Born Free Leap'n Lions RV Club Info & Discussion Forum

At least until Born Free changed body styles around year 2015, prior to that they used Southco door latches on all the outside compartment doors. I have a 2002 26' RSB coach with those door latches and have noticed that the steel washer associated with the latch retaining nut have started to show serious rust as viewed on the backside of the latch with the door open. In fact the rust had become real serious and I should have addressed the problem earlier.

I had to treat the nut and washer with multiple applications of WD-40 over a period of up to 6 days before I was able to break the 7/8" nut loose in order to remove the latch to treat it and it's attaching hardware to remove the rust. If fact two of the many latches had to be cut out of the door with a carbide cutting tool because the retaining nut could never be broken loose. These Southco latches are rather expensive to replace at $22 to $34 each depending on the style.

You might want to check out this latch rust problem in your coach.

Thank you for this reminder. Fortunately I was able to remove all of mine and clean them.

I have a '99 RSB. Our latches might be the same. Do you happen to have the item information for the latch(es) that you purchased from Southco? I can see several possibly fitting and am trying to avoid buying several and then returning one or two.

I bought my replacement Southco compartment door latches back in late 2018 and I no longer have my credit card records to come up with the exact Southco P/N's for the two different latches used by Born free. However, they were the E3 series of compression compression latches.

A spec sheet for those series of latches can be downloaded by clicking on the following Southco factory website link: https://files.southco.com/static/Literature/e3.en.pdf

I believe the correct hole size selection is 19.1 mm and the two head styles used were Knob type and the Southco Tubular Key type as shown in the attachment below.