Lift System
My wife and I have a 2000 3124 KS we bought used and I can tell you it had some rough use. The torsion bar bracket on the left front was bent and it suffered from at least 6" of solid ice on it's roof the first year we had it. Unfortunately, it was set up and the roof flexed quite a bit. We had a slight water leak around the front vent when the snow and ice thawed and refroze. This caused the ice to be pushed up under the overlap when it refroze then it melted again. All I can say is that it was the hell of a winter and the TM survived admirably.
Now for your question of the lift system. It survived the bent bracket incident and I don't know how much weight was on it with the ice but it was significant. Afterwards, it operated just fine and the two shells popped back up to normal without any further maintenance.
The bent front bracket however was another issue. Apparently the previous owner hit something with it like an curb and hit it pretty hard. There was slight damage on the two inside rear panels just over the bed by the rear windows likely caused by the jolt it received. We straightened the bracket out after we bought it and set about re-leveling the two shells. It took some effort and calculations to get it right but, everything came together and we can now open and close it without any problems. The TM support staff helped us over the phone and did a great job. This happened before the ice storm hit us and the settings remained good even after the storm.
All in all,the TM has served us very well and we continue to use it with trips planned from Missouri to Atlanta and Florida next year. Perhaps someday, we will consider fixing the two rear panels but since you can barely notice the damage, the simple solution was to just cover the area with a nice wall fabric and forget about it.
And no, there were never any other leaks plus, the heater worked great is 10 degree weather and once we were able to get back to the campground and fire it up, it melted the ice on the roof.
One thing though, it is noisy inside in heavy rain. We like it but you might not. LOL
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