|
My wife and I have finally started on our project to build our own camper, and I thought I’d share the process here. This is something we’ve been talking about doing for at least 5 or 6 years now if not more. But stuff happened and things came up and talk remained talk. Shortly after the new year, it became a “lets just do this so we have it” kind of project. Plus, we’re really sick of tents at this point and if our current tent survives this season we’ll be fortunate. So what is a Teardrop Camper? If you camp at all you have probably seen them as their popularity has surged back in the past decade or two – Very small campers, usually being towed by a car or some flavor of Subaru. The internet says that they have a very noble history going back to at least the 1930s and probably before. Basically, they aren’t complicated, typically sleep two, are fairly small, lightweight, and aerodynamic. The aerodynamic bit is where the name comes from. Besides the bed, the amenities are usually limited to a camp kitchen, hanging off of the back. Pintrest will show you there are as many designs as campers out there:  So is this just some twee tiny house bullshit? Not really. I don’t think so anyway. For starters, everyone is going to fall on the “I’m camping, you’re glamping” spectrum somewhere between a motor home and shivving a deer for dinner while naked and alone. We really enjoy the idea of a warm, comfortable bed (that’s level!), not on the ground, and somewhere to prep food and store the more critical stuff. Everything else – well, we enjoy being outdoors. Yeah, if the whole trip is rained out, that’s still gonna kinda suck in a Teardrop. Not quite as much as it does in a tent, though. But I really have no desire to hang around in a crappier version of “indoors” while theoretically camping – that’s what bigger RVs have always felt like to me. The other big thing – and back to that smattering of teardrops pictured above, is doing what you want and getting what you want. Some people go all in on style and art with these things.  Some people keep the small camper concept and shape and make them tall enough to stand up in (affectionately called canned hams)  Others go all in on lightness with “Foamies.” Some of these go so far as to be towed by e-bikes. Fiberglass optional but encouraged.  Squaredrop campers are a bit more brutalist and tend to show up with heavy duty off-road capabilities.  But the classic teardrop tends to look something like this:  Small and compact, cabin in the front, big tailgate hatch to expose the kitchen. This is similar-ish, in overall concept anyway, to what we are going for. The photo above is a commercial model, and in fact there are a lot of those out there. Despite their size, they aren’t cheap either. Mostly I think this is due to economies of scale and the fact that most of the production companies for these are relatively small outfits. Or, just that they're getting away with it. Our budget for this is around $10k, and realistically I already know that’s gonna be more like $12. And yes, that pushes us all the way up to entry level commercial trailer just in materials costs alone. https://youtu.be/dBcbekjrY-E?t=20 Nicer models are more in the $20k+ range. Frankly though I’m not even sure I trust those – most campers I’ve seen have been built like crap to some degree or another. I think I can do better. More importantly though – I can do specifically what I want. One big problem is that I am a 6’6” 300 pound goony goon. I do not fit in campers. I grew so accustom to sleeping with my feet hanging off the bed that I can’t not do it anymore. The cross-chassis beds in pretty much every camper just do not work for me; I can’t even completely unfold. Since I’m building my own trailer, this is suddenly not a problem! Teardrops, home made ones anyway, tend to have actual queen size mattresses shoved in them. This is ideal for me. All I need to do, is plan some extra foot space at the bottom. As I write this OP, I’ve spent the majority of 3 months of spare time researching, designing, and planning. And this Friday night, March 31, I have glued together the first two pieces of the camper. A while back the woodworking thread title was “pissing around for weeks on a half day’s project” or something like that. That tends to describe my project handling, so, I’m hoping having this thread to tend to is some extra motivation. My goal, is to have this done and out of the garage so that the cars can be back inside before the next Wisconsin winter. For now, the project is in our basement (exposed, we can haul stuff in and out) and this is where the first major sub assemblies will be built. Currently though, the state of the project is mostly a large pile of plywood and a growing pile of random fittings and gear. Navigability in the basement is low.   I snagged most of that pile of conflict plywood back in January while my local hardwood supplier still had some; they’re not restocking. However I drove all the way to Toledo to get the 1/8” skin material, which killed an entire day. Whatever. It’s done, and I have it.
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2023 04:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 08:20 |
|
|
On to our camper design. Teardrop campers tend to be built at 4, 5, and occasionally 6 feet wide, and 8 to 10 feet in length. On the small end, a 4 by 8 is by far the easiest and cheapest to build – Nominal sheet good sizing helps quite a bit, and a lot of people pop these on top of Harbor Freight or Northern Tool trailer kits of the same basic size. Lots of people who build 4 wides, also seem to later build a 5 wide or wish they had. 6 feet wide on the other hand adds quite a bit of complication in the form of materials use, and reduces the small vehicle tow-ability of the camper by quite a bit. 5 feet feels like the sweet spot to jam a queen mattress in and generally enjoy the camper. Similarly, 8 feet in length is again handy for commonly available trailers, and for sheet goods. And of course, smaller is lighter. But, in order to accommodate the bed and your legs, you compromise in the galley. Lower storage in the galley is usually close to non-existent. In the cabin, a lot that I have seen on this size tend to really push the interior cabinetry into your face. We’re not particularly claustrophobic or we wouldn’t be tackling a tiny camper, but I don’t think this would be very comfortable either. So: 5’x10’-ish is the plan, figure the trailer out later.  We started working on the general profile we wanted, some of the first sketches are above. Sketchup dude scaled to heights of myself and my wife. My height is another issue here – The interior height of the Teardrop itself. Quite a few home built designs don’t end up taller than 4’ above the chassis, again for simplicity of sheet goods. But, I wanted to make sure I could sit up on the bed, reach my arms over my head and pull a shirt off. That doesn’t take a lot more than a standard 4’, but it absolutely needs more. The other big height problem is the tailgate hatch itself – I want to reduce the chance I crack my head into the raised corner of the hatch, and that means getting it way into the air, hopefully enough to accommodate some shallow slopes in campsites. In some of the first designs (left version above) we were thinking about having a 3 part rear hatch, with a flat back.  This would let the hatch be shorter, making it a little easier to get the upper part away from my head, and it wouldn’t hang out in the site so far or be as heavy. But, on the other hand the seal design and construction for 3 door panels meeting in a tee seems… not fun. Plus, I think it looks kinda dumb. Speaking of flat ends – Many of these trailers are built with a flat vertical front end, that then curves into the roof. This is practical - both from ease of assembly, and just maximizing internal useful space. And if you add a tongue box, it will fit nicely against the camper. So of course, this was one thing we had decided against from the beginning. This is also pretty much the one big decision we made purely from an aesthetics point of view – we just don’t like how they look. So, a curved front it is. Zeroing in on what we want the shape to be, we work more with what exactly we want to stuff into this thing.  The big black shape above, is the 12v refrigerator shown in the OP. We went ahead and just bought it, among quite a few other things, to make sure we could actually fit it into the camper. Which is also how I know this is over budget despite just starting – we actually own most of the camper at this point, just, not assembled. Ultimately, we made it to this final design:  The model itself is close to complete here. There’s a number of fine details I need to get around to adding, but other specifics like the exact wall layout will be handled at full size when I make the construction template. Similarly, things like roof spars will largely be fitted as needed, with certain critical requirements detailed out. In this setup, starting at the front we’re going to have a fairly large headboard that also forms the forward bulkhead. This will have two fold-down doors allowing access to the oddly-shaped bin behind it. This is set at a tilted back angle and is tall enough that you should be able to comfortably lean on it, if you want to sit inside and read.  Into the cabin, we’re going to have a pair of fairly large cabinets for general storage, and a central open bay that can be more flexible. The large square opening into the galley won’t be there obviously, I haven’t bothered modeling a cover for that yet. Here, we’re taking advantage of my needed foot room. The bed is going to stop about 6” short of the main galley bulkhead you see below. My side will be on the left, which means the right has extra room. To take advantage of this space, we’re allowing the slide out fridge tray to protrude into the cabin space a small amount.  Most uses of these fridges end up going in 90 degrees off from how we are doing it. Which is fine, but it costs a lot more surface area in the galley end. Doing it the way we are lets us get a full 60 quart size fridge into this thing. Which is handy because their next size down, a 45 quart, has the same general height and width but is less deep – which would save us nothing on this design. Since a Teardrop is all about comfortable sleeping and food prep, more cold storage doesn’t seem like a bad idea at all. Since you don’t need ice with this style of system though, the same quart size goes a lot further than it does with a traditional cooler. The two circular holes you see are vents to exchange air between the cabin and galley. One will be passive, one active. This will mostly be used while traveling or on hot days when we’re not at camp – The fridge needs to dump heat somewhere, so do all of the electronics systems. Swinging around to the galley end, the upper space will be a row of cabinets, doors not drawn here. On top of the cabinet is a relatively small space that will have something of a funky access due to the lid clamping down on it – but this should be a good spot for sunscreen, bug spray, hats, whatever. General catch all that’s better than just leaving things on the counter top below.  On the countertop itself, off to the right you can see the general electronics control area. This will have 120v shore power along with 12v battery power for the galley. Also includes galley and auxiliary light controls, and a battery and solar charge controller monitor. To the right of that is an overpriced faucet that better drat well work reliably. It has a magnetic base, shown here is just one parking location for it. This will have a tube out the back, dropping into the 5 gallon water tank below. No sink though – we don’t feel a permanently installed sink and gray water tank can be justified against the significant space they take up. Speaking of the water tank – we’re storing our water and electricity together. What could go wrong? I do actually have some plans around internal partial dividers in there that should keep everything protected. There’s a lot of gear jammed in by the battery (yellow block) – Fuses, disconnects, and solar charge controller primarily. I’m planning to fit all of this to some sort of slide out tray so I can actually work on most of it where it is accessible. Finally, the central area will have a false back that does a couple of things – Hide the electronics distribution, act as ductwork for directing the air from the vent hole, and leave space if we ever decide to add a 12v to 120v inverter to this. In front of all of that, will be either two or three drawers.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2023 14:03
