Plunger and Nylon Socket Door Holder - 2" Long Plunger

Video Transcript for Redline Plunger and Nylon Socket Door Holder Installation

Hi there Forest River owners. Today on your 2015 Forest River Vengeance, we're gonna be taking a look at and showing you how to install Redline's bumper and plunger in a two inch length for a door stopper and holder. The plunger and bumper from Redline is gonna be an easy way for you to keep a door in the open position, and also to prevent it from contacting any of your components to cause damage to those components. So this is a really nice setup if you don't have a solution for your door, if your door just swings open. There are some other options, you can get just, like, the plunger with the bumper on it to where it would just hit the door to keep it from damaging any of your components. There's also another style where it's like a hook, where you'll hook it into either the door or the other side here, and it's just a metal hook that holds it.

This one is gonna be one of the easiest kind of setups though, as far as the fastest. With the hook style, if you want to use that one you have to hold the door over, you gotta bring that hook and line it up in the slot just right. Now I will say, I do like that style 'cause it is fairly secure, but it is a little bit more work on your part to get it set up, you gotta line that thing up to get it all in there. This one, you just kinda open the door and it does what it needs to do. The issue with just the bumper style ones is it doesn't hold your door, so if you have a heavy crosswind or anything like that, your door could potentially swing open or closed.

So, this is gonna give you the added benefits of being able to open a door and just utilize your screen without worrying about it opening and causing any damage or the wind slamming it shut and causing damage to your door. And we can see, we can close our screen door and then turn on a vent fan or something on the inside to enjoy some nice, fresh airflow while our door stays open here. And it is fairly secure, these little bumpers are no joke as far as how hard it is to push it in and out, I mean, I gotta give it a pretty good tug to get it out of there, so there ain't no way wind's gonna grab that, just ain't gonna happen, it's really strong. Same with pushing it open, you can pretty much just take your body weight though and lean into it and that'll snap that right in there for you. You can install it wherever you want on the door, but I do kind of recommend installing it in a location roughly where you're gonna be using your hand in most situations to get the best pull directly on the mechanism there.

And these plungers, you can purchase this same setup from Redline in various lengths. We're showing off the two inch model but if you needed a shorter one, makes it closer to the door, the closer to the door it is the more secure it's gonna be from wind and stuff like that. But if you got components you need to clear, you're gonna need that extra distance, so. So now that we've covered some of the features of our bumper, if you wanna follow along with us we'll show you how to get it installed. So we're gonna begin our installation here by determining where we wanna put this.

This door used to have a shock absorbing mechanism on it, a little tiny shock dampener so the door wouldn't open this far, but when the steps we're changed over, the shock absorber that it had on it no longer will function with those steps, so, they don't want the door just flapping open, potentially damaging their speaker grille, the speaker itself, or any other components here. These are just plastic, and plastic things get hit by the sun like this, get very brittle in a pretty short amount of time, couple of years they can actually get quite brittle outside. So, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take both of these two pieces here. If you take a look, you'll see that they do, kind of, snap together there and it's a nice tight fit so that way it'll hold the door. I'll go ahead and , yeah, it's really, really tight, but there you go, you can see they do snap together. This is what I recommend doing first, just so you can verify that that's gonna be the right length, and, kind of, just see where you're planning on positioning it. Now you can put it at the bottom if you want, top corner, I kind of recommend putting it more towards the middle though 'cause if you we're to put it at the very bottom corner or the very top corner, and when you're normally opening and closing your door by pulling from the middle, you're gonna be, kind of, putting some stress on your door hinges 'cause it's gonna be holding it down here but you're gonna be putting like a pressure on it here, that's gonna make it kind of pivot. So we want to try to put it in a pretty close location to where we're gonna be grabbing the door to make sure we're pulling it straight out of the plunger. It'll also be easier on your material, that's on your side wall and in your door, holding these components in place. So, we're gonna start with the ball side here. I did take some butyl tape and I just shoved it inside of there, that's gonna help seal it up for when we mount it on the wall, it doesn't let moisture enter inside. So you are just gonna use some screws to put it in, you do not get any screws with your kit though, so you will have to provide your own. So I've already determined that I wanted to put it about here, I went ahead and made a mark. And then the outside of our camper here actually is, like, a fiberglass material, so I do recommend making a small pilot hole just, kind of, through that fiberglass until you hit the wood. And then that way we can guarantee that our fastener is gonna get a nice bite. Now we're gonna be using just a Phillips head screw here, or that also accepts a number two square bit. It's roughly about an inch in length, I'd say maybe an inch and a quarter. That should be good, you don't wanna penetrate all the way through your wall, so something small like this. What I usually like to do, is I'll just hold it up to my door, if it's not gonna penetrate through my door, it's likely not gonna penetrate through your wall either 'cause the thickness should be very similar to one. So you can see here, our screw's definitely not gonna penetrate through the inside. So now that we've, kind of, made that determination, I'm gonna go ahead and stick my screw through the center here, kind of get it through that butyl tape, just to the point where it's poking through there so I can line it up with the small hole that I had drilled. We'll just kind of poke it in there like that, get that butyl tape to kind of stick, and we're gonna switch over to either your Phillips or number two square bit and get that mounted. And that feels nice and solid, it doesn't twist, we have no gap all the way around it, and our butyl tape should be sealing that up for us there. Now we're gonna take the other side, and we are gonna use some butyl tape on it as well. I'm gonna go ahead and poke it in there , that way when we go to shut the door we can, kind of, line it up where we need it to go. So we're gonna go ahead and take our butyl tape here and we're gonna fill in that inner cavity, just like we did this one. If you need some butyl tape, you can get some here at etrailer. And just nice, nice fill there. We're gonna make sure we just fill up the entire inner of that cavity, just to make sure we get the best seal possible. You don't want leaks into your door, can lead to premature damage of your components 'cause the moisture will damage the material and can also lead to mold and other issues, so we really wanna make sure we get this sealed up. All right, so that looks pretty good right there, We're gonna go ahead and take our door now, we're gonna open it up, get it lined up to where our plunger has a pretty good spot on it right there, kind of twist it to where it looks pretty good. We kind of know roughly where it's gonna go, we'll just, kind of, line it back up, make sure our plunger is gonna hit, and that looks like it's about right on where it needs to be. We can always take any excess butyl tape that's, kind of, squeezing out the outside, and we can just take a little razor knife or something and clean all that off. So we're just making sure we do get it lined up. That all looks good, maybe center it just a little bit so our two fasteners that are gonna hold this side in place are lined up with one another, kind of on the same level. That looks pretty good, double check our plunger's gonna hit, that all looks very good there. So now we're just gonna take our fasteners and run these in. These ones are gonna be, we use a little bit smaller fastener on this side. And I like to leave it just a smidge loose when we start the next one. And then we can run 'em in. See where our plunger lines up, little bit low, that's okay, we can manipulate that just a little tiny bit there. Push that up, just a hair, and then snug it back down. Recheck our plunger, and that feels pretty good, snaps into place for us. So we'll clean up our butyl tape now, and this side looks pretty good it has a much bigger lift on it so you can really fill that cavity up and it doesn't squish out so much. The butyl tape is not, it's not very hard, so, the blade cuts through it quite easily. Just kind of take your time, follow around that outside edge, and you should be able to, kind of, peel it off of there. Might have to use your razor blade or something to get some of the pieces that are real close to the inside. Now we'll just get this cleaned up and we'll be good to go from there. And that completes our installation of Redline's plunger and bumper door stopper and holder..