My god, it’s hard bloody work.

What is it your doing to them ?

We need photos, to check you’re doing it right 😉

Did a few repairs on our old one. Spongy floor, so boarded out with ply etc.

Some great repair stories on UKCAMPSITE

Back corner had some soft panels in the rear wall. I put it off for a while, when I came to do it now I removed the wardrobe, peeled back the vinyl wall covering (not the usual wallpaper) and a load of compost fell out from behind it.

I had to rebuild the back wall including window, re-cover the side wall with ply, re-do the wall covering (it’s like that vinyl fake leather that you used to get cheap sofas made from), fix the holes in the skin where water had been getting in, re-build the curved ceiling inside the wardrobe (that was seriously hard work). recreate a small section of floor… got one more panel of ply to attach, then stapling covering to the curved ceiling, then it’s re-installing the wardrobe.

It’ll be 8-10 days of work by the time it’s finished I think.

Your experience shows why people tend to run a mile if they see any evidence of damp in a secondhand caravan – it’s always the tip of the iceberg 🙁

Imagine having paid a dealer to sort it out…

Oh aye. In doing my research someone with similar damp was quoted something like £600 for the adhesive alone.

One of the biggest challenges is having to do everything from the inside. The van was originally built by erecting the sides, then attaching the back from the outside, then fixing the fibreglass back end and roof over the top. Of course, I can’t remove the roof and back, so I have to be creative in how I do it. Probably 50% of the time working, 50% standing there rubbing my chin.

I’m doing this so I can get some money for it when I sell it. If I’m lucky, prospective buyers will consider it a good thing that it’s all been fixed…

Good time lapse of the Bailey production line here.

[video]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzgchaOaZ-E[/video]

As you say, they tend to be built from the inside out so any major work requires some creativity.

New ‘van is a Bailey. Ok so it’s 1993 vintage but it’s really solid looking, also tows amazingly well for some reason – not sure why it’d be any different.

we bought a van from a dealer and found it had damp – luckily within the 3 month guarantee period. It spent over 40 hours on the work bench having the front end stripped back and rebuilt. At their published rates of £45 an hour, that would have been more than we paid for the caravan itself…

Bloody annoyingly, we then found more damp elsewhere once the warranty had expired. Got someone else to fix that for rather less

Nuke it from orbit, its the only way to be sure.

Why are caravans so susceptible to damp? You wouldn’t have thought it would be that hard to make a plastic box waterproof 😕

the fibreglass gets hairline cracks with age, and the joins are susceptible too

Seems to be either knocks and scrapes (the aluminium skin is thin) or road spray getting in underneath somewhere. They take a lot of shaking about when you tow them too, which doesn’t help.

The body and chassis on new Baileys have no wood in at all, and are made from alu panels bonded into right angle extrusions. Brilliant, no idea why no-one thought of it before.

got to tell you we had fantastic service form baileys when the damp appeared on ours.

van 1995.. serviced every year by the massive dealer we bought it from.. last year came back with ”the loo is riddled with damp floor and wall already rotted..”

”what even though you ve never found any damp at all .. in the space of a year its rotten…” ”yes. 3 grand to repair no warranty on repair..”

so we rings bailey a very nice man says yeh no problem we can fix that 6 grand guaranteed.

long story short the nice man from bailey sent all the sealant seals etc FOC and we supplied the new panels from some online panel vendor.. in hull cost 36 quid plus 36 quid delivery

stripped it all back in a day, reassembeld the next day.. dry as a bone and has been for a year.. result 72 quid all found..

Hang on – they said it’d cost a maximum of six grand, then it ended up costing £72 DIY? Cool!

I must say, that sounds like an easy fix.. this has taken me friggin ages and has not been at all easy.

£72 parts + 25(?) hours labour-ish. Even at dealer rates of, say, £100 an hour thats quite a lot less than the quoted repair prices.

Well, it’s £2.5k isn’t it, not that different.

Was it just the interior plywood you had to replace? No floor or spars? The plywood in mine is well bonded to the foam with some kind of pink adhesive, that might be expensive stuff – I’ve just used waterproof PVA. Also they have special gear for compressing the panels and whatnot, I just used bits of wood and heavy things.

I went to look at a caravan that was on sale at a local dealers.
It was a 2005 and had severe damp in the rear panel,but the dealer was going to repair it.The caravan was in a terrible state and that was a 2005.
Looking around the other 2 berths he had another van in of the same make and age and told me to avoid that as that had bad damp as well.You could push your hand through the boarding and pull out rotten wet wood.That was going for repair as well.
The Dealer told me that when someone pulls in with an Avondale his heart sinks as it will definitely have damp and the owner will get a shock at the poor trade in value.
The manufacturers will only look at remedial work if the damp reading is above 25%.

If you can get it sorted for May/June you’ll be laughing molgrips.
We picked our old one up for £800 in November. At that time of year owners are faced with winter storage costs etc, & if thats not an issue for you there are some bargains to be had. We owned it for 2.5 years then sold for £1600. The £1600 was just an optimistic fogure I put on the Buy-it-Now on the Ebay ad. In reality I could have sold it a dozen times over, phone was seemingly constantly ringing. Chap from South-Wales who bought it drove 200 miles to pick it up. He transferred £500 without having even seen it. Another chap offered to race down from Leeds to beat the chap from Wales & give us £1800.

Abbey Somerset

It was a bit of a mess when we bought it, horrid filthy carpets etc. A few weekends of cleaning saw it much better. Picked up a new sink from Ebay. It had no blinds so I bought black-out blinds from Argos. They worked a treat. The sloping front window one was a problem, but I just put some curtaint wire up for it to clip behind.

If you need any owners manuals for all the bits let me know, mine came with everything so I scanned & PDF’ed them. I can email them.

The best thing was the weight. For a four berth, it was only 870kg unladen. It towed lovely, even with a 1.6 petrol Corolla. Unlike the bloody 1500kg Swift Challenger behemoth that we’ve hardly used, & is being sold this summer. (Economic decision…Wife leaving work to go to Uni). 🙂

If I can give one single peice of advice…please please change the tyres if your in any doubt, especially if they are 5-6yrs old. We had a blow-out on the M5 on the way back from Devon last summer’ luckily the tyron bands kept the tyre on so we pulled up safely, but clean pants were needed afterwards. The tyres looked perfect from the outside, but the insides revealed the true condition…CLICK