In hindsight I would have setup the survey a little differently, asked some different questions in addition to the ones I did ask. Whenever I have worked with surveys I always find that after the fact you wish you had done it differently. Nevertheless, this was not meant to be a scientific piece of work! My thanks goes to the 151 people who responded.
I wanted to answer the following questions:
1. How widespread was people’s awareness of the “frame flex” problem.
2. Of those that knew about it, how many had suffered from it?
3. Finally, was there a relationship between the size of the gap between the bedroom slide and the bottom of the nose of the 5th wheel.
So here goes at my answers (which are subjective):
1. Question 18 asked Before reading this survey, did you know what Frame Flex was? 119 responses and 84% said they did. Given most people found out about the survey either from the Montana Owners club forum or the 3790/3791RD Facebook group this does not surprise me. You don’t need to spend too much time in these groups to hear about the problem. Given how many Montana’s Keystone sells though, I wonder how many know in the general population who don’t browse these groups.
2. Question 19 asked if the survey respondents 5th wheel had been diagnosed with the problem. 34% said yes (113 responses).
3. Honestly this one was hard as I don’t think I setup the survey very well. Some Montana floorplans don’t have the same bedroom slide arrangement and so the questions were hard for these people to answer – it just didn’t really make sense. So I did the following:
a. I filtered the respondents to those people with a 2020 5th wheel. Only 5 respondents, but 80% said they had the large gap between the bedroom slide and the bottom of the nose. 100% said they had not been diagnosed with Frame Flex. Now to be fair, these lucky people have not had their RVs for long, but I hope for them it stays that way. Its certainly Keystone’s belief that they have re-designed this area to prevent the problem from happening. To really see what’s going on we would need to repeat the survey in 1-2 years time.
b. I selected 2018 3790/3791RD (inc Legacy) respondents, all of which indicated a small gap and even in this group not all had suffered from Frame Flex, 64% did, 36% did not. I checked in 2016 respondents for the same floorplan (9 respondents) and the % balance between yes and no was very close 67% and 33%.
I have attached the PDF report out (there are a few blank pages, not sure why – just skip past those).
My summary is not all rigs seem to have suffered from the problem, there clearly has been a design change in the 2020 models, but time will tell if this really has fixed the problem or not.
If you do think you have it call Keystone customer service @ 1-866-425-4369!
Happy Camping!
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