'06 and later slide out awning w/cover

[dgerstel]

In looking for a noise coming from the roof, I found that my main awning had a lot of movement from the mounting brackets. On taking the cover off, I found the WRV had used pop rivets where I think they should have used steel screws. The pop rivet, being aluminum, had been worked by the movement of the awning and allowed the mounting bar to twist in the bracket. I replaced the pop rivets in the base bracket with #12 SS screws where ness. On the end that goes into the awning head, I drilled, tapped, counter sunk a little deeper and installed a 1/4-20 SS flat head mach screw. Photo of a mount where I replaced the 2 pop rivets in the base bracket.

[takepride]

Good idea Dale. I've replaced a few rivets, here and there, myself. With all the vibration, wind, pulling and flexing, I've found plenty of loose panels, brackets and other parts. While fast and efficient while building, I don't think the rivets work well in structural things for RVs. Short of installing rows and rows of rivets like airplanes have, screws and bolts are often better. I'm thinking the proper rivet count for the rear air-spoiler would be about 100. 25 for each bracket. Hmm, would they fit?

Thanks for mentioning the screw sizes. I spend more time driving to HD and back, getting the right screws than I do making the fix.