Water Leak At The Body Side Molding On A Monaco Signature

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Our RV site at Timber Valley SKP in Sutherlin, OR during our trip around the US.

Two Months? Wow, time has been flying by! We decided to stay another month here due to everything still being shut down and more reservation cancellations in WA. We have remained happy, healthy, and busy here in Oregon while riding out this crazy pandemic. The world just seems so upside down right now, I’m so grateful we found an amazing park to stay in while sheltering in place. Timber Valley SKP in Sutherlin, OR has been placed on our list of favorite parks. The people have been really nice and also helpful, they let me borrow some tools for a few projects I was working on. We can’t wait to come back when things have started opening up again!

Entry sign at Timber Valley SKP park in Sutherlin Oregon.

Speaking of projects, we have done a few. Almost everything around here has been closed since we arrived 2 months ago (at least the things we wanted to do). We might as well get something done, other than walking circles around this park. By far the largest project of the bunch was installing 1500 watts of solar on the roof and removing the 360 watts that was already up there. But, that will be covered in a different blog post. We’ve had an intermittent water leak for quite awhile now. It rains a decent amount here in Oregon and that damn water leak began showing up again in the battery bay. I thought it was possibly coming from where the awning mounts to the RV, we removed the awning (giant pain in the ass with only one ladder, get a second ladder if possible) and resealed everything. The next time it rained the leak was still there! While resealing the awning mounts, I went ahead and recaulked the windows around there as well. This RV will be completely resealed by the time we find this leak.  We were to busy and our hands were full, so no pictures of this process.

Hunting for the water leak part II was removing a large section of the body side molding that covered the seam where the middle and lower sections of fiberglass exterior pieces meet. It turns out that this was where our intermittent water leak was coming from. I have been chasing that sucker for a long time, I’m glad that problem is finally fixed. What happened was that a few of the screws holding the sections together had rusted apart and the seams separated a bit. This let a small amount of water through and that water ended up inside the battery bay. Months ago while trying to find this leak, I caulked the topside of this same molding. I was attempting to eliminate the molding as the leak source. But, it kept leaking so I (wrongly) assumed it wasn’t the source.

Monaco Signature body side seam covered by molding that was leaking water into the lower bay.
This was where the water was getting in, you can see it’s still wet.

Fixing it required us to remove the molding, drill some pilot holes, add new screws, and re-caulk the seam with Geocel Proflex RV Sealant and top side of the molding. I still need to remove and reinstall the rest of the molding and also do the other body side molding, but we’ll save that for a later project. That might be a good project for the middle of the desert next winter. It was also a really time consuming project trying to remove and clean off all the old silicone. Breaking this project down into small sections seems to be a good idea, if there is some extra time while in Eastern WA we will tackle this again. The body side molding runs down the whole side (40ft), then up the side to the top, and then all the way back to the front (40ft). This molding is close to 90ft long! And it’s on both sides of the RV!

Body side molding on Monaco Signature that was leaking water into battery bay.

The molding is painted, this means that bending the molding isn’t an option, it would crack the paint. This required some finesse, a heat gun made the molding more pliable and made it much easier to remove. I was taping the removed section of the molding to the side of the RV allowed the molding to sit there without bending it while removing the rest. This part was far easier than I thought it would be. Cleaning the old silicone and Proflex off, this takes a long time and some serious scrubbing, this is 90% of the job. Find a good putty knife with rounded edges (or round the edges yourself).  We only did half of the lower section and took most of the day. It will go a lot faster now that I know what I’m doing.

Body side molding on Monaco RV where it meets the drivers window, removing the molding to reseal due to water leak.

The pounding of the California Highways seemed to have rattled our WeBoost OTR antenna apart. I had to do a quick fix patch job on it (electrical tape and duct tape), it was just hanging there by the time we got into Oregon. The outer cover separated from the base of the antenna and the mast extension came apart also. I didn’t feel like removing the Dicor and resealing the wire entry point in order to fix it, there are too man other projects going on right now. It does seem that the antenna could have been made a lot better than it was.

WeBoost antenna outer cover separated from base.

WeBoost OTR antenna is barely hanging on to the roof, needs fixed.
Before
WeBoost OTR antenna after a quick patch job fixing the antenna.
After

 

We left Timber Valley and headed back into WA. Oregon has been a wonderful place to stay, we are so glad we got “stuck” here! But, it’s time to move on. Thanks Timber Valley SKP! We’ll be back again sometime in the future!

2 Replies to “Water Leak At The Body Side Molding On A Monaco Signature”

    1. Yes, we are finally back in Eastern WA! Just working on the RV while it’s still cool outside. It’s nice to have a huge assortment of tools again.

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