You do want the chassis connected, it's a part of the ground circuitry. If you have AC in the camper, the safety ground should also be tied in there.
Although there is a ground "harness" in my camper, a few things are also grounded directly to the chassis. Lets see, the furnace, flood and porch lights. All of the water pump current returned through that ground harness, and if the other appliances weren't tied to the chassis
all of the return current would flow through a 14 to 10 AWG "harness". All eight circuits!
Ground wire "harness" with taps:
P1050421r.JPG
I overkilled it by running a ground wire back to the fuse block for each circuit - probably not necessary with the chassis being a big low impedance ground, but while I was wiring stuff . . .
The fuses in the solar panel are necessary. Yeah, the
panel will never blow that fuse, but bad things can happen to the cicuitry with accidental shorts to other stuff. For example, my hawk was built without fuses on any of the solar panel/controller circuitry. The guy I bought it from proudly pointed out the new floor he had installed, a vinyl sheet that ran under both the water tank and the 130 # Lifeline AGM battery. Of course both had to be removed to install that floor. When he reinstalled the battery, I'm pretty sure he connected it backwards, blowing up both the controller and the
bypass diodes in the solar panel. Fuses might have prevented some of the damage! As transistors tend to blow faster than fuses, the controller damage was probably inevitable. But, those bypass diodes would have easily withstood the short circuit current long enough to blow a fuse. (I replaced the shorted controller, and was able to save the panels by replacing the diodes).
Caution:
P1010685r_1.JPG Diodes:
2015-04-18_16-54-49_602r.jpg
Good plan on the short ground replacement, I had mine pull out on a washboard road. It was connected between the battery and ground buss, the battery was shifting around a bit. I entered the camper to a screeching LP/CO detector, and a refrigerator running on 9 volts under load - the wire was still kind of in contact