Roof damage - Am I being unreasonable?

[SusiBus]

I'm finding our O6S bellows fold in much more effectively than any previous ones, but they still leaked in heavy rain!

 

[Blanco]

Don't rely on bellows bungee to stop the sides inflating outward in a breeze - the elastic along the centre of its its length is way too weak to exerpt any meaningful restraining power.

When the same thing happened after I hadn't been paying enough attention thinking the bungee was going to do what it claimed, what I did was sew a loop of thread to the inside of the fabric at the point where the two reinforcing strips kink and just before lowering the roof I connect the two using an offcut from the end of bellows bungee with a plastic hook on each end.

Stretched between the two loops the elastic has just sufficient tension to ensure the strips always start folding inwards, and by the time the roof is half way down its done its job and has gone slack.

All that's needed next time I put the roof up is remember to check if one or other hook already freed itself - sometimes one end will unhook itself once the roof is fully down - and if not just hop up and disconnect it.

 

[brabrady]

Don't rely on bellows bungee to stop the sides inflating outward in a breeze - the elastic along the centre of its its length is way too weak to exerpt any meaningful restraining power.

When the same thing happened after I hadn't been paying enough attention thinking the bungee was going to do what it claimed, what I did was sew a loop of thread to the inside of the fabric at the point where the two reinforcing strips kink and just before lowering the roof I connect the two using an offcut from the end of bellows bungee with a plastic hook on each end.

Stretched between the two loops the elastic has just sufficient tension to ensure the strips always start folding inwards, and by the time the roof is half way down its done its job and has gone slack.

All that's needed next time I put the roof up is remember to check if one or other hook already freed itself - sometimes one end will unhook itself once the roof is fully down - and if not just hop up and disconnect it.

View attachment 148709

Calis should ship from the factory this way. This is exactly how my Maggiolina rooftop tent addressed the issue. I intend to perform exactly this mod, but have not yet as I couldn't devise a satisfying way to sew the loops to the tent interior. If you're willing to share a close-up of your attachment method, it would be appreciated by many, I'm sure.

In the meantime, having a manual roof, I lower the roof a good bit, then use the semi-vacuum to my advantage by giving the roof a quick pop up (pun intended I suppose) of a few cm. Done quickly enough this will suck the edges inward the way the straps are supposed to but often don't... especially if they've bent the wrong way at least once.

My particular crime was pretty gruesome. Probably the 5th or 6th time I had operated the roof, I neglected to lower the bedframe before closing the roof. Highly un-recommended. Short of a contact-based buzzer system, I don't know how to guard against that kind of mental lapse. The problem is that the left bellows strip is pretty passive now.

As to VW warranty service: some of you will recall that back in the day of the VW Phaeton, Audi's Axel Mees was sacked for saying the quiet part out loud, saying among other things that he wouldn't buy the Phaeton himself, because he'd have to buy it from a VW dealership. I've loved many VWs and I love my Cali so far... but it does appear that VW's warranty folks are poached from U.S. health insurance companies.

-Brady