I thought I would start a thread rather than ad to the old one. I got all the trim pieces off, if you read the PDF file from Newell it states some coaches had mastic holding the trim pieces on and mine is one of those coaches, I do have the new disks on hand I went and picked them up yesterday morning from Newell and they gave them to me for free, met the new parts lady she is very nice and looks to be adsorbing as much information as she can. ALL of the rivets on the coach between the front and rear slide are popped out you can pick them out with your fingers, the only thing holding them in is a dab of silicon rubber, all the rivets in the short piece of trim behind the rear slide are popped, many of the rivets going around the rear slide are loose. None of the rivets on the slide are loose, I don't think it necessary to add rivets to the slide as there really isn't any stress there but I'm open to comments.
Morning Steve, I have a unbelievable assortment of Cherry Rivets that was given to me from a friend who had a bought trailer load of stuff from Falcon Jet which use to be out of Little Rock but this is what I have chosen for the Job, the bigger rivet is what will be used for the flush rivets around the opening of the slide and the smaller ones will go under the trim pieces that go between and behind the sides. But I am open to suggestion and experience.
After drilling a few new holes I found the aluminum material to be triple thick in some places which is .225 thick so I went with a different rivet that can sandwich the metal together without popping out from the back, used a couple pieces of scrap aluminum panel to experiment and this will never come undone again, Cherry aircraft rivets are the highest quality you can buy. Also our coach has had the rivet issue for many years most of the rivets that go around the slide opening where loose or missing, the problem is the aluminum panels shifting back and forth wallered out the hole which prevented me from using the same size cherry rivet so I drilled out the holes to 1/4" rivet and used an over sized head to cover up the hole. Now all I have to do is clean the area well and apply some type of rubber adhesive to seal off from water intrusion. then put the new round HDPE pucks to hold the trim on.
After sealing all the rivets and seams with flex seal we snapped a line with line chalk and put the disks on the coach then finished it by installing the trim pieces. I still have 25 rivets to replace around the opening for the slide and repaint the rivet heads but its done for the most part. I had to jack the coach in a couple places to get the panels aligned.
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