Tomorrow's Journey

I wrote this months ago and forgot to post it….

If you don’t care about quality control in RV’s or how electrical wiring SHOULD be done, then maybe this isn’t a post for you.

I’ve owned a Forest River (FR) trailer.  I’ve worked extensively on another FR trailer.  I now own a FR class C.  I’m working my way through my C making various upgrades and mods.  The most common failure, by far, is the failure to properly crimp wires in butt connectors.  Its not that hard to do correctly.  Apparently it is very easy to do wrong.

This is the kind of connector, commonly used in RVs and certainly a favorite of FR factories.  The proper way to make a connection with these is to strip your wire back 3/8ths to a half inch.  Then put the two wires together and twist the strands tightly around each other. Then put the crimp on – and crimp with an appropriate crimp pliers.

Crimp pliers use a narrow surface so a lot of pressure is placed in a small area to tightly crimp the inner metal around the wire strands.  If you use regular pliers, the pressure is spread and the crimp never really locks onto the strands.  Yet I can see people in the factories using whatever tools that are handy.  These two pictures show a crimp that was crimped with pliers (just flattened) and a pair of wires that weren’t twisted, nor crimped right and the crimp came off.

Here are some specific examples:  Almost every connection I’ve had issues with – the wires were not twisted properly.  It looks like the installer simply put the ends together – shove the crimp on and squeezed, but not hard enough.  One sign of this is half the wire strands aren’t even inside the metal part of the crimp,  having been shoved back as the crimp was pushed onto the wires. .

The brake break-away switch on my trailer was a fail.  Three wires – 1. from the truck. 2 to the brakes 3 to the break away switch were half twisted, shoved into a crimp and crimped.  But the switch wire in the half-ass twist attempt ended up wrapped around the insulation of the other two wires, not electrically connected to anything.  Thus I had no NHTSA mandated safety switch was not connected.

On another trailer – the brake wire connection wasn’t fully crimped, nor twisted.  When the wire was disturbed, the crimp actually fell off. The driver had been experienced intermittent issues with the trailer brakes.

I’m just getting started on my C.  I explored under the bed box so I could extend power to the “other” side of the bed.  There were three DC circuits passing through that were spliced (going from base to slide).  There were 6 crimps.  3 of them fell off while handling.  Fifty percent!  One wire also had over half its strands not in the crimp.

A day later, I pull the board between the back of the stove and wall out (going to mount spice rack on it), and I look down behind.  The stove has (had) nice lights built into the knobs that now don’t work.  One wire came out of the crimp.  Of course it had been crimped improperly.

So now I think – I have to examine EVERY connection on this vehicle!  So far, I’m up to 6 bad circuits on a $100k vehicle.  Many crimps are fine and were done with the proper tool. The area I haven’t fully explored is the main control panel.  When installing my battery monitor, I needed to disconnect a wire from a switch so I could add in another small wire and the connector slipped off the wires.  I expect most connections on that panel are also improperly crimped but I didn’t have time to go through and replace 25-30 crimps.

And there is also the notion that crimps are over-used.  I replaced the radio and did some other work to the dash of the E450.  This is what I found behind the knee panel under the steering wheel.  All the power came off a single heavy wire.  But there were multiple crimps after crimps and more crimps and inline fuses.  So much was stuffed under there that the knee panel wouldn’t actually fit on properly.

I tried working with this mess but in the end, I cut it all out and solder spliced wires and ran circuits through a small 6 fuse box.  Its much neater, and won’t burn my rig down when an unfused wire is shorted.  None of these crimps were loose but they still were a mess.  The wires are now all labeled as well so hopefully, the next person to touch them can actually know where they all go.

