5 Speed,
Rigging the flaps as awnings is probably the best thing you did. That is excellent.
As an experienced river rafter, I have patched inflated boats. I am familiar with the procedure. Unfortunately, inflated boats also leak, just as your camper boot. The air pressure is positive inside the boat tubes and this keeps most of the water outside. This is not analogous to our campers. However, once a boat starts to leak, they are very difficult to permanently seal. Sometimes the material becomes porous with age. In the case of your camper, the leak may be along the stitching. Reflecting on how the material is sewn on my camper, I don’t believe they used a sealing tape over the stitches as would be done with an inflated boat. In other words, I do not believe it is practical to avoid all leaks in the boot on one of our campers.
You might check with FWC or ATC about putting some kind of wax or silicone solution on the stitches, such as Scotch guard. Personally, I would not do that to my camper because I want the stitches to dry out when they become soaked after a long hard rain and I believe the heavy thread used to sew our Vinyl boots is selected to last a long time with no additional coating of any kind. I would leave it be, except for the “303 Aerospace Protectant” recommended by ATC.
Unless they are under cover, all RVs leak. The only question is “how much”? When we camp in extremely bad weather, we sleep with our camper popped down. In that position, we can take any weather short of a tornado … and we have plenty of those in Alabama …RVs rarely stand against them.
At the present time, my camper is stored outside with the top down. We have a lot of rain in Alabama, an average of 42 inches a year. My camper gets tested regularly and it leaks a little, even with the top down. Therefore, when we have a dry spell, I like to pop it up and let it dry out, especially before we take a trip.
Once in Wrangle, Alaska camped south of town, we endured a heavy 12 hour rain. We were holed up in the camper and slept it through. We had the top up. Toward the end; I noticed the forward passenger corner of the bed was starting to become wet. The rain was over, so I did not worry about it. A couple of days later, I noticed it had dried completely.
I am sure you will receive plenty of suggestions about how to stop the leaks with perhaps with an expensive rebuild, reattachment of the boot (more expense), sealing silicone (nasty and unsightly), etc, etc. You could also examine the leaks very carefully with a magnifying glass, then just pretend you did not see them. Dry out the camper when the weather clears. One thing about an aluminum frame camper, there is not much worry about the frame rotting as with a stick and tin camper.
The real problem leaks are in the sheet metal or around the windows in the hard wall. Those leaks should be stopped. Now, if you really want to hear horror storied about leaks, my last two campers before our FWC had leaks that resulted in ROT …
John D
Had my 04 Hawk out this past weekend thru 2 evenings of torrential downpours. The outer window flaps were open, and all 4 windows were seeping water in right at the lower set of stitches for the clear window panels.
