178 axle support

Great! It sure looks like more in the photo, shows how deceiving those can be. That's encouraging because your negative camber was really bad and its fixed by just recambering the tube, no other damage. So hopefully our axle end reinforcing fixes should solve the problem.... 

That response from the guy at Lippert is exactly why most companies keep their engineers in the back room and feed them peanuts. 

Lippert is the manufacturer who made that axle with that support spacing and its Lippert's label on the axle rating it at 3500 lbs. Not FR's. So Lippert is in the end responsible for fitness for use, they can't claim FR "forced" them to do it. 

I'm speculating but most likely what really happened is that the FR sales account executive at Lippert won the internal argument to accept that order at that price point and that required Lippert's engineering dept to reduce their normal axle load safety factor.  That safety factor is not regulatory as far as I can tell so its whatever they think it needs to be. its not a black and white thing. That kind of thing is very common in manufacturing companies especially ones that service a few large OEM's.  Its the old sales vs. engineering battle and sales usually wins. Duh, the engineers aren't the ones bringing in the cash. 

The safety factor on that axle isn't way off the mark either, looked like around 2.5 to 3x when I checked it, meaning you'd have to have a 2.5 to 3g bump load or around 4000 lbs per wheel to get a failure. That does happen but not commonly.  So while its no consolation to those that have had an axle failure, its not clearly that bad either. The actual failure rate isn't that high or there would be hundreds or thousands of folks reporting axle failures. 

And, axle problems are not by any means limited to rPods. If you do a web search you'll see these kinds of issues and concerns cropping up with many different makes and models of trailers. Weak axles seem to be endemic in the travel trailer industry. 

An interesting project might be to get something like this and stick it to an axle to monitor actual bump loading accelerations. You can get an accelerometer app for smartphones but I'm not going to strap my iphone to my axle.

www.amazon.com/Bluetooth-Accelerometer-Triple-Axis-Acceleration-Transducer/dp/B01MRPKDV9/ref=sr_1_1_sspa?gclid=CjwKCAjwk7rmBRAaEiwAhDGhxHekWdTW6ZDHHkE74oFgWlLnJmUxkNfSmeP6D0hHexgd5C5QhWtC9RoCXaoQAvD_BwE&hvadid=153659459887&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9009855&hvnetw=g&hvpos=1o1&hvqmt=b&hvrand=1951565213553423548&hvtargid=kwd-15395111&hydadcr=18031_9433042&keywords=accelerometer+sensor&qid=1557052264&s=gateway&sr=8-1-spons&psc=1