|
|
|
The first thing you do on a new adventure is, of course, side quests. To that end: problem one, my workbench is in no way going to be suitable for any of this, and I never had any kind of real assembly table, besides the 2 foot square flappy wings I made for my jobsite table saw. And there is no way I’m going to build any part of this monstrosity on the floor. So it’s off to Home Depot, where they have some fairly decent radiata pine plywood. I haul a few sheets home and grab my trusty mostly-straight piece of oak and set it up as a cutting guide.  That turned out to be pretty stupid, incidentally. I mean it worked well enough. But, I’ve been wanting to buy a tracksaw forever. And, maybe a month after I cut these sheets up, I finally just bought one. So, yeah, good job me, that was logical. Oh well. Here, I’m loosely following Ron Paulk’s mobile/jobsite assembly table thing. When this is all done I might turn one of them into a router table. For now though, let’s make a work surface.   Two sheets get cut in almost-half, and one gets chopped up into a bunch of equal strips. The two almost-half sheets produce a very thin leftover strip from the middle of the board. This is intentional, I’m going to need a strip like that later as a batten for lofting the whole layout onto a template. I cleverly store these on our house’s beam, behind a piece of copper that the builders presumably lost and forgot here, 50 years ago. I’ve joked enough about this being a terrible idea, that I will totally remember that they are here.  (ok I only sort-of forgot they were here until I saw this photo to write this) Anyway, 3 of the strips get chopped up into equal size chunks, and one of those gets set up as a master. Why in the hell am I using the router circle jig and not just lopping them out with the jig saw? I have no idea.  A quick check to make sure I can get my hand through while holding something.  And then do it again another hundred times or so.  I am using a ton of pocket hole screws to lock these things together, just out of convenience. They’ll be glued also of course. The web that I’ve left is pretty thin, given the limitations of using one sheet to make everything and needing a hole big enough to get my hand into. Some of those screws need to be placed through the thin material at the center of the hole. Not a whole lot of meat left in those locations, but, it should be fine once everything is glued and screwed into a single solid object. So naturally I almost immediately dropped one of them.  Oops. Fortunately, the two pieces fit snugly and seemed to hold a straight line. Which is good because I was not going to go back for one more sheet of plywood to fix this mess. I was able to glue and clamp these up, and pull the two halves together pretty well. Once I got into assembly I threw a bit of reinforcement behind these broken areas. Assembly for these went nice and quick.   Clean out the abandoned corner of the basement, borrow some left over saw horses, and the two halves got bolted together. Plopped on top I now have a 4’ by 8’ work surface, and a fairly flat one too. Unfortunately one of the tops had a bit of a bulge in it, which I was able to mostly get rid of via some belt sanding. That left one edge along the entire table was a little low, but overall I’m pretty pleased. This still won’t cover the walls or floor in one go but I should be able to work around that with a bit of maneuvering and bracing.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2023 00:34
|
|
|
One more not-a-camper thing to take care of right away – I need a foam cutter. Two, actually. I bought a small transformer and some resistance wire, and set about cobbling from random leftovers and cutoffs. For one thing I had all these long oval chunks from the bench, so I trued up a pile of those to a consistent size.  I didn’t exactly have a “plan” here. More of a vague idea that I didn’t really think through all the way. I love projects like that. No need to stress, or think. Just start adding bits.  Make a spicy washer  (And I should add – I can’t solder for poo poo and will be doing as little of it as possible on this whole thing) Add more bits. And a couple hooks that you found under the mantle.  Completely overbuild an arm assembly because you changed where things were going to pivot, while building. Keep going. There’s no chance of this turning into a messy boondoggle.  Anyway what I ended up acomplishing here, was making a whole arm structure that holds one end of the resistive wire. That wire is extended out on a bolt and captive by a couple of nuts, so I can move it back and forth. The whole arm, pivots under the table and is fitted into a loose socket, so I’ve got these screws that can put sideways tension on the whole thing. Between these two points and the tunrbuckle, I can tension the wire and pitch it around so it’s perpendicular to the table.  A quick rig up and test with the closest foam object I had at hand, and it works great. Do not recommend using this to cut that kind of foam though, smokes a lot… But it did work! I need to de-jankify that wiring though.  Made up a little control board to mount the light switch in, and it’s 90% less janky!  … Well, at least 70%  The other version of the cutter I needed was much more straight forward, a bow saw kinda shape thing.  However after swapping the connections over just once, I was cursing these crappy little spade terminals I was using. Granted, they’re the wrong size and I don’t think you’re supposed to crimp them onto solid wire. But they were still utter garbage and one fell apart immediately. I only grabbed these for doing some simple test connections on things, they were dirt cheap. For a reason, apparently. And then I remembered that I planned to use Anderson power pole connectors for the eventual fridge plug in, and the general solar connection port. Which is a total of 4 connectors and I had to get a 10 pack. I’d never used these, so practice time!  These things are fantastic. Not terribly fiddly to assemble, and once they are put together they are solid and they are working great for exactly this use case. They are making it super easy to swap which cutter is attached to the transformer. Speaking of – I know some people just do this straight at 120v but that seemed like a poor idea to me – enough risk of burning the poo poo out of yourself without adding the risk of a nice shock to that. I think spending $20 on a transformer was a good call. I might have been able to do this even with something out of my junk pile but I don’t think I had anything at hand enough with quite enough power to it. The dimmer switch was also critical for this – Below is the smaller shape cutter at full power. The XPS foam tends to evaporate away from it if you try to run anything this hot. Also note the small recess in the table, where one could easily fit a small washer to help protect your table from wire contact. You know, if you remembered to put it in. I’m not taking it apart now. 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2023 04:11
|
|
|
Thanks - I realize there isn't much of anything to discuss at the moment, but hopefully a few people find this interesting. Just a bit more catch up posting to do with the actual build start and then I'll be live posting progress from there.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 5, 2023 12:16
|
|
|
"Needs" strictly speaking, nothing. But, quite a bit of it and this makes the job easier. The floor and walls are of a similar sandwich construction, where the inner layer is a hollowed out skeleton. The holes are then back filled with matching XPS foam chunks.  The floor is pretty straightforward, but the walls are going to have more funky shapes and curves. The thickness is a bigger deal, and what the larger saw is for. For one thing no one around here has 3/4" XPS foam on hand, only 1". But even if they did - the floor is a little under 3/4", which could be resolved by more sanding. The walls though, are slightly over 3/4" in most areas. Which doesn't really mater in this case since I'm just taking a thickness down from 1" material anyway.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2023 00:59
|
|
|
Right! This thread was supposed to be about a camper so let’s do that then. The first thing that’s going to get built is the floor. Not because the rest of it is getting assembled on top of that, or anything – it’s actually going to be a while before anything takes on a 3D camper shape. Floor and walls will be built modularly, along with as much of the various cabinetry as I think I can get away with. But, floor first gives me a couple of decent advantages. First, it’s a stiff, fairly compact structure that will use up some of this awful pile of materials and should sit politely out of the way once done. It should be able to lean up against a wall just fine until needed. Second, I may actually want that big flat surface – I might end up using this as an extension of the main work table. This would help quite a lot because the walls are going to end up about 11 feet long overall. While I can work on one side or the other and slide it back and forth, the less of that that I have to do, the better. Plus this will be wide enough to catch the whole height. Third, the floor is a pretty basic structure with simple shapes and I can get a chance to practice some things I’ve never done before. Things like using the foam cutters I just built, mixing epoxy that doesn’t come out of a JB Weld tube, and mixing epoxy and arranging it with fiberglass to produce a desired result.  Above, is the first piece I prepped. This is the core layer of the floor, that will be located under the galley. This area needs to be fairly robust, so in some places it’s effectively going to be a 1.25” thick piece of plywood. As pictured here, the left side will be under the main cabin/galley bulkhead. The two countertop supports (which will also carry the drawers and half of the fridge) will sit on top of those left-right solid plywood strips. The holes, are pretty much just speed holes. I don’t need anything under the fridge (foreground), as it’s actually going to be supported on the walls. Same under the drawers. Area under the water jug and battery on the other hand… That’s a lot of weight in a small area that might do a little bouncing while driving. I cut some small holes there but left it pretty intact. To this piece of plywood, we’re attaching a rim made of Poplar. Home Depot had a couple of astoundingly nice pieces when I was there randomly – 11 foot long, clear, straight, flat, and almost completely quartersawn. So, I grabbed those immediately. They’re thicker than the plywood though so they need a light haircut.  I really need to build a cart for that and stop doing it on the ground. Anyway, I took extremely light passes and kept feeding a sample of the plywood through, until the cutters just bit into the plywood. Back to the basement, and I set up a crapload of dowels.  I have a Dowelmax which I really like – I’ve never done a row of dowels this long before though. I was happy to find it had no trouble at all holding alignment along the length. I bought the ¼” drill guide set for this project – this is all ¾ material but I didn’t want to risk delaminating the plywood. These dowels aren’t really providing strength anyway, just good alignment.  Glued and clamped and I’m happy with that. I flipped it over the next morning and glued the opposite side on, leaving me with a gigantic, unwieldy, fork thing.  I would have preferred to fit and glue all of the cross members to the first side, and then fit and glue the opposite full length member to all of that at once – But the realities of my work table made me believe this was going to be easier so I did it this way instead. Anyway the first two cross members get cut out of a piece of plywood and fitted to the length. Then, dowel from one end and a pocket hole screw from the other. There’s still no real strength required of this joint, the function of the cross members here are to help grab plywood ends, and provide a solid compression path onto the metal frame below.  The front cross member will be another piece of Poplar, not plywood. One pocket screw helped suck it against the dowels on the left side. The other side was going to be only pocket screws. Unfortunately I forgot to, like, clamp it down or in any way restrain the wood before I shoved screws into holes. So I made a hash of that, and didn’t have space to drill new holes. Plus this was already covered in glue. So, I just slapped a mending plate over it and decided to let the glue dry on this butt joint. I’m sure no problems will come of this.  That done, it was time to flatten everything as perfectly as I could, then slap down a bunch of glue and bond on the first face. This is ¼” Baltic birch – Whole thing will be an inner and outer ¼” layer with the ¾” core – Apparently this should be plenty strong even for a fatass like me.  Simply apply all of the clamps and heavy things that you can find, and you’re done!  Then use my fancy new toy to cut out the final size square shape from this block of wood. I’m using the front face of the plywood under the galley bulkhead as reference, everything else is being squared to that line. Chester the project cat also showed up to talk to me at this point, as he often does. Here he is being particularly bothered by something or other stupid that I’ve done.  And with that done, I’ve got a complete and clean floor-shaped thing! 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 8, 2023 03:01
