Reinforcing corner jack brackets

[HiPlainsDrifter]

On a recent hunting trip I took my Lance 3000 off the truck since we were staying 8 days and I wanted to be able to use the truck without breaking camp. As I took it off, the jacks started swaying and for a minute I thought it might fall. Not a great feeling when you're miles off road. The lag bolts were loose on the bottom of the brackets and appear to be pulling out of the supports. I ended up using ratchet straps to pull the bottom of the front mounts to the rear tie down points to stabilze the whole setup to put it back on the truck at the end of the week. My question is: what have you done to reinforce the mounting points? This is my first hard side camper and there is some previous damage to the jack mount on the passenger front side. Several of the lags are either stripped or broken and increasing the size would be a short term fix at best. I plan to run a piece of angle down each side, tieing the bottom of each mount together, front to back and possibly triangulate with flat strap from the top of the mount to this angle. Has anyone done this? how about tying the feet together to keep them from spreading. The camper is on a short bed dually with swing out brackets if that makes a difference.

 

[mallthus]

You're probably on the right track with the angle iron. It sounds as though the jacks were damaged in the past and that there might be damage to the frame wood. If that's the case, you're going to want to reinforce the affected corner and transfer the load from the jacks to a portion of the frame that's undamaged. If it's worse, you might want dig deeper, making sure there's no rot or other frame issues lurking under the camper's skin.

 

[Dusty-NZ]

What mallthus says , plus , you might like to consider some diagonal bracing.

I have done this and the camper is very secure when on the jacks.