I discovered a couple of things this weekend while checking this, adjusting that and lubricating the other.

Thing one: It's worth checking the tightness of the screws holding your awning rail on. While I was messing about inside the van (a 2008 540 in our case), it absolutely tonked it down and I found to my consternation that we had a leak.

This prompted an inspection of the awning rail (the only place water could have got in), and I found out that the rail was loose above the door. Not flapping about loose, but loose enough to be able to twist it away from the roof by a millimetre or so. It's not much of a gap, but water doesn't need much of a gap.

Out came the infill strip, and having undone all the screws (a mixture of stainless self-tappers and surprisingly small Torx screws) from the rail joint over the offside front window right back almost as far as the awning light, I eased the rail itself away from the body.

Sure enough there was water sitting in the joint between the wall panel and the bottom edge of the roof moulding, behind the wide rubber seal which is sandwiched between the rail and the body and bedded in that horrid black butyl mastic.

Some time later (several hours, when you include all the time it took to clean off all the new mastic which squidged out when I reattached the rail), I had a nice waterproof caravan again.

I suspect the problem was caused by a combination of the shrinkage of the original mastic and the not inconsiderable load put on the rail (and the awning brackets) by the awning itself. It's big lump of a thing, a thing which by its nature has to be held in quite a lot of tension and is tugged and buffeted by the elements.

The screws down the awning side were noticeably less tight than those at the ends and down the other side. They are now all nipped up properly, and I'm much happier about it all.

Thing two: This stuff is the same butyl mastic as that applied at the factory. If it's different, I struggle to see how. It looks the same, acts the same, smells the same and is just as much of a pain in the arse to remove from places you don't want it to be.

I wanted to use the same stuff as original for obvious reasons, not least that it remains sticky and doesn't set. People swear by Sikaflex this and Sikaflex that, but I don't think it's the right thing for this particular job.

And best of all, unlike Sikaflex, which for some completely unfathomable reason costs several hundred quid a tube, it wasn't expensive. I got two tubes from a local discount place and had change from six quid.

Definitely the dog's conkers.

Thing three: The awning light. Ours was as weedy as everybody else's. It was so weedy that we didn't even notice we'd left it on accidentally almost every single night.

No good. Mindful of advice from all quarters about the perils of putting brighter halogen capsules than the standard 5w glow worms in there, I put a pair of 3w LEDs I had left over from something else in there instead. What a revelation.

It's these here.

I doubt they're quite as bright as the claimed 25w equivalent, but they're miles better than the original halogens, don't get hot, will run off AC and DC and will tolerate voltage variations.

And they're very close in colour temperature to the halogens. None of this horribly cold DHSS waiting room lighting nonsense.

Highly recommended.

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