This may be a long post, but a good read.
I've been in email communication with a guy that also owns a new 277RL. Ours are new and we have been talking about problems we are running across and how to fix them. When he tells me what he fixed, I go and check mine, and I usually have the same issue. The latest is a goodie.
His latest issue is a leaking door on the pass-through with water standing in the flange of the door. Sounds like a leaking gasket? Read on. He replaced gaskets and that did not repair the leak. So, as usual, yesterday I go out to check all of my doors for leaks. I started with the baggage door on the bedroom slide. The outside edge looked like it was adequately sealed with a bead of silicon around the edge of the frame. I opened the door, pulled on it slightly and the frame and silicon pulled away from the wall of the trailer. LEAK!!!
I removed the four screws holding the door frame and pulled on it. It literally fell off the wall into my hands. At installation, there was a bead of sealant applied around the inside of the frame about the size of a strand of spaghetti. It was so small, that when the door was set in place, the caulk did not touch anything and it was completely in tact and undisturbed around the inside of the plastic door frame. I pulled on it and it came off as one long string. Bottom line, there was no way that thin string of silicon was sealing anything because it did not even touch the cutout for the door. The small amount of silicon remaining from the edge of the frame was easily scraped off with my fingernail.
The fix.. I've repaired dozens of leaking ports on boats, so I know the drill. I cleaned every bit of silicon residue off of the frame and the side of the trailer and wiped it all down with denatured alcohol. I then laid a 1/2" wide bead of silicon around the frame of the door. That sounds like a lot of sealant and it is. There is a lot of waste from the tube, because you want enough on there so when you set the frame in place, the excess squeezes out around the frame. If it doesn't squeeze out all the way around, you didn't get a good seal and you've wasted your time and materials. My guess is that out of a tube of sealant, half of it will get wiped off and discarded. Then the wall and door frame edge got cleaned up and it's done. Also, I use exterior grade door and window silicon that has to be cleaned up with mineral spirits, not the latex stuff. I just don't think the cheap stuff will hold up to the weather and it's not going to be painted. The silicon I use is around $6 a tube at HD, but considering the cost of delamination repair, that's not a lot of money.
My guess is that every door and window on every Keystone trailer is done this same way. I would estimate that at this rate of usage, Keystone sealed, or attempted to seal, everything on the trailer with two tubes of caulk.(The bean counters at work) I used almost a whole tube on one door. Like every other industry, it appears that this one is controlled by the bean counters. They know, to the penny, how much material and labor goes into each unit, and it's very tightly controlled. The boat builders are the same way. A specific amount of resin is allowed to do the fiberglass layup, and if too much is used in one place, some other area goes without, and the unit moves down the line.
I'm writing all of this because this is a problem that is going to have to be addressed by us, the owners. Good luck getting Keystone to step up and do all of this under warranty because we don't like the waythey built the trailer and we THINK it might leak. Well, it's not a matter of if it will leak. it eventually will, and all it takes is a little bit of flex cause by towing or weather to break what is already a poorly crafted seal. If you don't think so, go back and read the threads by people with delaminating trailers that are just out of warranty.
This is not a rail on Keystone. I really like my trailer and I think it represents a good value for the money. It just suffers from the usual production line issues. It takes about four minutes to make the cutout and install a door the way they did it. I spent 45 minutes on just one, so think what that would do to a production schedule and the cost of a new unit. So, it's up to us to either fix what they didn't do, or sell it and pay for a custom one-off trailer with no guarrantee that it won't be built the same way.
I hope this information saves someone a healthy repair bill, because fiberglass repair ain't cheap. I'm going out today to do a couple of more doors and I'll edit this post tonight with photos to illustrate what I've talked about.
Edited to add photos
This is Keystones way of sealing around doors and windows. Very small bead of sealant that barely if at all, touches the fiberglass around the door cutout. This is the second door. The first one had less silicon on it than this one.
This is one of the doors set back in the custout, secured and ready to be cleaned of excess caulk. Notice how the caulk squeezes out around the frame. This insures a good seal all the way around the door. Any pinhole voids around the edge can be filled with some caulk on your finger after the tape is removed. Everything was wiped down with denatured alcohol before laying in the silicon to get good adhesion.
This is one of the pass through doors, tape and excess caulk removed, everythingcleaned up with mineral spirits.