Can I fix the Fiberglass on my RV myself?
We had a customer come to our RV repair shop in Dallas Texas this week with an older RV that had some fiberglass work done by a previous owner. On the surface when the RV changed hands, things looked fine. However after driving the RV a while, a crack started to develop, and upon further investigation, things got ugly under the paint
The owners decided to sand off some of the paint to see if they could repair the crack themselves since this was a fiberglass RV. What they found underneath the paint and filler were some pretty sloppy and poorly repaired fiberglass work.
So this leads us to this week’s topic, Can you repair the fiberglass on your RV yourself?
Of course if you have the skillset, you can repair just about anything yourself. However the key word here is having the proper skillset. Because of their size, it is not hard to back an RV into something you can’t see, or run into a hazard that is just outside of your field of vision. Tree branches, poles and even other trailers are the culprits of many of the RV damage that we repair.
If your model is fairly new, some parts can even be purchased from salvage yards and replaced yourself over a long weekend. Parts such as end caps can be purchased and shipped to your location. When shopping for used parts from salvage yard RV’s you will find that a lot of the RV’s have fire or collision damage. If the fire damage was from a kitchen fire and it does not appear that the flames were too close to your salvaged part, you should be ok. Some collision parts, however, might be compromised in ways that you can’t see at first. The force from an impact traveling through the RV’s structure can damage or distort parts all the way on the opposite side of the collision. RV bodies do not react the same way as car bodies in a collision. So buyer beware in those instances.
To answer the original question, however, of whether you can repair your RV’s fiberglass yourself, we recommend that you do not attempt this repair yourself and here is why.
In the case of this customer’s RV, as you can see in the photos, not only was the fiberglass repair not done well, the previous owner failed to repair the underlying structure properly which is why the repair was holding up, but the rest of the RV was beginning to crack and delaminate. This RV owner had merely put a fiberglass band-aid over a crack and hoped for the best, only to find that the structure continued to flex and distort with every mile, causing a fast growing crack and delamination.
This delamination filled with water saturated the wooden structure and saturated the cracked fiberglass. Fiberglass does not mix well with water if it has not been properly and thoroughly gel coated.
So can you repair the fiberglass on your RV by yourself? Yes, you can. But should you repair it yourself? We recommend a professional perform the work for you, as your structural integrity and possibly even your safety is at risk from an improper repair.