|
|
|
Shove the kids in the tent! Alternatively I always wanted to see someone build a gigantic teardrop shaped fifth wheel.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2023 17:13
|
|
|
Time to start making the foam infill to get rid of all these hollow spots. I cleverly forgot to use my board from the galley side, to trace out the pieces before covering one face of it. No matter, I still had the pieces I cut out, and this pen happened to be just about a perfect offset for the router bit width. Trace the shapes and time to get the foam cutter actually doing something.  Draw the lines, cut the shapes, fit the holes. A stupid number of these fit very well just off the first cut with no extra trimming or anything required. Also I snapped the photo of the foam cutter in use, while it was actively in use. It’s so easy to use – obviously this isn’t a table saw straight line or anything but here I am free handing it, fishing my phone out of my pocket and snapping a photo with the other hand.   I did find that the best way to actually use it was to do the usual stuff about getting yourself in a comfortable position, try not to be in a place where you’ll have to move your feet. Then, don’t ever rotate the part that you’re cutting. Just move it around as needed to cut the line required, without ever twisting it in place. I then rigged up a couple of sacrificial sticks of the core plywood material. These were wide enough for the “bow saw” style cutter wire to ride against. Pop a piece of foam in the middle and, this worked better than it had any right to. The first piece wanted to lift up on me, I just chucked a small weight on top of them after that. Surface came out pretty smooth – not as wavey as it looks in the photo.  To actually bond these in, I’m using epoxy. This is the same stuff that will be getting used as a general adhesive in some areas, along with doing all of the exterior waterproofing and fiberglassing eventually. So, I wanted to get a feel for mixing it as I’ve never done this. Plus in this case – from what I understand it’s somewhat hard to get a material that will bond well with the XPS foam. Certain construction adhesives do it – Gorilla brand apparently is a pretty good choice. But, I have this and want to try it. And at $10/tube for that adhesive I’m not sure the epoxy is all that much more expensive anyway. That went painlessly, time to move on to the rest of it.   I knew I couldn’t do the large sections as single pieces – simply couldn’t build a foam cutter large enough. If I did, I wouldn’t have enough power to get the wire hot enough for it to work, so, had to segment these down into smaller pieces.  Glued everything down with a bit of weight just to keep it in place.  And then sanded it to remove any irregularities, and give the still-factory smooth face of the XPS some tooth for the epoxy to bite into. And we’re all set to add the second side face plywood!  I…. hmmm…. That doesn’t seem good. 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 9, 2023 17:15
|
|
|
So that corner is indeed the one where the pocket holes screwed, uh, up. Still, I’m a little mystified as to what exactly happened. Without the screws, the parts were incredibly well behaved and just sat there flat. I’m guessing this made me overconfident and I missed something? I slapped that brace on it and it looked fine, and left it at that. I’m not sure if something pulled during the glue process, or if that sheet of plywood didn’t take well to the glue moisture? In any case, that’s what I’ve got to deal with. By way of solution, something that I had been planning on doing purely for practice is going to kick in and be an actual important part of this whole deal. First though, I gotta attach this second side. I hadn’t planned on using it yet, but I’ve got a couple tubs of this stuff, time to see what it can do.  Fumed silica is one of the many additives you can blend into epoxy to create materials with different properties. In this case, a thick jelly that will cure into a solid block. If you’re curious on the subject, I found this video fairly interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KjlyXKeo8c Since joints are being staggered, the middle of the whole assembly is getting a full sheet on this side. If you look closely at the corner in the left you can see the board is already twisting at that point – this is very close to where it started, it was back to full flat a few inches past that point. I had made up a bit of thickened epoxy here just to try it – Not enough though and I had to try to force pack more in there after the board was down. I don’t think I ended up with too meaningfully large of a void in there.  For the sheet in the front, I rigged up a piece of plywood, clamped down flat back where the pieces were straight and already firmly fixed. The sheet of plywood was nice and flat and mostly wanted to lift itself up to the normal flat plane anyway, it just needed a little help at the far edge.  Zero chances were taken on having too little this time. Also I want to mention that all mixing of the silica powder into the epoxy was done outside of the house, and yes I was wearing a respirator. Incidentally by volume, the epoxy mix eats just an absurd amount of it. I’ve used up at least ¼ of that tub, just doing this joint.   Once everything cured up, the whole thing was flipped over again. Took a quick lap with the belt sander to knock off the worst of the epoxy squeezings, then flipped it back over to trim up the top side sheets with a flush trim bit.  This all turned out pretty well. So now, both sides are assembled and at least one of them is pretty well flat.   But now I have to fix that lump. As you can see by the filled gap above, I’m going to have to remove most of the thickness of the rather important plywood in this location. To do that, I borrowed my dad’s power planer. I set it to zero depth and immediately took a giant gouge out of the plywood. I choose to interpret this as my dad’s fault for not telling me the tool was totally messed up, and not my fault for not checking. In any case it didn’t really matter – I had to pull so much material off I just took another couple of crude swipes with it as it was, and then smoothed everything out with the belt sander.  You can see the ridiculous amount of material being removed here:  This is, obviously, pretty concerning from an overall strength standpoint. I’ve seen quite a few of these sandwich builds done using a pair of ½” sheets, most of the time with people later going “I probably could have made that lighter”. ¼” also gets advertised as generally being fine for this use, and plenty strong enough. I am fighting my general urge to overbuild everything throughout this project as I do really need to keep weight down. Here though I had a compromise in mind, anyway. The whole bottom of this floor was supposed to get a coat of epoxy in order to waterproof it. On top of that, I was going to throw in a layer of fiberglass. I want to emphasize here that I don’t know crap about fiber glass layups and have never done it before. My entire knowledge comes from watching a bunch of YouTube on the subject. I had been thinking that throwing in a layer of glass down here where it will never be seen again, was a great place to get some practice in. It would also allow more resin to be held in a layer of protection from the road. Plus, it would add some strength without much extra weight, and thus beef the whole thing up a little better than the ¼” plywood would indicate. Now though, that strength reinforcement is pretty important. My new plan, is to throw two layers of glass on the bottom, plus an extra patch piece or two over the weakened area with the weave on a 45 degree bias to the main sheets; apparently this helps with strength quite a bit.  Above is the main patching piece cut out. This is 6 ounce "boat cloth" and is what I'm using for everything on here. Partially because I could get it in a 60" wide roll and that was really handy. Having never actually seen raw fiberglass cloth, the stuff is really neat to hold and touch. It's not terribly itchy to handle and deal with in this state, not until you start grinding and chopping it up anyway. Raised by Hamsters fucked around with this message at 03:10 on Apr 13, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2023 03:06
|
|
|
I'm also trying to work out what to do about a spare tire. I think adding a tongue box - at least a small one - would be a really handy thing to have. Shovel, axe, extension cord, wheel for the leveling jack, wheel chocks, all that miscellaneous junk. But, I had been thinking the spare could just sit low on the rear of the tongue. Even if I squeeze a long narrow box on there and raise the tire above it (which would also mean doors on the ends and a lot of reaching and digging), I think it ends up looking a bit beep beep clown nose. It probably wouldn't be that bad in person; throw a silver-ish tire cover over it and it it would somewhat blend in at least a little with the diamond plate that will end up on the front lower face of the trailer. I don't have room to sling it under the belly anywhere, the only place that's wide enough to not severely impact ground clearance, will end up occupied by the axle most likely.  I could also weld an arm onto the trailer frame and float it off the side wall somewhere. But that's gonna be awkward too and also messes with my intended shore power connection location, plus it's going to be a bit tricky to account for the fender. Wouldn't be a show stopper though I suppose, and that side of the camper is typically on the "outside" of the camp site. I'm not sure if I ever mentioned this but both walls will have doors, so all of that space forward of the axle on the driver side isn't actually free. I could also stick it on an angle on the side of the tongue, then make a more square-ish box on the other side of the tongue - But that pushes the tire forward even more and I really need to watch overall weight balance. My Outback's tongue weight limit is 200, I'm targeting 150 for this. Still, I should have room to move the axle forward.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2023 04:54
|
|
|
That might not be a bad idea, need to give that some thought. What probably is a bad idea- I've been toying with the idea of getting a donut spare off of something with the same bolt pattern, 17" run would put a tie closer to the same diameter as the real wheels. The trailer's pretty light, shouldn't be a huge load stress on it... The slight size difference would be enough to mount it under the camper, too. But, this is probably the kind of thing that's "fine" around here in Wisconsin where I probably don't even need a spare, and super sketchy if we go out in the middle of nowhere in Utah or something. I think I'm dismissing this idea as I write it?
