Figuring out how to Replace a Wire in a Caravan is problematic. But ultimately pretty simple

First recommendation is to get a replacement wire from the manufacturer.  They made decisions about engineering, load (static/dynamic), dissimilar alloy interactions, and other relevant criteria.

Alternatively – contact someone like RVGO who has wire and caravan specific knowledge… and can build you a repair.

However, that may not be possible (or desirable) and that is a valid decision – which is probably why you are reading this…

Unfortunately, you may not know any of the relevant details of what might have caused your wire failure, or what sort of fittings you have on the end of the wire…but some general points to consider are:

• Check your pulley movement and alignment – this can often be the cause of premature wire failure and putting a new wire into a FUBAR pulley is just a waste of time and money.
• If it was designed for ~ 2.5mm wire rope – I recommend you continue with that size. Two reasons
  1. Over strengthening 1 point of a design can shift stresses to other points and lead to a cascade of failure points across the entire structure of the caravan, and
  2. A pulley may appear to be able to accommodate a larger size of wire, but the ‘sides of the groove’ may work to develop a shearing force on larger wire rope encouraging the fibres of the rope to interact and fail.
• use the same type of wire as original (galvanized or stainless) but you can upgrade to a higher grade (e.g. G2070 for Gal and G316 for Stainless)
• use the same (flexible) structure of wire as the original – 7×19 IWRC (stronger and a wee bit stiffer) or 6×19 FC (weaker and wee bit more flexible) is recommended.
• use thimbles
• use appropriate ferrules to avoid a dissimilar alloys reaction that will result in corrosion
  • Stainless Wire Rope requires either copper, nickel coated copper, or stainless swages, while
  • Galvanised Wire Rope can cope with aluminium, copper, or nickel coated copper swages.
• use a proper swaging tool and measure the resulting change in OD of the swage
  • across the crimping points if its a manual tool, or
  • over the entire swage if its a hydraulic tool.

Bottom line

You can buy whatever you want, but we won’t recommend anything specific until we know more about the causes of failure…feel free to call and discuss this in more detail. 1300 601 514