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Old 02-08-2010, 01:09 PM   #6
Bill
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Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: The mountains of Scottsdale, AZ, and the beaches of Maine
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Originally Posted by harveyrv View Post
It's pretty hard to identify wood rot in these trailers because of the sandwich construction. The best that you could do is to remove some screws around the window frames etc and see if you have clean wood in there or black rotted wood. However, if I were a seller, I wouldn't be real excited about some guy taking a screw driver to my trailer unless there was a good reason to be suspicious of a particular area.
Similarly, raise the front shell. Along the bottom of the wall, there is a series of screws (every 6 inches or so). Pull a few of these out. Look at the wood crumbs in the screw threads. Shine a flashlight in and look for rot. Push a piece of stiff wire (coathanger) up into the screw hole and make sure you poke solid wood. Since this is the low point of the wall, water would tend to settle here, and this is one of the common places where I have heard of rot happening.

Another is behind the trim where the roof meets the sidewall. That's a harder place to check.

Since the seller wants a sale, he should recognize that your concern is valid. As long as you are gentle and methodical, and pull-and-replace one screw at a time (or suggest that he do it), he should go along with your request.

Bill
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