Sprinter conversion stripped back after a branch strike opened the roof

Van conversions hide water better than any other vehicle type OCRV Center sees. There is no laminated wall to bubble and no ceiling panel to stain, because the insulation and the timber battens absorb everything first and pass it along quietly. By the time flooring lifts at a seam, the water has usually been travelling for weeks. This owner noticed the floor a month after a branch strike he had barely registered at the time, and the two events turned out to be the same event.

The roof told the story immediately. One rack foot had torn out of its mounting plate, elongating four fastener holes straight through the roof skin, and the impact had lifted one corner of the rear ventilation fan flange. Water entering at the rack holes ran along the underside of the skin, dropped into the driver side wall cavity, and pooled in the floor build at the rear. The moisture map OCRV Center recorded at intake traced exactly that path before anything was opened.

The initial carrier estimate covered the roof and the rack. That is standard, because an adjuster looking at photographs of a torn rack foot has no way to see what is inside the wall. Teardown of the rear third changed the conversation: swollen cabinet carcass, sodden insulation and corroded twelve volt terminals, all photographed against the moisture map. Submitted together, that evidence turned into a single approved supplement rather than the three rounds of argument that the same findings produce when they are described in a sentence.

Drying is the step nobody wants to pay for and the step that decides whether the repair holds. OCRV Center dried the cavity across three days with readings logged morning and afternoon, rather than closing it up the moment a single check came back acceptable. Sealing wet insulation behind new panelling produces exactly the same job again in a year, at the owner's expense the second time. The logged readings also went into the file, which matters if the same area is ever questioned on a later claim.

Reassembly had to match a conversion that was not built at OCRV Center. The cabinet carcass and face were rebuilt to the original dimensions and finish so the rear of the van reads as one build rather than a repair patched into someone else's work, and the vinyl plank flooring was replaced through the whole rear section rather than pieced in at the seam. The twelve volt run in the affected wall was traced, the corroded terminals renewed and the circuit relabelled properly.

The last thing done was a water test on the roof, fan and rack mounts, held long enough to find a slow leak rather than just a fast one. Betterment came up on the flooring, as it usually does when new material replaces used, and the deduction was argued down against documented remaining service life rather than accepted as written. The owner settled the deductible at delivery and left with the photograph file and the drying log.