Our View 24J has one of the European “aircraft style” doors that Winnebago experimented with for three or four years. They went back to their legacy coach door / screen door combination in recent model years for a number of reasons, and one of those many reasons might have been the tendancy for the micro contacts on the coach door to corrode and lose continuity. The result is the remote power lock on the coach door no longer functions, and if you are not careful, you might just go for a period of time thinking your coach door is locked – when it really isn’t. Yes, we fell for that one…

The coach door on our View does not really fit the frame all that well, as the door is smaller that it needs to be for a nice snug fit. We installed adhesive backed weather stripping in areas where daylight had the tendancy to show, and that not only helped make a better seal – but it helped with the road noise as well. But, at the time, we did not install any on the leading edge of the door, and that turned out to be bad news for water ingress into the micro contacts that are responsible for communication with the chassis power lock system.

Here is a photo of the micro contacts on the coach door – On the left, in the door frame, are the contact plates that the compressible, spring loaded, contacts attached to the door, on the right, make continuity with when the door is closed.

One of our spring loaded contacts became corroded and lost its ability to stand proud enough to make contact with the door. We had to buy a new pair of switch contacts from Winnebago for about 58.00 USD, plus shipping, plus exchange rate … :

On the left is the old pair of contacts, and on the right is the new pair:

The replacement was pretty straightforward, just a drop-in replacement part - we did not replace the door frame contact plates that also came in the kit, but we added some water ingress protection so hopefully we wouldn’t have to go through this failure again.

To show why we thought we would try to protect the area from water, here are a couple of photos to show the contact switches are indeed open to water ingress:

Door closing:

Door closed – I marked the area where the contact plates and the compressible contacts meet – you can see that road spray can easily impact the area:

The fix was pretty easy – I extended the weather stripping application I was doing to provide a seal that the door compresses when it is closed:

When the door is closed, the switch contacts are now sealed off from the outside:

I mentioned that we did not replace the door frame switch contact plates. In this mod completed photo, you can see a bit of rust on the top screw and contact plates - evidence of four years of road spray.

After the photo above, I lightly sanded the plates to ensure good continuity with the new spring loaded contacts on the door. As far as the protection mod goes, it looks like the seal is a good one, as you can see the door ridge imprint on the weather stripping:

An extremely simple mod, but an important one? The coach door locks when you want it to!


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