|
|
#
¿
Apr 13, 2023 13:28
|
|
|
I’m going to say two things here: 1) I do not know what I am doing with fiberglass 2) It was an incredibly good idea to do this low-visibility practice section, we learned a lot here. The epoxy itself is just shy of being outright fun to play with. I didn’t really comment on this before but the process is very simple. First, snap the end off of a mixing stick so that you can scrape the bottom properly. It’s so viscous that there is absolutely no self mixing by being swished around by other epoxy. If you don’t scrape it, it’s not mixing.  Go ahead and pour part A into your mixing cup. Speaking of viscous – Stop early, because the fluid line will keep rising for about 30 seconds as all of the material you poured, levels out into the cup.  Part B (at least the one I am using) fortunately is more fluid. Get that brought in at your correct ratio. I’m told this won’t work beyond +/- 5% off of target volume so be precise. Then get to mixing, using your handily positioned clock.   You need to give it about 2 minutes of mixing. Less is fine for a tiny batch like this, big ones get harry. The whole thing is exothermic and given a bit of time it will start to cook on you in the pot, which is obviously compounded the larger the volume being mixed is. Incidentally, if you want to get a clock with a second hand, and you think that one with a hygrometer and thermometer built in sounds like a great idea for the basement wood shop, and you pay $13 for it, well, what the hell were you thinking you were going to get? (No those other numbers are not accurate) Do whatever you were going to do with your epoxy and then set the container aside. The next day, if you’re lucky, you can yoink the whole cured leftover straight out of the pot, like this:  That one had quite a bit of waste in it but I’ve managed to pull this off a few times. It’s very satisfying. You’ll also find out exactly where you failed to completely mix inside the cup, because there will be a wet border between this cured piece, and the cup wall. The cups themselves seem to be good for at least a few batches each – Eventually you break them while extracting the remains of the last batch. So, fiberglassing. Apparently if you buy a substantial enough chunk of a roll, they ship it to you as a log with about 70 wraps of cling film around it and a UPS shipping label. Took a while to de-husk it, then we rolled it out. We’re going to do this entire ~50 square foot section in one go, and see what happens.   This is the bottom, we’re doing 2 layers plus the patch piece. So, we roll both out and cut them to size, then carefully bundle them up where they can be grabbed later. The cloth is surprisingly soft to the touch, I also find it a bit trippy to look at. The weave plays with the reflections – If you are cutting it and you manage to follow one of the threads in a straight line, you can leave yourself a pretty clean edge. But, this is hard to do with the weave throwing a more visible pair of 45 degree angles into your vision.  As far as actually applying it, I had learned that it was important to wet the wood itself with epoxy before laying the glass down. A lot of people will put the glass down, then lay epoxy into it. The problem with doing this is when the epoxy soaks through the glass and reaches the wood, the wood starts to suck it up. You’re left with a layer of epoxy cured to fiberglass, and then a weak bond to the actual substrate. I honestly kind of thought this was overblown since I was dealing with Baltic Birch – With its many thin layers and existing density, honestly how much could it absorb? We mixed up what we thought was a large batch and dumped it out over the whole surface. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t have a whole lot of photos of this whole process because we were on the clock, and somewhat panicking. And I didn’t want to get epoxy on my phone screen.  Above is what it looked like, and we couldn’t get it to move properly at all. Trying to flatten the bubbles was a huge waste of effort because nothing would move or lay flat at all. We ended up making multiple additional batches of epoxy and dumping it onto the table. We used a combination of a small plastic scraper and a foam roller to try to spread it around. It turns out that eventually, you do hit a correct saturation point and all of a sudden – the whole thing switches from panic mode, to fun mode. Since the threads have no elongation under strain, you can just tug on them almost individually, and pull a bubble out from across the table – IF there is enough fluid for everything to work and move.  We were actually able to get the first layer down to where we were pretty happy with it from a flatness point of view. What we weren’t able to do was uniformly fill the weave in. This epoxy is too thick to self level much at all. That isn’t a problem here because, well, it’s the bottom but also because we’re going to add a 2nd layer in a few hours. Doing a glass layup with epoxy as I understand it, can be handled in a few different ways. You can do multiple layers simultaneously, at risk of messing up your previous layer while trying to get the sequential ones down. You can wait until the first layer is cured, but then you have to sand the whole thing to provide a surface for the next layer to grip. Or, you can wait until the first one is semi-cured and has the stickiness of masking tape when you touch it. Those are open un-polymerized ends that will chemically bond to your second layer, and supposedly are as strong as if you had done the whole thing at once. So this last one, is what we tried. Masking tape isn’t very sticky but it turns out if you have 50 square feet of it, it’s a lot of grabbing power. The sheet went down onto it and stuck there, badly. For the 2nd layer we assumed that we wouldn’t have to deal with the wood sucking up the epoxy, but also that we needed to make more than we thought anyway. We still didn’t make enough. Que more rounds of mixing epoxy and attempting to spread it out and pull the glass flat. It was still true that, with enough fluid, you could break the glass free of the masking tape sticky first layer and pull the bubbles down. But, it was a lot harder this time and we did not get perfect results. We would have probably had much better luck if it had been more heavily coated in epoxy, before we ever laid the sheet down. Once cured, we had a lot of this going on:  Again, bottom of the camper so I don’t really care – none of these were actually “blisters” that could hold water or anything. I sanded off the worst of them around the perimeter where they could sit unevenly on the metal frame, but otherwise left it.  Whole thing got flipped over at that point and we did it again, now to the top of the floor that will be inside the camper. I did add a small round over to what will be the floor of the galley, this whole plywood end will be exposed perminantly so I wanted the glass to lay down over this.  Then used the oscillating tool to knock off the cured edges, and sanded them just enough so they weren’t sharp.   The top of the floor doesn’t need glass, but again it’s good practice and won’t hurt anything. The whole inside of the camper will be covered by mattress, and in the galley area it won’t hurt at all to have a thicker water proof layer. This side went better – made a lot more epoxy to start with, for one thing. Still though, it doesn’t self-level and we couldn’t get the weave fully filled in, evenly. I did a little bit of sanding in some of the worst areas the next day and did a bit of a fill coat, partly to see what would happen. Worked OK. I’m trying to work out how best to fill these things as smoothly as possible, as this will greatly reduce how much fairing and sanding is needed on the exterior when we get to that point. Nothing that we’ve done so far will get properly finished yet– I’m avoiding doing more fiberglass sanding inside the house than I have to. At some point though I’ll have to get around to coating these both with something with some UV protection.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2023 02:28
|
|
|
That might not be a bad idea. I don't really think the wood pulling in a bunch of epoxy is necessarily a bad thing, since I'm trying to make this as water impermeable as possible. But, might also be kind of pointless if the real plastic shell is bound up around the fiberglass. We're planning to make some small sample panels to practice some finishing with, I might have to try the method you're describing, too. Most of the instructions I'm following imply that you really want strong bond to your substrate - but here that isn't so important since we're not doing this for strength. Well, the roof we kind of are since that will end up being really thin. I've also been thinking more about the spare wheel issue - I'm currently leaning towards doing this -  Split tongue box saddlebags. Not huge but enough to get some utility out of them. Keeps the tire mount simple, and the center of gravity low.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 17, 2023 02:28
|
|
|
45.25 That’s the person-hours invested in the project to date. Not shopping, not researching, not planning, - just working on the whole thing. More or less, I mean I’m not punching a time clock here. I’m not sure why I’m keeping specific track of this, morbid curiosity? Or just so you all can feel better about how fast you work on things. Anyway I’ve certainly made worse uses of my time, so at least there’s that. Progress slowed recently, due to a combination of lack of time to work on it, and needing to take a pause and make sure I didn’t screw anything up. With the floor done it’s time to switch to the walls, and for those I am building a full size template. Before getting to that though and while having a think about things, I gave some more thought to where the axle is going to ultimately end up. Since my tow vehicle does not have a lot of cushion in capacity for the tongue weight it can support, I really need to nail this. So to that end I put together a little spreadsheet that will let me add an object’s weight and position, add up all of those objects, and spit out the resulting tongue weight for a given axle position.  Then I did some practical testing to validate that the math was working correctly when I moved things around. I was pleased when these hit to the gram and the tenth of a pound, respectively.   Ultimately for some of the big sub assemblies like the floor or the walls - or specific parts like a spare wheel - I’ll be able to actually weigh them and find their center of balance. For other objects, I’ll have to make some educated guesses based on the weight of a sheet of Baltic birch, and the area of a given part based on the Sketchup model. And for some things like gear that we actually will stuff into the trailer – Well, I can pile some of that up and get a guess at it, but, it’s going to be pretty much of a guess by that point. Still, this should all hopefully be enough to get me pretty close. Also during this last week, our doors arrived. For a while in our planning phase, we were planning to make our own doors. Partially this is because the commercially available doors are stupidly expensive. And partially, it was because the available doors are in dumb sizes. Still, I wasn’t looking forward to making a decent door seal system to keep water out, and by the time you buy a window and decent hinges and the trim and seals, You don’t end up saving THAT much money. A lot of people seem to regret spending the (significant) amount of time it takes, to make their own doors. But that goes back to the problem of the dumb sizes – The common commercial doors for sale are 26w x 36h, 26w x 42h, or 30w x 36h. There are a few problems with these sizes. For one thing, since your mattress will be above the bottom of the door, you don’t actually have the full vertical space as entrance. Also, you get into these trailers either by crawling in, or sitting on your butt and rolling on your back, then swinging your legs in. I'd hit my head on the shorter ones, and a 26” wide rough opening does not seem user friendly for this. But as it turns out, Lippert, who I think makes all of this stuff, only wanted an extra $50 per door to custom make them at 30”wide by 40” high. So yeah we just did that. My only real regret with this approach is that the windows in the door are rather small compared to the space available for them. Oh well. With doors in hand we could go about finishing up the skeleton plan. As far as the template walls go, I had a general plan in my mind for how they needed to be skeletonized out…. But I decided this really needed to have the time taken to model these out. After mucking about with that for a while, I eventually came up with this:  The overlays there are the sheet good usage, most of it anyway. The long rectangles are the 4x8 sheets that will form the skeleton. There are two sets of 5x5 blocks - The lower ones are the exterior 1/4" material that will cover the edge of the floor. The higher ones are the interior 1/8" that effectively sits on top of the floor. I also started building out a sequence of events that needs to happen as the walls get built. This is really where I am trying not to trip up. Internal wall structure is one thing, but that’s easy enough to draw out against the parts that need to connect to it. There are small differences between the walls though and I need to make sure I am accounting for things like the strap down anchor points for the water jug, and shore power connectors, and air vent holes, and exterior lights. Interior coat hooks, cargo tiedown points, and light switches inside near the doors also need consideration – and I absolutely must not forget to run wire to those locations before the wall skins go on, with enough length leftover to reach the distribution box. The template itself is being built from a couple pieces of cheap ¼” underlayment material. Since this will have a couple of very long butt joints with no bracing whatsoever, I put a thin strip of fiberglass down the seam lines and filled them with a bit of epoxy from both sides. When I laid out the epoxy for these, I had strips of wax paper under the seams to keep the part separated from the table. Despite that this one tiny little blob did manage to leak through and contact the surface.  That tiny little blob was enough to induce panic- I couldn’t get the template off of the table. I did eventually succeed, but with an uncomfortable amount of prying between the parts. That stuff is ridiculously strong. I then spent 20 minutes putting a thin coat of white primer on to it, just to make it easy to read and see pencil marks. This was time well spent, I think.  To transfer the model to reality, we laid out a long reference line for the floor, and a complete series of parallel lines, perpendicular to the floor, down the entire length of the template.  With those in place, vertical measurements from the bottom were taken off of the model, at each line down the template. A small nail was tapped in for each of them.  We then worked around the perimeter with the battens that were left over from the workbench project, fairing out a smooth shape and tweaking out any weirdness from the various compound curves stuck together in the model. There are a few critical points that really can’t move – the front and back of the floor, of course, but also the position of the galley hatch hinge. Those have precisely calculated out gas strut sizes. If I change anything too much on those points, I’ll end up having to get struts by trial and error.  There’s also a flat spot in the top center of the camper, where the vent fan will sit. This area will also be reinforced to support the potential future addition of a small roof rack, if that was ever desired. The flat spot makes a convenient stop and relocation point for the batten, since I don’t have a single piece that could do the whole circumference at once. The rear had the largest deviation from model vs what worked in reality – This didn’t surprise me a at all since we had a really hard time coming up with that shape in the model. This also doesn’t matter much as far as any particular impacts in the galley – That whole area had a fairly big air cavity in it, which will now be a bit smaller.  Then it was just a matter of jigsawing as close to the line as I dared, and finishing it out by sanding up to the line and feeling for a smooth curve. And no, I did not cut into the floor. I am however extremely glad that I did things in this order – the 5x10 work surface of the floor is so much more useful than the 4x8 of the work bench would have been. I’m kind of astonished I don’t see more people doing this.  Template complete – Now I need to add references to internal objects, and to the skeletonization plan. From here on, most measurements will come off of this, and not out of the SketchUp model. 
