Rotted wood on side of cap, easy repair?

[98750sxipro]

OK, it's my first pop up so I'm new with the lingo. My pop up had a dent on the side of the cap that water got in and rotted the wood. It appears to be rotted from the left edge to about midway across. It is just the side piece of the cap only where one of the metal support poles goes into. I'm thinking that we might be able to scrape the bad wood out with a big screwdriver and slide a new piece of wood into the cavity. Or will we need to take it all apart, put in a new piece of wood all the way across, and then re-caulk everything? My husband is fairly handy too so I would like to avoid taking it in to a repair shop as we only paid $1300 for it.
Any advice at all would be wonderful!
Thank you,
Kelly

[98750sxipro]

Well we attempted this repair on our own and it actually wasn't as bad as we thought. The wood was so bad it was easily removed by scraping it out with a long screwdriver and putty knife. Then we cut a new piece and shaped it to fit and then put everything back together. We did not have to completely take the outside all apart which was good. All in all it totaled about 5 hours and $30, well worth the attempt! Looks good as new.

[Hunt4Fun]

If you husband is at all handy, he won't have any problems.  Just be sure to get rid of everything that is water damaged.  Mold and mildew are something you want to be sure of eliminate.  

If you are like me, I ended up replacing the wood with better quality products than the original construction.

With some new treated lumber, a circular saw, hammer and nails or better yet, a cordless drill and screws, you be good to go.

Hunt4Fun

[austinado16]

Just completed this type repair on my '87 Starcraft Nova.  My front verticle wood had turned into mush, and about 10+ inches of each front side had done the same.

I unscrewed the edge trim and removed enough of it so I could work.  Then I used a wide blade gasket scraper to scrape the mucky wood off the aluminum skin.

I cut new wood to match the correct shape of each area's aluminum, then glued the wood to the aluminum with some very strong construction adheasive and clamped it in place until dry.

My roof sides were originally edge stapled to the front panel.  Instead of that, I used 1-1/2" galvanized sheetrock screws and a screw gun to screw the roof back together, gluing the edges before assembly.

Once glued and screwed it was solid as a rock and much stronger than before.  Now that it's back together, you can't tell that it was done.

If you look back in posts from a month or 2 ago, you'll find my original post with the before and after photos.