Leak at seam between roof and sidewall in bedroom

[John Fitzgerald]

Now that I can go over my new to me coach and fix all the things I noted before purchase there was evidence of water intrusion by the passenger side window.  It is not coming from the window, it is coming in at the roof/sidewall seam.  I pulled off the outside horizontal trim, and most of the screws holding that on were rusted to nothingness.  The roof has a rhino liner coating on it and at first I only saw cracks in the coating at the trim upper edge. My big concern is the pop rivets that are there underneath the trim for the roof and sidewall are also mostly corroded away.  Since this is what holds the skin on, i need to replace all the corroded ones.  Does anyone have a sketch or whatever of how this was put together?  I assume the roof and sidewall fiberglass was riveted to the header of the wall framing, and the aluminum trim 'gutter' was sealed and screwed over the joint.  Anybody else seen or fixed this?

Thanks

[Eric Maclean]

John
The constitution is as you discribed it at the top of the wall the roof fiberglass comes down over the outer wall skin where the upper belt moulding is screwed down to create the transition from roof to wall .
This is a common fault  most of us have removed the trim insert and drilled new holes and installed new screws between each of the existing screws when your done reseal the heads of all the screws reinsert the trim and reseal the moulding to roof seam.

Hope this helps
Eric

[Jason Worman]

John,

On our 1991 Contessa we had the same problems plus leaking windows. We removed all the windows and resealed them. We also removed all of the trim you described, once we removed the trim we realized that the trim had not been sealed properly at the factory. We scraped all the trim to bare metal, (no small task). We should have used butyl tape to reseal the roof and side trim, instead we used Eterna Bond. Walls have leaked over the rear windows since, have thin strips of clear plastic over the seams for now. You might want to consider also removing your large awning, found out rusted and rotted screws and woods. Joys of owning an RV!!

Jason Worman

[John Fitzgerald]

Thanks, it does look like this area has been "repaired" in the past but really not done correctly.  I am in the process of cleaning everything up bright and shiny before reassembling.  I have some industrial sealants that are used to assemble cooling towers that should keep this joint water tight for a very long time.  I do enjoy going through the rig to find out how it was built and runs, but finding a huge mess like this kind of takes the glow off the initial joy of purchase.  Time to get cracking on the fix.