Raised by Hamsters fucked around with this message at 00:35 on Apr 24, 2023 |
|
#
¿
Apr 24, 2023 00:31
|
|
|
Thanks!SpartanIvy posted:I have a dream of building a teardrop but it'll probably never happen so it's cool to watch your progress! Since we've really just started I'm not able to speak from much experience here, but: Don't do what we did. We really were thinking about this for a long time but in that "ooh we should do that" kinda way. When we flipped into go mode on this in January, that was tons of research and planning that we were cramming into as little time as possible so we could get this going (and hopefully have it done by fall). If I had actually seriously thought about this last fall or earlier, I think it would have been much more relaxing and laid back. Oh well, it's under way and I'm happy about that.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2023 03:52
|
|
|
54.25 With the template ready, I’m working on getting the wall skeletons built out. To do this, I need to start with one full sheet, and add 3’ 9” of another sheet, to the front of it. Both pieces will then get a “hat” about 9” tall that bridges the seam between the first two pieces. I started cutting up my plywood and…. Yeah, I knew this sheet was bad news…  I could probably mash this flat while the inner and outer skins cure up and the whole assembly would be nice and straight once the glue cured. But, that’s also gonna be a bunch of headache I don’t want. I had grabbed 4 sheets out of the Depot bin, and they were getting toward the bottom of the pile. All of them had a little bit of a bend to them – but the last one was really pushing it. Fortunately, there’s another Depot 15 miles in the other direction with the same stuff, and more of it. I went that way and got another sheet – Retrospectively would have been a good idea to just do that in the first place as theirs was much nicer. Set about doweling these panels up. Trying to make it a policy to be overly helpful to myself and label things whenever possible. Forming the end of these panels into tongue and groove connections would probably be the more ideal solution here, but I don’t have router bits for that, and I do have a doweling jig. These seams will all be bridged over by plywood skins on both sides, anyway.  This first seam is directly centered on the door, so I’m able to knock in some convenient “clamp here” holes.  Once the clamps could come off, I did the 2nd one directly on top of the first. This is the kind of “do something for an hour, then wait a while” work that would have been ideal for weekdays, unfortunately I had to blow a Saturday on this. A sheet of ¾” plywood is heavy, but manageable. A sheet and a half long, piece of ¾” plywood is a whole other thing. We knew dealing with these in the basement was going to be one of those “this barely works” kinda things, and, well, this barely works. Once again though I am extremely glad to have the floor structure helping provide a full 5x10 work surface.  Shaved a bit off of the top where the 9” plywood “hat” has to attach, just to get a straight edge  Then set about doweling this thing up. In an attempt to minimize any errors over the distance, I used my offset bar to shift the jig down one step and drilled a few holes. Then I moved over to the other piece of plywood and immediately did that set of holes. Hopefully this would help avoid any issues from bumping into the offset bar with the jig, stacking up over time and changing the pattern if I had done all of one piece, then all of the other. Still, by flipping back and forth I had to constantly remind myself which way the jig was supposed to be facing.  Then once those were all in, I went back just using the reference locator pin and added more in the gaps.  These next two photos should be considered a free advertisement for DowelMax… That’s 70 dowels in an 8’ long row – I was pretty nervous about this working at all. But, holy crap, they went together in a dry fit just fine, with only a few persuasion taps. I’m honestly a little astonished it worked that well.   Then glued and clamped it all up  I had originally been planning to just give this a while and then do the 2nd wall right on top of this one. However, given how hard they are to move at this point I think I’m going to let this fully cure and then at least cut it to shape. Maybe even fully skeletonize it to make it easier to deal with. Regardless, it needs to sit for a while before I can do either of those things. So, shifted subjects entirely, to our hurricane hinge for the hatch which had arrived. The particular hinge we are using, comes from one of the micro-builders of Teardrop trailers, Overland Trailers. Shown in the photo below, the part on the left will bolt on to the back of the camper. The part on the right, attaches to the hatch itself.  What I like about this version of this hinge, is the dedicated gutter that it has, formed into the shape in front of the hinge itself. This should help a lot in camp, any water running down the back of the camper should get ejected off to the left and right. Speaking of ejecting water, you want these hinges to extend over the edge of the camper, at least a small amount. People seem to go with about an inch or ¾” for this, I’m opting for it to be a touch shorter since this will be right around eyeball height. I can use the floor plus wall exterior skin thickness, to plan my overall length need. Since it will hang over, it really doesn’t matter if it’s off a small amount. This is just mill finish aluminum right now and we want to have it anodized. May as well get that taken care of since I can’t really do anything else. I am not a metal worker, in fact this may be the first piece of aluminum I’ve ever specifically modified for any particular reason. So mostly I wanted to not make too big of a mess of it or scuff it up too horribly. I cut it to length, then set about reducing the number of pointy bits. I wanted to give it a lead in and lead out slope, and round off the bottom support web. I set up some marks and made my cuts, but a lot of this ended up being freehand work to what looked correct. Should be pretty impossible to ever get a good look at both sides at once, anyway. I hacksawed away the bulk. Cutoff disk really didn’t work for crap, ended up shaping this with the sander mostly. To finish it out I smoothed it with some 320 grit by hand, again trying to avoid scuffing the un-cut surface any more than I could help    The piece that goes onto the hatch itself gets a matching lead-out angle, but these differ in that a good size chunk needs to be removed. Eventually, this area is where the walls and hatch will close together, so material here would interfere with things.   Hardly flawless, but these will mostly not be super visible, and I for sure would not want clean sharp right angles sticking over the edge of the camper. So, I’m happy enough with how these turned out.