On my trailer – the main battery wire went from the battery 2 feet to the frame of the trailer where it connected to a circuit breaker.  From the breaker it went 3 inches into an unsealed metal box.  There I found a huge twist-on connector.  The 8 gauge battery wire had been cut and the solar connector and both ends were in this massive twist-on connector.  This isn’t allowed in AC circuits but not because of the high voltage, but because twist  connectors on stranded wire IS A BAD THING!  And this is a high current connection – one that is voltage drop sensitive.

Making electrical connection isn’t rocket science.  Anyone on the line can be taught the correct method in just a few minutes.  The tools aren’t very expensive.  There simply is NO EXCUSE for sloppy work.  These are problems that do not need to exist.  They are  an easy fix if only manufacturers cared about now screwing up or burning down our RVs.

 

This article is partially RV related.  But not the first part.  My “work truck” is a 2004  Ford Explorer Sport Trac.  It’s a great little truck.  I bought it used, with a third party Alarm and Remote Start unit installed.   I would be working out in the garage or yard and would hear the locks on the truck “locking”.  Anywhere from 3 to 30 seconds apart, all the door locks would click like I was hitting the lock button on the remote.  I presumed it was the alarm/remote and started diagnosing around the box.  The first anomaly I found was the supply voltage was fluctuating.  Odd.  I checked the fuses – they were fine.  Still had fluctuating voltage.  I went to the battery and put my  probes on the battery cable clamps – and fluctuating voltage.  What?  Batteries don’t do that.  I put my probes on the battery posts (this battery has the round cylinder posts).  No fluctuation except a tiny amount when the locks cycled.

The clamps were tight, clean and no apparent corrosion.  So, I took them off and looked inside and I did see a bit of discoloration.  Not enough to notice if I wasn’t looking for it.  I cleaned it off, put it all back together and no cycling locks.  For about three months.  Rinse,  Repeat – I cleaned them again.  Same result.  Three months later they were cycling again.  This time I cut off the cable clamps and installed new ones.  It has been a couple of years now, on the same battery and the problem never returned.  The odd thing is I never had a problem starting the engine even with this situation.  So there must have been something mixed in with the lead in the clamps that was creating an odd resistive layer that was only resistive at low current but allowed full flow under starting load.

Now, to part two.  My son-in-law called with a dead van while they were camping  “somewhere out west”.  They assured me that nothing had been left on.  He took out his meter and we started checking voltage at the battery.  He reported that the meter reading was jumping all over the place.  Since he has side-flat-post connectors he had to remove the cables to get a direct on the battery reading.  The battery was run down but the voltage reading was rock steady.  I had him clean the connectors good and after a recharge everything was fine.  Since the battery was 5 years old and had been run down, they were also going to replace it a few days later.  My thinking is this weird corrosive layer caused a voltage drop to the car.  Items in the van (newer van with lots of computers) that are “asleep” drawing very little power wake up as the voltage fluctuates back up.  While the van was parked for a couple of days, this cycle was enough to run down an old battery.

So,  the takeaway here is it does matter whether you put your meter leads on the cable clamp or the post!

p.s.  while I’m here I just have to tell another story about my  2004 Ford Explorer Sport Trac.  My previous car was a Saturn Vue.  I had rented a trailer from U-Haul using my Vue via their website.  Well, I went to the U-Haul website to rent a trailer for my Sport Trac but since I was in a hurry, I didn’t bother to change my vehicle type.  I knew my truck was more capable than my Vue, why bother?  We got to U-Haul and the service guy came out, took one look and said “I can’t rent you a trailer”.  WHY?  “Because this is an Explorer”.  Wait – its a truck, not an Explorer!  “Doesn’t matter, can’t rent you a trailer.”

We left and found a truck at another company (no one else had trailers).   But I started researching and sure enough, the U-Haul website confirmed that they won’t rent to anyone with a vehicle with the name Explorer on the vehicle.  They insist it is not a safety issue (they will rent to a Mercury-badged version of the same truck).  Apparently, they had a spate of liability lawsuits involving “Explorer” named vehicles and the company lawyers won out over reason.  As so often they do…….