A little advice please

[Black914]

I've been working on the interior of my recently purchased 1985 Keystone. Installed a new peal and stick floor, wallpaper and a few new panels with birch plywood to replace the chipped up press board. Pix to come. Now for a push panel. At my age raising the front section is getting pretty difficult so I purchased a speaker stand to raise the roof. So far I have just used a 40" piece of plywood that is not yet attached to the ceiling. I have a nice 5"x72"x3/4" pine board to use on the ceiling. Thinking I would cut it down to 60" so that it would not interfere with the vinyl when the roof is down. That's the background now for the questions.
Does the board really need to be 5' long or would 40" pushing on the 3 middle roof ribs be enough. I'm somewhat concerned about drilling into all of the ribs and possibly weakening them. The owner of a local camper repair shop said that he would use #6 screws, but I have only found 1 1/4" screws which seems a little short. Lowes has 1 1/2"#8 screws which would put 3/4" into the rib.

Any advice from someone who has actually done this would be appreciated.

 

[Casa Escarlata Robles Too]

You might also contact Stan at FWC or Marty at ATC.
Frank

 

[Vic Harder]

I changed those push boards on my current PUMA build. Original board only contacted 3 of the longnitudinal ribs. Mine cover 5. No problem with weakening the ribs, yet. FYI, I have hundreds of screw holes in the ribs from when I mounted my new ceiling and trim.

 

[bike4mee]

I changed out that board to go all the way across the roof and hit all the rafters. Speaker stand crank works great when I have the kayaks up there. You can attach a cordless drill to the crank and really get it up fast

 

[Black914]

I've been working on the interior of my recently purchased 1985 Keystone. Installed a new peal and stick floor, wallpaper and a few new panels with birch plywood to replace the chipped up press board. Pix to come. Now for a push panel. At my age raising the front section is getting pretty difficult so I purchased a speaker stand to raise the roof. So far I have just used a 40" piece of plywood that is not yet attached to the ceiling. I have a nice 5"x72"x3/4" pine board to use on the ceiling. Thinking I would cut it down to 60" so that it would not interfere with the vinyl when the roof is down. That's the background now for the questions.
Does the board really need to be 5' long or would 40" pushing on the 3 middle roof ribs be enough. I'm somewhat concerned about drilling into all of the ribs and possibly weakening them. The owner of a local camper repair shop said that he would use #6 screws, but I have only found 1 1/4" screws which seems a little short. Lowes has 1 1/2"#8 screws which would put 3/4" into the rib.

Any advice from someone who has actually done this would be appreciated.

 

[Black914]

Finally took some pix showing the new floor, wallpaper which really matched and the new bath/closet wall and door. Haven't decided on stain yet. Also installed roof struts with pix in another post.

 

[Jon R]

Just for another data point on push boards:

The factory push boards on my 2021 Grandby are not identical, and there appears to be a reason for that. The rear board is about 2 feet forward of the rear wall. The front board on a Hawk is just forward of the center of the roof. The front board on a Grandby is at about 60% of the length of the roof forward of the rear wall. If your roof load is uniform, when you lift the “front” board, you are initially lifting nearly the entire weight of the roof until the struts start assisting. So that front board takes more lifting force, as we all know from lifting our roofs.

If you look at my pictures, the rear board just bears on the three middle ribs. If you look at my front board, the ends extend farther out, about halfway to the next rib, and they have a spacer under those extended ends. That spacer presses on a crossmember of the roof frame that I can feel through the ceiling liner.