|
|
#
¿
May 1, 2023 00:02
|
|
|
75.0 With the wall cores glued up, time to start cutting big pieces out of them to reduce weight, and prep for filling those same voids back in with foam. This seems straightforward enough, but, I think now this is probably the most complex part of the project. Not that any of it is particularly hard to do, but there are plenty of opportunities for mistakes. Mistakes that may cause huge scrap outs, or rework, or rework that I won’t recognize needing to do for months yet. Or, things that might cause a small workaround that will bug me forever. To that end, I hemmed and hawed on this for a while before plotting out a whole sequence of what I needed to do and what couldn’t happen until all previous steps were done: code:  The wall cores got rough cut to size with a jigsaw, and then moved out onto some saw horses along with the template. The whole stack got clamped together. Idea here being that until I had everything transferred through that needed it, these clamps were not coming off.  First order of business was getting the walls to final shape using the template. I had to sand through the epoxy and fiberglass at the seams near the edges, just so the router would ride smoothly. I also couldn’t plunge far enough to do the entire stack – About half of the 2nd wall will need to wait until I can move these apart, but that’s fine. There’s enough completed surface to pattern off of.  To transfer marks through from the template down into the stack, I used an 1/8” drill bit. I had a block of hard ash that I drilled through with the drill press to get a nice perpendicular shot, then used this as a guide for a long aircraft bit so it would hopefully not get too off track. A bunch of these marks don’t need to go all the way through the wall stack anyway, but a few do.   I tried to keep myself consistent for these bulkheads and always mark them from the same position relative to the notch that had to be cut for them - forward and down. I cut out the position for the galley hatch spar, and then almost immediately realized I still needed the template to be intact in this position for later, so it was plugged back up.   But with the hatch spart marked and everything else transferred, I could move the template off of the (still clamped) stack. Next thing to go was the space at the bottom; these wall cores will eventually sit on top of the floor itself. Only the very front nose will cover the floor – Same at the back end, where the wall edge will turn into hatch, and again clamp over the floor when closed. And yes if you’re curious this support pole in the basement has been just wonderful. Half way surprised I haven’t slipped on sawdust while pole-dance swinging myself around this thing, yet. I am starting to REALLY look forward to getting out of the basement.  With the template moved out the big things to transfer through are the dados for the various bulkheads and cabinetry. I want this to be as precise as possible to make everything line up better when the structure assembly is happening. To that end, I’m cutting through both pieces at once, for all 5 dados. I have 2, ½” dados and 3, ¾” to make. For those I’ll make a jig for the router to follow and cut the dados. I’ve got a nice cuttoff of plywood that’s just about the right size – Little wider than it needs to be but it’s fine, I can make both sizes out of one piece.  Ha Ha! A jape! For the internet! Surely I wouldn’t be so stupid as to accidentally use the wrong dado slot on the wrong spot. There are only 5 of these, just be careful and verify everything. You won’t screw that up! And I didn’t! But, while making sure I didn’t use the wrong slot, and also while not wanting to take too deep of a cut in one pass with the router, I managed to forget all precepts about, you know, using a router. Such as, when using a template bit, make sure the bearing is actually riding on whatever you want to use as the template. So I immediately carved a small gouge in the side of the first dado. Not a big deal, this will get sheathed with ¼” plywood eventually anyway.   But I did trash my jig. Made a new one, and made this thicker so I could take a shallow pass while sill having a template to follow. And, ended up with two separate jigs which I thought I had so cleverly avoided in the first place. The rest of the dados went in without incident, although I switched to using a ¼” spiral flute to freehand hog out most of the waste, before going in to actually follow the template. Seemed to work much better in general.  With that all done, the clamps come off and the walls can be separated out. This let me finish the final size trim on the bottom piece. And, with that done I could cut the roof spacers off of each piece. I need a 2.25” drop from the roof line, and ¼” removed from the roof spacers themselves. Which makes a router bit the perfect object, although following a varying curve using a simple edge guide probably isn’t the right tool for the job.   I don’t know what the right tool would BE though, and this worked well enough. It does mean that each roof spar will need to be cut to dimension for its specific slot, but there aren’t that many of those at the end of the day. These cutoffs will be saved as they already have the right shape for both the top and bottom of the roof – I’ll be able to cut sections out of them, and fit them right in between the roof spars as braces. And, I’ll probably just use construction adhesive to bond the foam in the roof in the curvier sections, where the edge guide made the cut deeper. That should gap fill pretty well and take up any slack space that might be left. My wife has taken on the trailer welding part of this project. She doesn’t know how to weld, but, I don’t either really – I’ve had some experience with simple stick welding but that’s about it. She’s an expert with various precision hand crafts like knitting, some of that hand control should come in handy. We’ve got access to a handy Harbor Freight-tier MIG welder for this project. So while all of the above has been going on she’s been attending the school of YouTube and getting some practice in. You can get nice little practice sample packs of steel to work with, from the James Lincoln foundation. So with a few of those in hand she got to work on training. Her first ever fillet weld, uh, missed.   But within just an hour or two penetration was improving dramatically and getting more consistent in positioning. Speaking of, I did not know that Naval Jelly was a great acid to etch and view your welds with.  Since then she’s gotten pretty comfortable running vertical as well as horizontal, so we’re charging ahead this week with welding up the trailer itself.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2023 01:36
|
|
|
Yeah that was just practice stuff, the actual welds won't be getting quenched.
|
|
#
¿
May 15, 2023 12:41
|
|
|
98.25 With some time off of work, trying to get this whole thing moved ahead. Still working on the wall assemblies – Dados cut through (at least enough to mark the second side) and with important layout points transferred through both skeleton layers, it’s time to start making them look like skeletons. First step there was to start transferring my skeletonization plan from the model, onto the actual walls.   That included adjusting a few things on the fly. In the 2nd photo above, the area under the cabinet dados seemed… Really big. Not concerning from a strength standpoint but from a “support the internal skin” before everything is actually built, standpoint. I suppose I should pause here and explain what the hell I am doing since I only halfway mentioned this along with the floors and I don’t think it came up since. These big pieces of ¾” plywood, are going to be mostly removed from the final build. They are getting cut away and hollowed out, and the voids will be filled with more XPS foam. You could just build the wall out of a single sheet of plywood and leave it at that, and a lot of people do this. What we’re doing though is taking this skeleton layer, and then adding a sheet of 1/8” plywood to the inside to be the “show” piece. The outer wall will get ¼” plywood. This has a few advantages over just using a single sheet wall. A big one, is due to the nature of Teardrop campers themselves. They are tiny, and the internal volume you’re breathing in is tiny. Condensation buildup on the walls is a thing in any camper, it’s a huge thing in Teardrops. Having a partially insulated wall core helps with this quite a bit. There are still a lot of solid wood thermal bridges though, nothing is perfect. This build method is also quite strong, since your compressive and tensile stresses on the outer skins have more distance from eachother, since the total wall ends up over 1 inch thick – That is, assuming they’re well bonded to the substrate that you’re working with, plywood and foam in this case. There’s also a huge simplicity to the roof assembly, once you go through the pain in the rear end of building a wall like this. This thick ¾” sheet ends up turning into a rabbit, once the ¼” sheet is added to the outside. The ¾” will sit directly on top of the floor, while the ¼” covers the edge of the floor. And, at the roof area, the same thing happens. The roof structure can sit on the ¾” ledge formed by this core, while the edge of the roof structure is all covered by the ¼” exterior layer. This is also why I really need to have the template available later on. Anyway, after laying out, there is cutting, and cutting, and cutting, and cutting.     I suppose I could have laid the two on top of each other and done two sheets at once, but, there are a handful of small variations between the two walls and I didn’t want to take the chance of messing that up. I did start just using the track saw to quickly knock out the longer straight cuts though – this was a lot of jigsaw cutting. As of right now I’ve still got about 2/3 of the 2nd wall to go… But, once the first wall was done I was at least able to just trace onto the 2nd wall. I left notation arrows everywhere something needed to be changed for the next wall piece.  I also brought the ¾” dado jig back out, and finished cleaning up the 2nd wall. Because of that messup on the first one my transfer depths weren’t right so I just left it with only a single edge true to the slot itself, with the intention to clean it out later. For whatever reason all of the dados on the 2nd wall are tighter than they are on the first wall. Better than the alternative, I may have to come chase this with a bit of sandpaper later.  I also remembered to trace everything onto a sheet of foam this time, before making it impossible to do this!  With that set, time to get a wall skin attached. The 1/8” interior layers have to go on first, which is annoying due to their general flimsiness. But to do that I need to clean up the leftover glue. I’ve pretty much only ever used Titebond 2 wood glue, here I was using 3 though for the general better water resistance, and more importantly the longer open working time. Stuff is kind of a mess to clean up, gets very gummy. Had to use the belt sander to rip off some of the worst of it before smoothing things out.  That done, I set about trying to make the skeleton as perfectly flat as I could, when under compression.  Then, my large pile of leftover skeleton meat and a bunch of parallel and identical width strips of plywood that I ripped from the bendy board, get together into a mess of a structure that can hopefully apply some uniform pressure to the squirrely 1/8” sheet of plywood.   With that set up, clamping is provided by the available heavy things. Against this much surface area this is a stupidly low PSI, but, best I could come up with.  That set, it was time to change venues and get going on the trailer welding for real. Outside corners were proving the most troublesome, fortunately there’s only 4 of those to do on this thing. Penetration is consistent now, if those outside corners need the ol grinder and paint treatment to make one a welder, I’m still happy with that. I got started chopping pieces to length to build this thing. Offcuts turned into practice pieces of actual build material for the final practice and test welds.   I’ve used the Milwaukee portable bandsaw quite a bit, but unfortunately do not own one. This Harbor Freight Bauer model is not the same thing, but on the other hand costs 90 bucks. It honestly works just fine and I’ve managed to get very square cuts off of it by taking my time with everything. Aside from the poorly responding variable speed trigger, the real issue with this is the motor casing. Apologies for the crap angle here but what I’m trying to show, is that you can’t sight down the blade from above the tool. View from the back against the shoe/brace thing is just fine, but if you have to look from above, the casing for the motor actually blocks a parallel line of sight to the blade. Not by a huge amount, just enough to be really annoying.  As ever, you don’t get as far as you had hoped or planned. But, at the end of the day, we’ve got a perfectly square and (so far) dead flat external frame tacked up. Tomorrow, we need to tack in all of the cross braces and then start throwing actual welds. Meanwhile, trying to keep the whole thing from distorting too bad given our lack of any kind of assembly table or real fixturing. 
