Chassis and Mechanical
Step and Entry Door Repair
In short: An entry door that will not latch is usually reporting that the opening has moved rather than that the latch has failed, which is why adjusting the striker repeatedly never permanently fixes it.
- Typical range
- $350 to $4,500+
- Labor hours
- 2 to 20 hours
- Updated
Doors and steps are small jobs that are worth doing properly because they are frequently reporting something larger.
The door that will not latch
This is the most common complaint in this category and the most commonly misdiagnosed.
An entry door and its striker are fitted to an opening. If the door will not latch, either the door has moved relative to its hinges, or the opening has moved relative to the door.
Hinge wear and sag do happen and they are straightforward. But on a coach, the more common cause is structural movement: a collision that racked the body, a soft floor under the entry area, a sidewall that has sagged with age, or a frame that has twisted.
The tell is a door that keeps needing striker adjustment. Adjusting the striker compensates for the current position. If the structure is still moving, it will need adjusting again, and each adjustment moves the striker further from where it was designed to sit until it runs out of travel.
So when a door has been adjusted more than once, we check the structure rather than adjusting it again. That may lead to frame straightening or to water damage restoration if the floor under the entry has softened.
Electric steps
Kwikee and Lippert electric steps are simple systems with several failure points, and the motor is not the most likely one.
The door switch tells the controller the entry door is open so the step can deploy. It is exposed and it fails.
The controller interprets the switch and drives the motor. A common failure.
Grounds and connections are underneath the coach in the path of road spray, and corrosion there produces intermittent operation that looks exactly like a failing motor.
The linkage wears, seizes and bends, particularly on a step that has been driven over a kerb.
The motor does fail, and it is the last thing to check rather than the first.
Diagnosis before parts matters here as much as anywhere, because a replaced motor on a corroded ground still does not work.
What we do
Entry door adjustment, hinge and hardware replacement, skin and frame repair, seal and gasket replacement, full door replacement including adapting current doors to older openings, screen door repair, compartment and baggage door repair and gasket replacement, electric step diagnosis and repair, step replacement, manual step repair, and grab handle and threshold repair.
Compartment doors
Compartment and baggage doors are overlooked and they leak more often than anything except roofs and windows.
Their gaskets harden with UV and stop sealing. The doors themselves get leaned on, loaded and occasionally reversed into, which distorts the frame enough that the door no longer sits flat.
Water that gets into a bay is not seen for a long time, and bays frequently contain things that suffer from it: electrical connections, water heater components, generator installations and storage.
Gaskets are inexpensive and worth replacing on a schedule rather than after discovering the consequences.
What it costs
| Job | Typical range | Hours |
|---|---|---|
| Door adjustment and hardware | $350 to $900 | 2 to 5 |
| Entry door seal replacement | $350 to $800 | 2 to 4 |
| Entry door repair | $700 to $2,000 | 4 to 10 |
| Entry door replacement | $1,500 to $4,500 | 7 to 20 |
| Compartment door repair and gaskets | $350 to $1,200 | 2 to 6 |
| Electric step diagnosis and repair | $500 to $1,600 | 2 to 7 |
| Step replacement | $900 to $2,500 | 4 to 11 |
Labor is $210 per hour for body and door work, $260 where electrical diagnosis is involved. See the pricing page.
Safety
A step that collapses under load, a door that opens while travelling, or a grab handle that pulls out of a wall are all injury events rather than inconveniences.
We fasten grab handles into structure rather than into wall panel, we verify step mounting rather than just the mechanism, and we will not return a coach with a door that does not latch positively. If any of those are currently marginal on your vehicle, they are worth dealing with before a trip rather than after.
Estimates are $150 and credited back against an authorized repair.
Doors on conversions and commercial vehicles
Entry doors on van conversions, bus conversions and mobile business builds are a different problem from coach doors, because they are almost always retrofitted into an opening that was cut rather than manufactured.
That means the opening has no factory frame, no designed drainage path and no engineered structure around it. A door fitted into a cut opening without adding structure back is relying on the skin to carry loads the skin was never intended to take, and the result is an opening that distorts progressively until the door stops latching.
When we fit a door into a conversion we frame the opening properly first, restore the load path that the cut interrupted, and build in a drainage detail so water that gets past the seal has somewhere to go other than into the floor.
The same applies to service doors on food trucks and mobile clinics, which get used far more often than any coach door and are frequently the single highest-cycle component on the vehicle.