There are
leaks from badly done or cracked old caulking,
leaks from dried up, shrunken seals and gaskets,
leaks around rivets, wind-driven leaks from horizontal rain, leaks galore, we cannot
escape them. They can be obvious, sneaky, or stupid. I hate 'em, especially the stupid, sneaky ones I don't know are at work, then I lift up a seat cushion and find it discolored and damp and danky under there. Wish my
windows would never leak, but inevitably, they will.
The back window on my '81 has a rough opening of 22 1/4 inches high by 44 inches across. It has a center pane slider. All 3 panes are plastic. It's the original window. Not the greatest design, unfortunately. Plus, it was caulked in place with gobs of silicone, likely by the previous owner, since this trailer was a home-assembled kit. I mention that only because I don't think the pros use silicone to seal
windows.
Besides the sneaky leak, there is one other thing about this back window; it isn't flat across and has no screen. It conforms to the curvature halves of the '81
Burro shell. The big thing for me is this leaky back window is of such unique size and shape that its specifics have moshed my search for a newer, affordable replacement. Rain and flies, rain and flies.
A few months ago I got lucky on ebay and replaced 3 other
windows with terrific, newer windows for bargain prices. Not an exact fit to my rough openings, but I tackled the serious shell modifications needed simply because I wanted to do it. (A man thing.) Well I don't feel like doing that extra work this time around. ( ...My wife will confirm this as being
another man thing.) Now many months of searching is gone by and have found no window close enough in size to use in that rough opening. How long can I stay this course? Got to fix that leak.
Had a major rain recently. It forced me to finally isolate the source of the window leakage. It wasn't horizontal wind-driven rain pushing through the vertical edge of the flexible plastic center pane like I thought. Rain was coming in at a bottom radius corner where the seal-gasket slipped out of position. My strategy of wait and hope for another window is not working. Time to get up out of my ...commander in chief's chair.
I cut out the nested, rubber front face-trim gasket holding the plastic pane in place and run it through a solvent soaked rag to get it clean. Sure enough, that skinny seal gasket behind the pane was dried up hard. There's your trouble!, I said. This here is a clear need for new butyl caulking!