one.
I suppose if there is a nut that fell off, it’s inside the door and not worth fishing for unless I was on the road somewhere nowhere near an auto parts store, which isn’t the case today.
After the suggestion of using a ‘rivnut’ as they are called, I searched online and found that O’Reilly’s auto stores carry a simple tool for installing one plus it comes with a single rivnut in the 5/16″ – 18 TPI size, for $10. They also sell bubble packs of that size rivnut w/o the tool for another $10/6. I don’t need them atm so I held off buying those. In the picture below is the ball bolt that just fell out one day. No warning. If it was getting loose, I just didn’t notice. Next to the ball bolt is the rivnut tool with a 5/16″-18 rivnut ready for installation.
First I measured the rivnut diameter for a clearance hole size for the OD of the rivnut and drilled it out on the bracket using a handy step drill. Then inserted the installation tool with rivnut, squished the rivnut with two adjustable wrenches so it held fast to the door, withdrew the tools bolt, and bolted in the ball bolt. Nothing to it. And makes for a nice repair that doesn’t require much effort.
Reattached the gas strut and I’m good to go.
Compartment lights not operating…June 2022
The basement compartments of this RV aren’t really such a problem that they need their own category but I did recently need to fix something about them so decided, hey, why not. What has been going on since I bought this RV is that the basement compartment lights would not come on when I opened the compartment doors. Each door on the drivers side or passengers side (with a few exceptions) have a nice push button switch that should activate the light when the main switch is on. Here, let me show you a schematic…
Basement CabinetsNote that the main switch after the fuse shown above allows all the bulbs in the basements to be turned on as it’s the main supply switch. I haven’t found the fuse for the Cmpt switch next to the door yet but it’s around somewhere.
So today, I figured it was finally time to trace down the problem with these lights and I started with checking under this plate…which is just on the left in the stairwell as you enter the RV so they’re easy access from when the owner is standing outside or standing in the stairwell.
The ‘COMPT LAMPS’ means Compartment Lamps of course. What I found right off the bat after removing the screws and pulling out that plate with the 4 switches is that there was a push on connector that was supposed to go to the COMPT LAMPS switch that someone neglected to reconnect sometime in the past. The connector is in excellent condition and was very tight when I reconnected it to the switch so it was left off, it didn’t work itself off due to vibration or anything of that nature. Now with that working, I checked and sure enough, I had light when opened the compartment door and no light when I pressed the push button switch on a couple of the doors on the passenger side. And here’s how they look on my RV….
What I found as I worked my way around the RV checking the bulbs is that the engine compartment and the hood lamps both have their own switch and they work independently of the main ‘COMPT LAMPS’ switch. That’s shown on the above schematic.
Over on the drivers side of the RV, I found 4 of those switches that didn’t operate the bulbs. I pulled the bulbs and measured them and they were all fine. On close inspection, I found one switch with a broken off terminal, one with a wire that had come out of the terminal which had ended up lost (easily repaired with a new terminal), one where everything seemed okay but the switch just wouldn’t light the bulb, and one where the terminals inside the switch were pretty dirty and the bulb wouldn’t light (squirt of contact cleaner fixed that one).
I pulled two of the switches for repair.
Once I got the switch open I could see they are brass contact type switches and should work for decades as brass doesn’t corrode that easily.
I had to solder one external terminal back on that someone had broken off in the past, and I had to open one to ‘adjust’ the brass pinch contacts internally so the internal shorting tabs actually made contact. They are nicely made switches and repair was in order rather than replacement and they’ll likely outlast my ownership of this RV now that I’ve repair them.
One other thing I did while working on these lights is to use clear packing tape to tape the frosted white plastic covers so they’re held tightly onto the fixture. I’m always bumping into those covers and they pop right off as there’s no strong positive lock. With the tape, they’ll no longer pop off when I bump them.
I’m not worried about causing a hot spot under the bulb ruining the plastic cover using the tape as these covers aren’t that expensive and I’d bought several extras when I was in Yuma last.