rockylizard wrote:

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I have had it happen within the first 80km of taking delivery of my van 10 years ago - it was definitely NOT a pleasant experience. However, that was caused by the 'manufacturer' failing to install the split pin into the castellated nut holding the wheel components together.

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I would blame the chassis supplier, not the van manufacturer on that one.

-- Edited by Bill B on Sunday 10th of February 2019 12:02:23 PM

iNot sure about now, but when we bought our Jayco caravan, we had some problems. Jayco effectively sidestepped the whole issue by saying that component X is covered by the manufacturer of Component X. Component Y is covered by Company Y. So if your fridge failed within the warranty period (12 months) you go to the fridge manufacturer. As said, not sure if this still applies. Certainly if you buy a car and the alternator goes pfffft, you go to the car dealer and he replaces it under warranty, even though the car manufacturer rarely makes alternators.

One of the many things we had fail was the wheel alignment. AL-KO were the manufacturer and their warranty was 12 months. I found the problem at 20 months - the van was still under Jayco's 24 month warranty. I have quite a fight and it was only because Jayco had mounted the axle about 25 mm offset that they eventually accepted some of the responsibility for the issue. Had they run a tape measure over the axle assembly before they fitted the axle to the van they would easily have found it was way out, but Jayco's Quality Assurance...... (I doubt that any of the major manufacturers are any better).

Jayco passed the axle on to AL-Ko for them to fix it. After wearing out 3 sets of tyres, in desperation I finally wrote to AL-KO asking them what the recommended toe-in was for the wheels. To their credit, AL-KO eventually arranged for a new axle to be sent to me (after about 12 years of usage), complete with hubs and brakes. For free and they paid the return freight for the old axle. The replacement axle still has what I would call excessive toe-in (I reckon it should be zero, not 5 mm at the tyre tread), but thusfar, the tyres seem to be wearing evenly although I find the left tyres runs hotter than the Right side one and this may be as a result of excessive toe-in and scrubbing. Even so, the tyres have outlasted all previous tyres by " a mile". Thusfar, they have done about 45000 km, and I reckon they should last at least 60000 km. So they should - they are only there to stop the caravan from dragging its bum on the road. They rarely do any stopping, they never drive and mostly they run on a straight road, so what more could be asked from a tyre?

And then, to compound my woes, one of the hubs failed. It broke between the bearings. I approached AL-KO again to ask what model the hub was so I could order a new one. To their credit, they offered to replace the hub (and the other one as well) for free, and they examined the failed hub and gave me a report as to why it had failed. There was an impact where someone had slipped whilst installing a bearing and had put a punch mark in the cast iron - this caused a stress concentration and the hub failed there.

So, AL-KO have well and truly supported me even though all was well out of warranty when the faults were noted. A pity that Jayco didn't support me as well...

-- Edited by erad on Sunday 10th of February 2019 07:10:20 PM

-- Edited by erad on Sunday 10th of February 2019 07:12:28 PM