2011 Factory Updates...

Dec 2011

I made a little excursion to the factory for 2 days of upgrades. In the fall we received a letter from Safari Condo, offering all owners the opportunity to bring their Alto in to the factory to be upgraded to the very lastest build specifications.
Naturally, we made an appointment right way and so did many others, our appointment ended up being the first week of December. Wanting to get the trip and work out of the way before the 2012 season, we set the time and hoped the weather would cooperate. Other than being a little cool and rainy, snow at times actually, the road trip went smoothly.

In terms of what was being upgraded, from the list of items, I would say that the majority of them would not
really be noticable to most owners. Items such as replacing aluminum rivets with stainless steel ones, or
increasing the diameter of a rubber moulding, would largely go unnoticed. There were many such changes. The larger changes were the addition of 2 large aluminum straps to help hold the tanks onto the bottom of the Alto. Someone must have lost one at some point, which could be a nasty event. I could see this happening in certain situations if the tanks were full while travelling, and if a large bump was encountered, the weight and downward force may well shake one loose. I cannot see travelling with full tanks, as that is a fair amount of weight to drag along. The new straps look robust and certainly add to our peace of mind. The other noticable change is the addition of 2 corner braces to the back wall. This makes sense, as it is a right angle, with no other sign of bracing. They do seem to increase the tightness of that back wall, and they also double as handy bedside shelves.

A number of the changes were based on what your production number is. Being number 80 of what is now well over 250 trailers, we had a number of updates to be done. One quirky change is with the porthole windows. Seems that they discovered that the original lubricant they used to help install the windows actually turned out to cause the aluminum walls to rust around the cutout edges. They repaired this by cutting a larger circle to remove the affected areas, then installed a larger porthole window. Just an inch mind you, but it is visually bigger. Bonus. I've posted some images of the updates in the Mods section.

So now we have a completely updated Alto, ready for many more years of comfortable travel!