|
|
#
¿
May 18, 2023 03:59
|
|
|
Eh, this won’t be a super light one or anything. The goal here is really more “light enough”. The real goal is durability, and having nice versions of the features we want to have. Should be able to have a better guestimate on where this weight will actually end up, in a few more weeks. I have a lot of data that needs punched into my calculator, the biggest hold up is the walls and taking some actual measurements of them when completed. Frame welding finished yesterday and I’ll post on that more later today – Heading off to paint it shortly. If you meant just the frame itself, 222 pounds as it turns out. Wall skinning has also continued. Dancing around all of this stuff in the basement continues to be very fun. I’ll just squeeze around here  And reeeaaaacchhh back here to mark the end of the wall , crab pincering the pencil and stabbing to make lines should work  Yup that looks accurate  Best available cutting and handling surface for a 5x5 sheet of plywood, employed  Oh good it actually covers. And no, the grain isn’t run the wrong way here – this piece will be totally covered by more layers, and cutting it this way saved me a nice off cut I will probably need later on.  Play some more off cut Tetris  And hope the cats don’t decide to roost back here 
Raised by Hamsters fucked around with this message at 21:27 on May 21, 2023 |
|
#
¿
May 21, 2023 14:28
|
|
|
144.75 Clamp and tack Tack and clamp Clamp and tack Tack and clamp And Welllllldddd    That pretty much sums up 4 full days of work. This took way longer than we expected it to. Well, clamping and tacking and welding and also flipping the whole frame over and / or propping it up or holding it on end, to make easier to work angles on different joints.     But, all in all the whole thing went pretty well, just slowly. As shown previously, we managed to get the outer frame set, and used some bits of angle to help keep the whole thing square and flat. We were also careful to try to move around and not over heat any one area, and as much as possible make opposing-heat welds to keep anything from twisting. After getting the frame done we then popped in all the central cross ribs. These line up under solid wood cross sections in the floor assembly.  Once that was set we fully welded the frame itself, and then started with the tongue. The central member was simple enough and we tacked it in place – but then I had to figure out the side pieces. I wanted to fold the outer tongue arms so that they’d line up with the frame. Not so much from any great concern about strength – this should be quite overbuilt – but because I think it looks nicer than just cutting the end of the tube where it crosses. First thing to do though was to cut the sharp angle for the front connection, this took a bit of doing because it was much to big of a cross section to do with the bandsaw with any accuracy.   Ultimately I got through after various short passes with the bandsaw, and finished it up with an angle grinder. But now there’s that issue of figuring out the bend in the tube ends. Pictured below is me trying to do something stupid with measurements and calculations before realizing I could just mark the intersection on each side, find the line perpendicular across the bar from each mark, that’s half your triangle width so mark the other half.   Yeah, that worked out pretty well  Then got the tongue welded up, again trying to manage opposing heats  And from there on we started attaching all of the other junk that needs welded onto this thing. There are 8 tabs where the cabin will be bolted down onto the frame. We made and added 4 of these little nub things under the rear area – These would be a simple hold down point for a hypothetical elastic cord, that would be keeping tension on a side wing/shield thing that we might want to add, as a bit of a wind block to the open galley. The top end could attach to the raised galley hatch, then stretch down to these points and cover the whole side area. Rear corner gusset plates got added as well, these being drilled out for mounting the stabilizer jacks onto.   Safety chain attachments went on the tongue. A 2” hitch receiver went on the back as well. I doubt we’ll ever use this but it’s conceivable we’d want to put a bike rack back there or something, and this would be a pain to add later on.   Two of our pieces of cross bracing angle iron were actually intended for this – Shoe bin sliders. These end up positioned under the doorways. They’ll give you somewhere to keep your shoes dry and/or scorpion free, depending on the local clime. We sized these around the ubiquitous Costco 3-pack of bins that they’ve seemed to have for a long time. Partially because we already have a bunch so if some get damaged in use for shoes, we’ll have spares.  A plate also got added for mounting our leveling jack to the tongue. The one we’re using is designed for an a-frame tongue system but we’ll make this work. A lot of people seem to go for those strap on jacks that fit to the side of the tongue, and then swing down to be parallel with the tongue for travel. This lets you get into your tailgate easily. But, I’m not a fan of these for a few reasons. First, they seem expensive for some reason. Second, with our design we’d have to go one off the two outer arms of the tongue assembly. That, plus the needed pivot room, would put the leveling jack fairly off-center and create a rather unstable support triangle. Also I think they look kind of fiddly. I just realized I have no photos of our leveling jack, but the one we bought still gives you tailgate access – because the entire thing drops down toward the ground with a release pin. You can then re-lock the pin at whatever height you need, and use the standard screw adjustment from there.  The whole process went pretty well overall. The frame didn’t turn into a potato chip, and is still pretty flat. The one problem we ran into came from the big welds attaching the side arms of the tongue. These seem to have pulled the front of the frame, down toward the tongue arms. I couldn’t get a photo of this, but it is noticeable if you sight down the frame. Still, I think this is about the best possible defect to have. With where it’s located, I should have no real trouble making a bit of a shim for the cabin to sit on. It can easily be hidden with the diamond plate we were going to put on the front end anyway. Plus, if anything this is creating a minor arch in the frame which is much better than any kind of belly. We also propped the whole thing up on edge and found a center of balance, and weighed it. 222 pounds and I have a real value to enter into my spreadsheet. Frame got hauled outside and degreased and cleaned – producing significant filth pools even after substantial rinsing.   Then etched, and primed. It’s going to stay with just the one coat of primer for the moment. Needs another, and then topcoat, but we still have to weld on the axle mounting brackets whenever we actually get the axle and find the spot for it. We also skipped the tongue box support arms for now – might end up skipping them all together, but those are easy to add later if we change our minds. Spare tire mount isn’t going on in any case until the cabin is actually in place – that one could be difficult to place precisely without having the physical object to reference.  
Raised by Hamsters fucked around with this message at 04:03 on May 22, 2023 |
|
#
¿
May 22, 2023 04:01
|
|
|
Yeah, I honestly don't know either. My thinking with leaving the tube ends open is 1) to prevent pooling as best as possible and 2) leave wide open access to just get in there and hose the whole thing down with fluid film periodically. I do have little spray access holes up on the left and right tongue arms in the front, since there's nothing else I can do up there. I will probably get plastic push in end caps to try to keep the appearance clean and reduce some of the blow-in water. Other than that I'm planning to make sure it always parks nose tilted up. As far as the trailer light wiring - That I couldn't decide on a path for and ultimately did nothing. I'm probably going to attach some sort of conduit under the frame and just do that. Part of this was because we don't have the axle yet and I wasn't quite clear on where wiring for brakes was going to pop out from. Incidentally I finally called them on Friday and basically got a "oh yeah it's ready for pickup, we forgot to tell you". I'll take that over "we forgot to make it" or "we have no record of your order." Part of skipping the wiring was also from limited time to get the trailer welding done, and out of my dad's garage, since the whole thing took a lot longer than expected.
|
|
#
¿
May 30, 2023 01:35
|
|
|
159.75 Back on the camper project. Actually went camping over the memorial day weekend, which was a great reminder of why we are doing this.  Why, with the 45 minutes or so we spent setting up and taking down the tent, and comparing to our current labor spend on this project, its…. Only 213 camping trips until the project (so far) is labor neutral! Then took advantage of our nice Wisconsin spring drought to stain the deck and fix the rotty bits of the garden box and patch up the driveway. Now if life will kindly stay out of my way, I’ll keep working on the thing I want to do. With all of the interior skins on the walls, I need to clean up the edges before doing anything else. Which means slowly working my way around with a chisel to get rid of the glue squeezings.  Followed by jigsawing off most of the waste, and then using a flush trim bit to clean up the rest of it.   Router got angry in two spots and ripped up part of the skin surface. Fortunately one of those will be completely covered by additional material layers. The one below will technically be exposed – but, inside the headboard cabinets and no one will ever see it.  With the cleanup out of the way, I need to focus on getting everything inside the walls that has to be there, before gluing on the outer skin and losing access forever. First up I’m going to punch a pair of holes through the wall for the air intake vents. I location drilled these before when the template was up on the stack, using that aircraft 1/8” drill bit. Conveniently, my circle cutting jig uses a 1/8” pivot pin. I’ll just grab my circle cutting jig and…. Wow that’s a lot of holes. I hope I’m not missing any parts for this thing.  Chester you malevolent plastic eating goblin! We’ve had words about this!  … The circle jig wasn’t missing any parts, and is now double bagged and hidden deeper in the storage trolley it came out of. Every time I use this thing, without fail, I load the cutting bit and then remember I actually need to load the blank pin that centers the jig on the base.   Anyway with the vent openings cut out I can at least get a look at the wall layers, seems like the 1/8” skin bonded well here. I had noticed a couple areas along the very perimeter that weren’t completely adhered, did not seem to pull back much at all but I was still glad to see this here. I think those edge issues were from the first clamp set up or two where I didn’t have the pressure boards actually hanging over the edge of the skeleton core. There are only a couple of them though and I’m not worried about it.  Next, opening up these wiring “junction boxes” that I cut for the over-door porch lights. I have no idea why I made these so small in the first place. I hogged them out with the router and gave myself some more room to work. Still tons of room to make a gasket behind the light. Speaking of these lights, we kind of hate them but they have the huge advantage of being a ubiquitous style, so when they wear out or get smashed or something, we’ll be able to replace these very easily.   Then, light switches for the two entry doors. This is made slightly fun by the fact that I dropped a planned switch from this location and will actually be installing two-switch size plates. Which I don’t have on hand, so, chances for errors. Which don’t happen, fortunately, and I set up nice matching locations on the two walls.  I got rid of the majority of the wood with a forstner bit and then cleaned everything out with the router / freehand wood mill.   I will concede that it is possible that I got a little greedy on my depth of cut toward the end, with a very hot carbide bit. Regardless, all’s well that ends well.   I did not account for the locking ring quite correctly, but I think I’ll do that from the other side when ready to actually mount these. I do need to cut all the way through the face 1/8” skin yet but I want that to be as tight as possible to the required area. The extra 1/8” will help with the height issue you can see below, but not enough. I’d been assuming for a while that I would be making some small switch plates for my switch plates to create some more of an interior space for everything to fit.   What I did not count on was the extra height for flag terminals. I think I can get around this by getting some un-insulated terminals that I can bend a little, and just stuffing heat shrink around them. I can also bend the terminals on the switch out a little to help. I do need to figure out which of those 3 I need to use; one will be for the “I’m on” LED that I have no intention of connecting. The switch itself isn’t labeled at all though and I haven’t done any testing yet.  That done, next up is to prep for mounting things. Things that I do not want to be reliant on a short wood screw into plywood. Things that I would like to bolt to the wall instead, like coat hooks! I want the ability to chuck a backpack on these things without worrying that I’m destroying the wall by pulling on the screw threads too hard. Given an open exposed wall and my own time to waste, I’m shoving T-nuts in there for these. The coat hooks we’ve selected aren’t the most stylish thing – But, they do fold up really nicely when not needed. I’m also discovering the simple joys of setting up matching locations on mirrored walls, with a bunch of rough and/or curved surfaces as reference. It’s a constant game of, look around, what can I locate off of. Or, what will I be able to easily copy in the future, when I can’t actually see this part but need to make it look like it matched? Not too bad in this case, I just pull a measurement from the bulkhead slot, and the floor.  