Kenny3p0
Travelling Full Time
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Here is what happens when a Lippert Frame fails on a Keystone Cougar. Look at the damage first then the repairs.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/kenny3po/
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joebedford
Jasper, Ontario
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From the rust, I'd say that failure was in the making for a long time.
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downtheroad
Pacific Northwest
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I'm not seeing an excessive amount of rust.
From a very quick look at the pics...appears to be more of a metal tare/failure rather than a weld failure..
Again, as I have posted before when this comes up...ALL the frame failures I have ever read about were on 5th wheels - none on travel trailers...??
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chuggs
Florida
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I'm sure glad that Lippert engineers don't design wing roots for commercial airliners. Whoah...
They know that area flexes...which work hardens the steel...and eventually it gets a tear. Those joints need gussets and stiffeners welded in to help distribute that stress. The metal is just too thin to handle that kind of repeated flexing.
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pcm1959
home
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It's only 3 years old, too! Were you traveling with the fiver when it happend? Did it damage your truck? Phillip
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garysol
Avon Ohio
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Did Lippert give any assistance with the repairs? Was there any interior damage?
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conmoto
Northern Illinois
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Seems as though those pics get recycled on a regular basis.
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chuggs
Florida
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It looks like they just butt welded the pieces in again. I would have liked to see them put a reinforcement plate at the corners of some of those 90degree butt welds. Imagine a flat piece of steel shaped like a football. Bend it in a brake to 90 degrees... Stress relieve the bend with a torch. Place against the structure that you're reinforcing. Run a bead of weld along the entire edge of the gusset. It spreads out the forces...and you're not depending on a weld to hold at a 90 degree angle. Welding leave the metal brittle from the heat. It's not really practical to hold a torch in there an nomalize those joints. So welding in a gusset...where the bend has been annealed would certainly help out.
I'm kinda suprised that Lippert doesn't have some real engineers design a Reinforcment kit for mending and reinforcing their frames. They've got this cool technology these days called Finite Element Analysis... The could figure out WHY these things are breaking and come up with a suitable fix. They just need to fork out some bucks to have an engineering consultant come in and do the design work for them.
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SoCalDesertRider
SanDiego, CA, USA
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They should have welded the rectangular tube all the way around. Where the vertical welds end and don't wrap around the bottom is the next place a crack can start.
I also agree with what Chuggs said above about welding in gussets in the corners.
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Shrek51
Houston,Tx
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As garysol asked. Did Lippert help with any of the financial costs involved?
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