Tiffin Repair For Lake Forest Owners

Tile floor cracking over slide room transitions

Ceramic tile is laid across the main floor including the area where a slide room floor meets the coach floor, and those two surfaces do not move together. Every slide cycle flexes the joint fractionally, and after a few hundred cycles the grout line cracks and then the tile follows. Owners assume the coach has structural damage. Usually it does not. The fix is a proper movement joint at the transition rather than a rigid grout line, and re tiling without addressing that guarantees a repeat.

PowerGlide chassis datum on coaches needing frame correction

Coaches on the in house PowerGlide chassis cannot be measured against a Freightliner or Spartan specification, and the datum information is not as widely distributed as it is for purchased chassis. Shops that assume a generic Class A frame layout end up correcting a rail to a target that was never right for the vehicle. On a Tiffin with frame involvement we establish datum from undamaged reference points on the coach itself before any pull, and record the measurements so the correction is verifiable.

Allegro Red cutaway cap fitment after a front end repair

The molded cap on the Freightliner cutaway models is fitted around a cab structure that has its own tolerances, and the gap between cap and cab was set by hand at the plant. After a front end repair the cap frequently goes back with the gap closed on one side and open on the other, which looks wrong and, more importantly, changes how water runs off the cab roof. We set the cap to the cab rather than to the coach centreline, because the cab is the fixed reference and the coach body has more adjustment available.

Rear cap seam stress on Phaeton and Allegro Bus

The rear cap on the longer Tiffin coaches carries the engine access door, the ladder mount and often a bike or cargo rack, all hanging off the rearmost point of a long wheelbase vehicle. Every dip in the road loads that cap in bending. Fine cracks appear in the gelcoat radiating from the upper corners of the engine access opening. Filling and refinishing them addresses the symptom for a season. The corners need laminated reinforcement so the opening stops concentrating stress at a sharp corner.