Alite - Tire Blowout!

November, 2011   I'd enjoyed a fall weekend camping trip, caravanning with a friend and her Alite, when the unexpected happened just an hour away from home. At the same time I felt something "funny" in the trailer, Jan, who was following me, flashed her lights. I immediately pulled onto the shoulder and saw smoke coming from the left trailer tire. It was absolutely shredded! Forty-five minutes later, after a call to AAA, the spare tire was mounted and we were back on the road. Thank goodness it was a dry, sunny day!

Inital inspection of the damage revealed a hole through the bottom
 rear of the plastic wheel well, with a small intrusion into the camper interior and a very banged up aluminum undercarriage behind the wheel. In addition, the cover was torn off the power-cord inlet. It looked pretty bad.


The first step at home was to clean up the damaged area for a closer look. A combination of GoJo Fast Wipes hand-cleaning towels, Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, and Dollar Tree Awesome Orange did a good job. The only break into the camper interior was the hole at the bottom rear of the wheel well, and the banged up undercarriage didn't look nearly as bad as before. The floor of the Alite is made of an aluminum-styrofoam-plywood sandwich, just like the roof and the sides. Where the aluminum undercarriage was badly banged, it squashed the styrofoam filling and pushed up the plywood floor very slightly. That small section of the floor was in a storage area, to the outside of the frame rails, and it didn't compromised the camper's structure.


Repairing the interior was quite simple. I glued a piece of white vinyl (cut from a solid gutter cover) over the broken seam between floor and wheel well, and caulked and taped the edges. I added a short piece of 1" aluminum angle to stabilize the floor-to-wall attachment in the damaged area. From the outside, I shoved as much caulk as I could into the hole beneath the inside patch.

Replacing the missing 30-amp inlet cover was more expensive than I'd anticipated. Although a local RV parts store (and Camping World) had the square inlet, I needed the round one. And I couldn't find just the cover - I had to order the whole inlet for $63!



Repairing the exterior was a greater challenge. Some sort of tape seemed the obvious solution to sealing the hole and securing the broken portions of the plastic wheel well. I knew duct tape wouldn't hold up, so I checked all our local hardware stores for something else. I found Quick Roof 6" tape at Home Depot. It has an aluminum outer surface, with a tar-like adhesive on the other side. It's advertised for roof, gutter, RVs, trucks and trailers, so it seemed an obvious choice. And it was relatively inexpensive - $17 for 25'. I trimmed a piece to fit, peeled off the backing and pressed it into place. It made a good, watertight seal over the hole and the undercarriage.

I wanted to avoid future damage, as well as repair the current problem, but was advised that shielding the entire wheel well was unnecessary. Protecting the rear wheel well and undercarriage would be sufficient. Aluminum sheet stock was the obvious material to use, and it occurred to me that diamond plate (DP) would look better than flat metal. A 12" x 24" piece was enough to make guards for both wheel wells.

I made a pattern from newspaper, and transferred it to posterboard to make final adjustments. The DP was easily cut with a jig saw, and I filed the edges. TO make the bend, I clamped each piece between two boards and pushed HARD until I had nearly the proper angle.

I used 2 stainless machine bolts and nylon-insert lock nuts to fasten the DP to the wheel well, reinforcing it on the inside with a piece of 1" aluminum stock. I used 3 bolts to fasten the DP to the undercarriage, with bolt heads and fender washers on the inside of the camper, since I wanted a low profile in the storage area. The nuts are on the outside. These fasteners are visible in the interior-repair photo.

The outer edge of the plastic wheel well has a very different profile from the camper undercarriage, leaving a big gap to fill under the DP. Too big a gap to fill with caulk. A piece of rubber D-profile weatherstripping, the kind used on the camper A walls, was exactly right to act as a backing material in the biggest part of the DP-floor gap. The smaller spaces left will be easy to caulk, making a watertight seal around the DP.

So why did the tire blow? Though they were 5 years old, and slated for replacement within the next year, they appeared to be in good condition. From marks on the remaining tire shreds, and debris inside the rim, the local tire shop thought I'd been running on low pressure for a while, likely from picking up something that caused a leak, and the tire heated up until it disintegrated.

Not long before it blew, I'd stopped for gas and thought I smelled something hot. Nothing looked amiss, and I assumed the smell was coming from someone else. In retrospect, it was probably my own hot tire I was smelling. I used to touch the tires every time I stopped. But since they never felt more than just warm, and since I always checked the tire pressure before traveling, I'd dropped that routine. No more! From now on, I will stop at least every 2 hours, and I will ALWAYS touch the hubs and the tires when I get out of the car!