Screwing into Plastic on Your RV
Dave SolbergDescription
To ensure the longest lifespan for the materials and components on your RV, you want to treat them with care and use proper techniques for altering and updating them. Close attention should be paid when mounting or drill into plastic on interior and exterior of your rig, as you’ll want to avoid spider cracking whenever possible. And in this lesson, RVing expert Dave Solberg teaches you the correct technique for screwing into plastic and fiberglass so you can prevent cracking on your unit’s materials.
You’ll learn why it’s critical to pre-drill a hole for any screw you intend to attach to plastic or fiberglass, whether the component is on the roof, side or interior of your RV. With Dave’s help, you will be able to drill a smooth, crackless slot for screws of all sizes. Remember, if you want your components to last, avoid the spiders at all costs!
If you need to attach anything to fiberglass or plastic on a motor home or a travel trailer, it's critical to pre-drill a hole before you screw into it, if you don't, even if you have a self-tapping screw, like this one here, now, these are designed to pre-drill prior to it going in, but watch how it tears, when we put this in here. See all the little fibers we have running all over the place in here. Pull that back out. And see this, got a lot of really rough edges on this, and what's happening is it's basically tearing into that plastic, it's really important on fiberglass because a fiberglass has got little fibers inside and they'll start to rip that apart and get little spider cracks. And what happens then is once I get spider cracks in it and I take off on a cold morning, I hit that first bump, it's gonna just run and tear off on me, so I wanna take this out. And get a good, sharp, drill beat. And see how it did a nice little spiral. It's very, very smooth, I don't have a lot of rough surfaces in there. So then, when I do put my screw in, I gotta nice clean connection there, so again, anytime you working with fiberglass or plastic on an RV, pre-drill the hole beforehand otherwise, you're going to have a nightmare with cracks.
A couple of comments: First the drill bit should be positioned at 90 degrees to what is being drilled. Your illustration appears to be about 5 degrees off vertical. Secondly the dill bit used should be the diameter of the screw exclusive of the threads otherwise you may not get a tight connection when the screw is tightened. I use the eye ball method when selecting the appropriate drill size required: hold the drill up to the screw and determine that it is suitable.
Hey Dave, that black sleeve you have on your drill, if used properly, will prevent the wobbling you experienced when trying to use the self-tapping screw. Just pull that black sleeve down over most of the screw before starting. 😉