The magical day finally arrives. You pick up your new RV and all is well. Until something happens to cause a screw, holding your towel rod to the wall, to pull through the wall. Why do bad things happen to good people you ask? It’s not you, it’s the fact that you have a very thin wall that the rod is attached to, similar to a hallow interior door in your home. I found that when they build RVs they like to just screw things directly to the walls and ceiling with a screw that has a large thread, similar to a screw one would use when screwing into plastic. After discovering that our brand new RV was no longer perfect I started searching for magical methods of attaching something to your RV wall. It seemed like a popular method was to use rivets. This could work for some things, but a fancy towel rod? I didn’t think it would work or look very nice. Plus if I ever wanted to replace it I would have to work a lot harder to remove the rivets. I thought about possibly using toggles, it’s what I’ve used to hang TVs and other things to drywall in our home and office but they are meant for a thicker wall. I wasn’t sure I could get the toggle piece tight enough to the thin paneling. On top of that, most toggles seemed to be for a really large hole compared to the size of screw or item I was trying to fasten to the wall.
Then what can we use? I found hollow door and drywall anchor from E-Z Anchor.
These do the work very nicely. They are intended for hollow doors you would find in your home. The outer shell of the hollow door seems to be a similar material to what is used for your RV wall. Using these is simple. If you know how to use a screw driver you can install/use these.
1. Remove the item currently fully/partially attached to the wall. That is if it’s not already completely come unattached.
2. Take the metal anchor and screw it in where you removed the screws. It will look something like this when fastened to the wall.
This is what the towel rod end looks like fastened to the anchor.
This is the finished product.
On the box it says that these anchors will support 40lbs. This is obviously dependent upon the strength of what the anchor is fastened to. I have not done a weight limit test on the towel rod since, well it’s only going to be holding one large towel. I can say that the towel rod is still securely fastened to the wall after several uses.
One thing to note, I was a little concerned when initially attaching these to the wall. I wasn’t 100% sure that the hollow area between the front and back side of the wall was more than the length of the anchor and screw. These anchors are a little bit shorter than normal drywall/stud anchors that look similar. I couldn’t imagine the wall being thinner than a hollow door. But to be safe I checked the back side of the wall as I screwed the anchors in. I am happy to report we did not poke out the other side of the wall.
We purchased this truck after purchasing our first 5th wheel which our 1995 Chevy 3500 SRW with a 454 couldn’t tow up any hill without over heating, including an ant hill. Dodgezilla, as we call it, was perfect for the job with plenty of power and torque. It rode a bit rough and loudly, but was pretty good for a lifted truck with 37″ tires that had also been straight piped (no muffler or catalytic converter). We knew that the max towing for this truck was just under 13k pounds but with air bags to help with the extra weight it would in reality tow more like a 2004 3500 SRW. I figured we wouldn’t be in a rush to get anywhere and just take it easy on it. Thinking all would be well, we started getting ready to tow our new trailer. We removed the 6″ lift and replaced the 37″ tires with some barely larger than stock. Below are some pictures of it in Monument Valley at it’s close to stock height.
From there we were able to get the truck and trailer towed to our new campsite but there wasn’t enough room for the tow truck, Dodgezilla and Rudy (name we gave our large trailer) to pull through our campsite. After a few calls, we were lucky to find a friend with a truck and gooseneck hitch we borrowed to move the trailer from the street into our spot. Thanks to Jeff and Tori for helping out a friend in need.
Things brake from time to time, so having a brand new truck under warranty, plus a few extras like the engine/exhaust brake, helped us make this decision. Also, watching an old Chevy dually take flight over some rail road tracks in the 1981 film Cannonball Run is what first hooked me on big trucks and made this my dream truck.
ended up fixing that and using Dodgezilla as a trade-in on the new truck. We’ve not come up with a name for the new truck but I’m sure we will.