Tipping point

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Papa tom

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Jul 30, 2018
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2
I just bought an Itasca Navion 24j and was wondering if anyone knows the tip-over point of one of these while going straight, precisely how many degrees off plumb. I can?t find any info on this and it seems like a good thing to know! I recently parked on a bit of a slope and it made me wonder! A small, mounted pendulum device would be great to have, indicating the degrees off plumb.
 
Hey papa Tom. Welcome to the forum. I would forget that. I've never seen that question come up.  Start using your RV and you'll soon have other worries.
 
I would think that you'd roll out of bed and your eggs will slide off the griddle long before you reach the tipping point.
 
I agree this sort of information would be nice to know, though I have never seen it listed for any RV.  I too had one of those worrisome parking situations at a mountain top campground last year.  The RV parking area to go into register at the entrance had a distinct sideways tilt to it towards the passenger side, enough that I was worried about going out my entry door, thinking all it would take for me to become a pancake would be one good strong gust of wind, not to mention that climbing down my entry steps at that angle was difficult in itself.
 
Papa tom said:
I just bought an Itasca Navion 24j and was wondering if anyone knows the tip-over point of one of these while going straight, precisely how many degrees off plumb. I can?t find any info on this and it seems like a good thing to know! I recently parked on a bit of a slope and it made me wonder! A small, mounted pendulum device would be great to have, indicating the degrees off plumb.
Welcome to the Winnebago family and the forum. What the other guys said. It's a 'seat of the pants' feel - if your door flings open or if it's difficult to open, then you are too far off camber. I suspect the unit can be way, way off and still be stable. When you turn a corner with a tight radius there are dynamic roll forces at work, far exceeding a parked chassis.

In our rockcrawler Jeep, we've probably been 30*-40* off camber and we're not at the roll point - when we were new to off-roading, even being 10* off-camber was scary. We slowly gained experience and learned the equipment's capability. I was a passenger in a friend's highly built Jeep when we started slowly rolling to the passenger side on an obstacle, my 'seat of the pants' feel told me at the exact moment when the Jeep reached the point of no return. We were flopped completely on my side.
 
Whatever it is,  and even though RVs are top heavy, it's a fairly big number.  Not a high as John's Jeep, but still substantial.  It would also depend on how the RV is loaded, so a factory number wouldn't be all that helpful anyway.  Realistically, the tilt would get scary before it got even close to tipping. 
 
Yeah, i can't imagine getting someplace where I'd have to worry about that.... but for grins, this brings to mind a statics class I took around about 32 years back.  I haven't done this sort of work really since almost that long.

It is possible to calculate if you have a way to measure weights at each corner, and then tip it to some angle that you can measure before remeasuring the weights.  It's basically using moments and force vector calculations.  I'd have to scratch my head on it for a minute to remember the whole thing, and I couldn't really explain it here anyway, so I went looking for a link...and couldn't find a decent reference quickly

but here's an explanation for part of it...just the side to side part.
https://www.khanacademy.org/science/physics/linear-momentum/center-of-mass/v/center-of-mass-equation
 
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