Caps take more damage than any other panel on an RV, and they are the panel owners are most often told cannot be repaired. These four were, and the photographs are before and after on each.
Why caps fail more than anything else
The front and rear caps are molded fiberglass, not laminated wall, and they live a harder life than the flat sides do.
- They are the leading and trailing edges. Road debris, hail and anything the vehicle in front throws hits the front cap first.
- They are what you catch on things. Low branches, gate posts, canopy corners and the pillar you did not see reversing.
- They flex constantly. A cap is a large, curved, relatively unsupported molding at the end of a structure that twists as it tows. That is why cracks appear away from any impact.
- They carry the roof seam. The joint where the cap meets the roof is the most worked joint on the coach, and when it opens the water goes straight down inside the cap.
Four jobs
A Cougar front cap — one week
Damage and heavy staining across the lower cap, rebuilt and refinished. Seven days between the two photographs. Staining like this is usually the visible end of something else — run-off finding a path it should not have — so the sensible order is to find out where the water is coming from before you make the cap look new again.
The rear cap of a Class A — a day and a half
The rear cap of a Class A motorhome, torn open at the lower edge and taken off the coach for the structural repair. The middle photograph is the stage nobody usually sees, and it is the one that matters: the cap is sound and faired flat before anything is sprayed. Roughly a day and a half from the first photograph to the last.
A Phoenix front cap crack — overnight
A crack running the height of the cap. Cracks like this keep traveling if they are only filled at the surface, because the load that opened it is still there — so the repair goes in behind the skin first and the filler is the last step, not the only one. Under a day on this one.
Impact damage through the cap — five days
What actually drives the price
People expect the size of the hole to determine the quote. It rarely does. What determines it is:
- Whether the structure has to be rebuilt. A surface crack and a hole through the molding are different jobs regardless of how they look.
- Whether the cap comes off. On the Class A rear cap above it did, because that was the only way to get behind the damage properly. That is a substantial part of the labor when it is necessary — and it is not always necessary.
- The finish. A cap in a single flat color is a different proposition from one with graphics, a two-tone break, or a metallic. Matching an aged finish is the slow part of every one of these.
- How far the damage actually goes. Which is nearly always further than it looks.
The thing worth doing today
If you have a crack in a cap, mark each end of it with a pencil and write the date next to it. Check it in a month.
A crack that has not moved is a cosmetic repair you can plan around. A crack that has grown is a structural one, and the sooner it is caught the less of the cap has to be rebuilt. That single check costs nothing and tells you which conversation you are having.
And if the cap is stained rather than cracked — like the Cougar above — find the water first. Refinishing a cap that is still being run over by a leak is money spent on a symptom.
Insurance and warranty
Impact and hail damage to a cap is one of the most commonly covered and least commonly claimed repairs in the RV world, largely because owners assume the deductible will swallow it. On a cap that needs structural work and a finish match, it very often does not.
We work with insurance claims, with most extended warranty providers, and with factory warranties for select manufacturers. It is worth establishing which of those applies before the work starts.
Send us a photograph
Cap damage is one of the easier things to give a straight preliminary answer on from a couple of photographs — one close up, one from ten feet back, so we can see the finish as well as the damage.
Repairs are carried out on site wherever the job allows it.
*One hour minimum labor charge required with all service calls. Contact us for current labor rates.