Bowed out side wall of upper shell

Some poltergeist must have slept in our 3124KS over the past year. As some of you may recall, I had my TM down for an extended length of time while I dilly dallyed with replacing the 1" square tubes on the bottom edges of my front shell. I inserted perfectly straight, thick-walled 1" square tubes and secured them in place with monel Cherry-Q pop rivets and Dow Corning silicone sealant. While finally finishing up the job by attaching the shell's stirrups, I noticed that the upper shell was bowed outward about 4" at the pocket for its front torsion bar, driver's side. It's normal to have a slight outward bowing of the shell at the pockets, but, this was so severe that we couldn't push the shell inward enough to latch it down. After trying some adjustments of all torsion bars without any effect, I decided that the bar involved was bent.

I called up our nearest TM dealer, Dinuba RV - which now isn't anything like a "Nearest" dealer because they had moved 150 miles farther away from us - to discuss this shell problem. I wound up asking their mechanic to order a new torsion bar for our 3124KS and informing him that I would bring my TM in to have it replaced. 2 weeks later the bar arrived and I towed my TM (with the upper shell tied down) the 160 miles to Rio Vista, the present location of Dinuba RV.

Their mechanic had never before seen any distortion of an upper shell's sidewall like that on our TM. He wasn't sure that installing a new torsion bar would straighten the side of the shell. However, he dutifully took off the old one and installed the new one. Lo and behold, this restored the shell's side wall to a normal curvature! He learned something new about TMs in doing this repair (and I learned how they raise shells after disconnecting them from the torsion bars).

I am baffled about why this happened. How did this torsion bar seemingly slowly bend on its own so that it distorted the upper shell's sidewall? The best hypothesis that I've come up with is that a previous accident damaged our TM before we purchased it. Another mechanic pointed out to me a couple of years ago that there had been some structural repairs to the upper shell. When the damage was repaired, the bent torsion bar somehow must have been forced back into place and restrained by the other bars and the shell itself. When I disconnected the shell's two rear torsion bars in order to drop the front of the shell, that may have freed the bent torsion bar from its restraints. During the several months that I had the shell disconnected from the rear torsion bars, this bent bar must have gradually distorted the shell's sidewall. How else would you explain a torsion bar's bending by itself without any external cause such as a recent accident? Did some poltergeist bend the bar as easily as some modern day mystics bend a spoon by rubbing on it?

The outward bowing left two large crinkles in the inside aluminum lining of the shell. We'll have to live with that since it's a Lake City, Tennessee category of repair. I'm just glad that the sidewall is straight again.

By the way, Dinuba RV is a great TM dealership with a reputation for integrity and honesty in dealing with its customers.

Larry