Roof Leak Advice & Insight

We have a 1995 TM that has developed some significant leaks…significant in that they seem to be all over the place, not necessarily a huge volume of water coming in. After looking through all the “leak” threads here, I'm sure it's the trim that needs to be re-caulked, so I am planning on re-caulking all the corner seams on the exterior of the roof, as well as possibly the center trim piece although it does not seem to need it.

I’ve noticed that the trim on my roof differs from the trim on newer roofs (see my pictures), so I hope somebody that has or has had an older TM may be able to enlighten me to some degree on the construction of the roof and how the trim on my roof “works”…I don’t know if just removing the old caulk from the seam formed by the trim and the roof is sufficient or not. The aluminum trim piece on my roof edge has a center channel with a piece of “floating” vinyl type material that is either slid-in or is pushed inside it. I haven’t removed it, but at this point I am assuming the vinyl piece may cover some screws that hold the trim piece in place and possibly the roof to the side walls?? If that is the case, it seems like I could possibly be getting some leaks from inside the channel of the trim via the screw holes in addition to the seam between the trim piece and the roof where you can see the caulking. My roof does not have an interior aluminum angle brace like the newer models have (based on the interior pictures posted by commodor47 http://picasaweb.google.com/commodor47/RoofLeak#), and that is why I am assuming the outside trim piece is what holds the roof to the side walls. Hopefully somebody here knows for sure as I don’t want to have to start pulling stuff apart unless I absolutely have to, and then only if I have replacement parts on hand in the event something needs to be repaired/replaced.

We have a Camping World about thirty minutes away, so I went there yesterday and picked up some tubes of caulk…two types, one a self leveling and the other a non-leveling, for horizontal and vertical surfaces, respectively. They are both made by Dicor and were $8 a tube, which is twice the cost of the DAP Alex Ultra230 caulk I used on my house this spring when I painted it. I guess the Dicor caulk is superior in some way to the DAP caulk so much so that it justifies the cost? I don’t necessarily mind spending twice as much on caulk if that’s the case, but would like to know if anybody has had any issues with it versus, say, a run-of-the-mill but high quality caulk like DAP. It looks like the caulk used (by the factory I assume) on the horizontal surface is not a self leveling caulk, so I'm not sure if I really need to use this type of caulk. Any thoughts? There does not seem to be any caulk on the vertical surface where the corner roof trim meets the side wall of the TM so I plan on using the non-leveling type caulk there as (1) it couldn't hurt to have it there, and (2) it seems there is a potential for water/moisture to wick into this seam without it.

I've got about 9 months of tree litter and dirt to clean off of the top of my TM before I re-caulk, and was going to pressure wash it off, but on second thought that will probably just put a lot of water inside the walls given the leak problem, so I'm just going to have to do it the more labor intensive way with a bunch of elbow grease . I bought a plastic caulk removal tool to (hopefully) get most if not all of the old caulk off the trim/roof...any advice for getting the remaining scraps off?? Alcohol or acetone seems to be the popular recommendations. Any other advice or insight would be helpful...I want to get this done RIGHT the FIRST time so it won't have to be done again (hopefully) for a long time.

Tony