Many Issues with 2019 R-pod 180 - Event Date: 01 Jan 2019 - 14 Mar 2019

Turning out trailers with inadequate quality control makes little sense to me.  If you give your employees adequate time to do it right the first time, you have happier customers and lower costs in the long run.  It is much less costly to use care to build something right than to pay a dealer to go back and tear something apart to do it over again.  The dealers have to be paid for their warranty work and the more errors are made, the more it eats away at the bottom line for the manufacturer.  Would it really be that much more expensive to give the employees 2 or 3 hours of additional assembly time to allow them the ability to avoid mistakes and save 3  or 4 times as much time for repairs at the dealer.  I suspect, even thought the dealers don't charge their full shop rate to FR, they are receiving more than the average hourly worker in the factory.  Go figure. 

Good article. From our trip last summer to RV country we learned the following.  The Amish mostly do the woodwork (cabinets, bed etc).  The reason why the day starts so early is that there is no air conditioning in the factories.  They are paid on a unit basis.  They must build a minumum number of RV's (at the plant we visited it was 12).  Then for every unit over that they are paid a bonus (the highest number at our plant was 17!!!).  That is the major reason why there are so many mistakes, they are rushing.  The more they build, the more they make.  Would you want your surgeon paid on the number of heart bypasses they do a day!  In addition, they do not have extra helpers.  So if a person calls in sick there is one less person working the line that day and the remaining workers have to make up the slack.  So for all these reasons it is amazing that RV's do not have more issues.  But again this is industry wide and not an RPOD issue.

In my experience, paying piecework usually leads to shoddy craftsmanship, injuries, and long term development of disabilities that cut one's work life short.  I suspect that if someone made a study of the correlation between piece work and quality, there would be an inverse relationship.  But it is a way to drive the bottom line for manufacturers, as long as they don't mind paying very high workers' compensation rates and dealing with high turnover.

The trailer you got was the one I was trying to buy from Harrison Marine.  I put a deposit on it but you had first choice over me.  I could not wait for the next shipment so I got a r180 in Sacramento.  I bought my 171 from Harrison and I was happy with them.  Sold it after 2+ years for the same price I paid for it. 

I understand and this has been my sad introduction to the world of RVs. With regards to quality control, Forest River brags about their QC right on their website and points out their QC procedures. Yes, it shouldn't be this way as you said, but I hope that more people like myself don't settle for this and contact FR with their issues. Maybe if more people did, there wouldn't be as many issues. I don't know...just speculating a bit. In my case I wrote detailed letters with pictures to all the FR locations in Oregon and one to the main headquarters in Indiana. We'll see what kind of response I get. At the very least, I felt a little better just by taking the action and expressing my frustration in writing. Thanks for you input.