Camper Van Conversion Body and Interior Repair for Placentia Owners

We remove the fixture rather than smearing more sealant over a failing joint. The old butyl comes off, the roof surface is cleaned back to sound paint or gel coat, and the fixture goes back down on fresh butyl tape with a Sikaflex or comparable perimeter bead. That is the only version of the repair that lasts more than a season.

Solar mounts deserve extra attention because they are through bolted into thin sheet or into a fiberglass cap that flexes. If the substrate has cracked around a foot, we reinforce from the back before remounting. A Zamp or Go Power array that has been shifting under highway wind will keep opening the same hole otherwise.

Cracks get ground out to a tapered bevel, backed where access allows, laminated with matching glass and resin, then faired and refinished. Gel coat blending is part of the job, and we color match into the surrounding surface rather than leaving a patch that reads as a repair from ten feet away.

On pop tops we also check the lift mechanism, the fabric or tent bellows attachment and the seal at the perimeter when the top is closed. A cap that closes slightly out of square after a collision will chew through the bellows and let water track down the inside of the sidewall within a few months.

We remove and label the galley, cabinets, bed platform and any plumbing that blocks access to the damaged shell, repair the body, then reattach to sound structure with proper backing plates. Where the original attachment was undersized we say so in writing and offer the corrected version rather than reinstalling a mount that already failed once.

Electrical gets inspected before anything is re-energized. Lithium batteries, Victron or Xantrex inverters, shore power inlets and charge controllers are checked for physical damage, chafed conductors and displaced busbars. Mechanical and electrical labor runs 260 dollars per hour and diagnostics is 285 for the first hour, applied as a credit toward the repair.

Water intrusion after a roof or window hit is its own project. Wet insulation behind bonded windows and in the wall cavity does not dry in place, so we open the affected bays, remove saturated material, address the vapor path and rebuild before the interior panels go back. Bonded windows are reset with fresh urethane and cured properly.