New 308BHTS Owner

[iflywhatevr]

Just stumbled across this forum and it has some awesome informative threads. We have owned our current 2016 Tracer Air 305 Bunk House trailer for about 9 months and are excited to be taking delivery of our 2017 Reflection 308BHTS on Friday.

The Tracer Air was our first trailer and we have been out on quite a few trips (our first one was trial by fire - or ice ) where we had 20 degree temps the whole outing . Despite all that the kids love camping and the wife came around quickly as well. We decided we wanted something that was less of an "ultra-lite" and something more substantial with some better options. Initially we were looking at 5th wheels but decided to go with another travel trailer as we like having the dry waterproof storage under our Leer fiberglass bed cover which we would lose with the 5th wheel.

We were very close to purchasing a Lacrosse (Forrest River/Prime Time) since they are the parent company of tracer and we had only a could minor issues with the Tracer. We stumbled across the Reflection line by accident and drove several hours to take a look at a 2016 and then finally located a 2017 at a great price in Delaware (we are in Virginia).

We plan to camp a day or two next week as a shakeout trip to find any issues before heading to Oshkosh, WI for our annual air show pilgrimage and about 10 days of camping. Looking forward to taking delivery and posting up my initial impressions!

Since Grand Design seems to review these forums my one suggestion so far is post up some videos of assembly in the factory and some company produced videos of the various trailers/floor plans. The videos that are out there are all from dealers. Videos are huge for the "younger" customers and carry more weight from be manufacturer than from dealers pushing the product. I get the whole factory PDI but let's SEE it in some videos!

[LCBoyer]

Congratulations! Welcome to our group

[el Rojo]

Congrats on your new trailer Dave. Welcome aboard.

Red

[iflywhatevr]

So just a quick follow-up. Dealer in Delaware tried to pull a little switch on me basically after promising one with the pullout sofa (we need the extra sleeping space) he said it was impossible to swap the recliners for a sofa and we would "have to" take delivery of the trailer anyways. We ended up getting our deposit back and found a 2017 with 2 ACs installed from the factory and the pullout sofa that we wanted just north of Atlanta. So we turned a 6 hour round trip into a 19 hour round trip. We drove our trade in down and took delivery of our new reflection.

Issues we found during delivery inspection (after dealer PDI was supposedly done and all systems checked):
-Shower missing lots of caulking around the entire bottom so when water was run on the inside of the door we got a waterfall on the bathroom floor.
-Bunkhouse door latches would not line up so door would not stay closed.
-Island sink drain leaking under island due to loose pipe connection.
-Tires inflated to 48 psi rather than the proper 80
-Indicator LED on power cord connection inop on rear of trailer.
-Missing caulking in over a dozen areas on exterior of trailer.
-Switch to activate water pump reversed (compared to on position of all others).

So overall not a huge amount of things but a bunch should have been caught by a real PDI and systems testing. We hitched up and pulled it about 3.5 hours up the road into South Carolina for a test run in a KOA. Overall very happy with the trailer no other issues found. Having the second AC was nice since it was about 98 degrees outside. Trailer tows very nicely with my truck so no complaints there.

One complaint I would have is the plastic pans in the forward storage compartment are cheap and hold water in the grooves rather than funneling them out onto the ground as they should. In my mind water should be encouraged to drain outside rather than sit in the plastic pan. The pass through hole for the water hose actually prevents water rom draining out the way it's designed.

Other than that I'm heading out for 10 days at the end of the month and will let you know what else I find!

David

[Bob/OlallaWA]

A small drill bit run through the plastic pan in a few spots cures the water holding problem.