I marked them out, drilled them through and then… intended to use a forstner bit to make a spot face recess for the T-nut to fit into. But, I’d already cut the holes so there was no center point so that weren’t happening.  And Then I remembered that the router was right next to me and already set up to work as a mill so why not just freehand this. And then I remembered that I was free handing a goddamned forstner bit in an attempt to make a flat spot face for a T-nut which would never have been flat and the router was a much better tool for the job anyway.  Those done, next up are a few cargo tie down points. I found these can pop top tab looking things that I think will be ideal for my purpose. I just want the ability to lock down a cargo net if I ever need to. Which is another reason the embedded T-nuts are great – I don’t actually ever expect to use these but if I do need to I can just bolt them to the wall as needed. And if I don’t need them, I won’t be irritated snagging my foot on them because they won’t even be there. First set is going right in front of the galley bulkhead, at the foot of the bed. I’m only putting a pair on the passenger side wall, for the driver side they will actually connect on that fridge box extension later on. Anything here should be more or less right over the axel so it’s probably a good place to dump extra mass if needed.  A second set will be in the nose of the trailer, hidden by the headboard. These would potentially be useful with the doors of the headboard flopped open, allowing extra stuff to be secured up front.  Next on the list is the water tank. I’ve planned this out to float with about 1” of air gap between it and the main bulkhead; I’ll jam a foam pad in there or something so it can’t move. The gap allows for some wire clearance along the face of the bulkhead. Partly that’s for the roof wire entry gland that I plan to use as a side wall solar power cable connector area.   Fun side note! Commercial solutions for side wall entry of solar power connections SUCK. And mostly don’t even exist. Pretty much everything that’s commercial and set up as “solar ready” is using the crappy SAE connection that’s existed forever, these things –  I have a fond hatred of these from my parent’s camper when I was a kid, I remember that sometimes the electric would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t, and frequently you just kind of poked at stuff until it maybe connected. The battery on their 1970’s camper linked to the camper itself through one or two of these, and I think they were always suspect. As far as I can tell no one else actually seems to like these, either. Anyway there’s no other solutions for specifically what I want to do so I’m rolling my own. Except for something from a company called Furrion who makes exactly what I wanted but I never found their stuff until writing this post and googling up an image of the SAE connector that I was mentioning and it’s too late for me to get that now, and now I’m annoyed. Back to the water tank tiedown - Slight issue in that I positioned this rib of plywood, on center with where I wanted the front of the jug… And not on center with where I needed the center of the tie down point to be.  Slightly dicey that, I debated only drilling out two of the holes on a diagonal but decided 4 would be better load distribution. Should be fine as long as I drill carefully, and just reinforce these with some epoxy. Unless of course I just absolutely whiff one of the hole locations. Then three! Three would be just fine!.  I have absolutely no idea how I did that. All four awl punch marks were on center and I looked at them all at one time.  Last up (except for the bottle opener which I just realized I forgot), is this beefy full extension slide which will allow the heavy fridge to slide out far enough to clear the counter and open.  When I say beefy, I mean my beefy rear end could stand on these at full extension and not break them. These present two dilemmas though. The first one – I wasn’t sure if I actually wanted to set up T-nuts for all of the locations along the length of this thing, or maybe just one at the far end. If I only do one, I’ll be able to precisely position this later on when it’s actually being fitted. Plus the 2nd side will be attached to one of the vertical braces under the counter top. Might be easier to match to that wall and get them installed properly, if one isn’t already completely fixed. On the other hand, through bolting with T-nuts is obviously much stronger and this is a high load application. Regardless, the 2nd dilemma hadn’t actually occurred to me until I positioned it here and took this photo. This slide does not allow you to remove the part that attaches to the drawer, the parts are permanently fixed. And in this case, I can’t actually get to both sides, to both connect the drawer and fix this to the wall. It’s one or the other, not both. I can only think of two ways around this. First would be to get the slightly weaker but still strong enough version of these slides, that DO allow you to remove the inner tray piece. I’m not thrilled about that because this first pair cost about $110 and I can’t return them anymore. The other option would be to bore a hole all the way through from the outer wall to the inside, to access the hole in the middle layer that lets you mount your drawer. Not ideal because then there’s a huge hole in your camper. But I could patch and disappear this from the outside – no way I’ll be able to hide it on the inside though. Still, it will be low and in a non-obtrusive spot, maybe it’s a “who cares” situation?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 10, 2023 03:09
|
|
|
Thanks! I know project threads don't really generate a whole lot of discussion most of the time, not until you catastrophically screw up anyway. Hope people are enjoying following along with this. For reference, current mood is: Panicking about how far behind schedule we are. Anyway: 179.0 Carrying on, got the bottle opener taken care of before I forgot it again. Also decided that it would be a good idea to add a pair of tie down points just inside the door hinges – In case I want to add some sort of a strap to keep the doors from slamming open too far, this one will be a great point to add them. Will need to add a small plug or something to these if we don’t end up using them.   Then made myself a proper template for the main hatch spar, keyed off of the bulkhead right behind it. Rendering my previous work unimportant, and I had to make this a touch larger just to make sure I cleared everything. I don’t think the hatch spar being a touch larger is a bad idea anyway, considering the leverage and forces on it. Got that cut out of both walls.  I should also add that while all of this has been going on, a large pile of shaped and flattened foam chunks have been appearing. We actually made a map and labeled them this time.  Went to add the reading lights which will be on the walls right above the headboard, and I realized they use a tiny little set screw offset at 45 degrees from the bottom. On one, this is no big deal. On the other it would have been almost impossible to reach once the headboard shelf is in place. So I raised them up a little higher than I had been planning. Went through another goofy array of triangles and measurements to get the position transferred to both walls.   They also have this goofy little mounting ring. I mark it out leaving room for the screws to anchor and… yeah, this is not going to work. That is way too small for wire access. So I decided they were going to go on top of a mounting plate, letting me make a larger hole behind them.   Meanwhile, I added some of the first foam parts under the leading sheet of exterior wall, to get them curing.  All of the dado slots for bulkheads and shelves still need to be cleared out. They all have the 1/8” interior skin still laying over them, which I had left here as long as possible for strength. Without that sheet, the rear end end of the wall is held on by about 2” of plywood at the very bottom of the wall, and another ~3 or 4 inches right in the middle. There’s a lot of places that could throw a good flex load on the whole thing and snap something off. I’m very much looking forward to having the exterior skin on so that this will no longer be a concern. I further decided to cut the cabin cabinet face dado all the way through the ceiling. This does further weaken the wall skeleton of course, but it’s one less piece that needs to be managed when the walls are going up. As it is, when we get to the point of standing these up we need to mate up the lower bulkhead, cabinet bottoms, and headboard. Those all fit into dados that have no access once the walls are in place. I almost forgot the headboard dado but managed to pick it up later.   With those set, went rummaging in the plywood pile and pulled out some ¼” sheets. Baltic Birch here lets me cover my full trailer height without having to do any vertical panel stacking, which is great. I set one up on the front and then grabbed the roof spacer and positioned it also. The assembly of this thing is getting heavy, plus everything makes it harder to move down here so I wanted to preemptively cut off waste. I scribed a generous safety line, then re-generoused it, then cut well outside the line anyway.   I do leave a large flat area from the sheet though. The trick with the outer wall skins on this build is that there’s nothing to reference off of to make the final shape. These skins will hang over the existing skeleton on (almost) all sides, so there’s nothing to line the template up with to actually shape these. So to get around that we’ll do a few things. The first is use this flat spot- The forward most bit of the camper needs to line up with the natural factory edge of this sheet of plywood. Finding the point of the tangent perpendicular to the floor line is not easy. The whole thing only has one straight line that’s relevant to me, the rest of it is curves and lines at random angles. Standing in front of it and just looking at what feels right, I want to say the point is higher up the body than it actually is. I fiddled around with this and checked a few different ways until I was happy enough with it.   With that located, I check the exact width of the roof spacer at this location, then add ¼” for the inner and outer roof skins. Cut a spacer to this size, and screwed it down to the sheet along that flat spot. Added a pair more along the bottom, matching the floor thickness.   Now we just push the sheet until the nose touches and the floor bumpers are tight up against the edge of the skeleton. Then a quick sanity check annnnnddd what the heck? How is that an eighth off?   Trust no one. Factory edges on these aren’t very good, apparently. I squared this up to the seam edge that will be in the middle of the wall and took a thin cut, not even half a kerf in the middle of the track here, but enough that there was actually a cut off at the far end. Still in love with having a track saw available.  Re-set and attached the floor strips again, now I need to punch a hole in for the porch light. It’s covered from the back so I need to just measure for it and peck some holes in, then hollow it out with the router.   I also sanded a pitched floor to the bottom of these holes – Which is also why they are cut on a odd angle. I want the low point in the hole, to further angle outboard of the camper. Any water that does get into this hole will have a chance to actually head towards an exit that isn’t deeper into the camper.  I also hacked out the door rough opening, partially because I need this offcut sheet for other parts and partially because it’s just easier when this thing has a giant handle. Still have no where to handle these sheets of plywood and I cannot wait to get this whole thing out of the basement.  With that prepped it’s finally time for something completely different! I first eyeball out where we will likely want roof spars to be placed. Rule of thumb apparently says around 8” spacing in the curvy bits and 12” along the flats. In our case I’ll also want an extra one where the headboard can brace against it, since the whole thing is designed to be leaned against. I’m also eyeballing this spot along the leading edge for a possible stargazer window. We’re not going to install one but I do want a spot where we could cut it in later if it’s just way to dim in the cabin. This area has around a 23” radius which should be just fine for this.  With some idea of where the spars will end up, it’s time for what is technically the first bit of systems work. I need to get wires into these walls so I grabbed a handful of router bits and tried out a few different sizes and depths.  Here, I had to route a line all the way over to the porch light from the switch area. I probably could have gone up into the roof with everything else and made it work through clever notching but… That seems annoying to deal with. Incidentally, routing through XPS foam is incredibly fun.  All of the wood entry/exit points got themselves smoothed out and rounded over as best I could. I also sealed up the porch light wire hollow. I meant to do all of this earlier and use my regular epoxy but I forgot completely, so I just gooped it up with JB Weld.   Then on to measuring and fitting wires. This is all inaccessible once the wall is sealed, so, I tried not to be too conservative with lengths of runs. This porch light is the only one where I can actually get to both ends right now. Of course I also used significantly more wire than I had originally calculated. But in my defense I think the calculation was influenced by “Ok, this will only cost THIS much” thinking. I also did a resistance check on all of the wire segments just in case, not much else I can do to try to make sure they work.  Once everything was cut it was wrangled and labeled and then taped down in position. Everywhere the wires entered or exited from a wood edge, they got a blob of JB weld. I’d never be able to re-snake anything in here anyway, may as well give it the best shot possible at avoiding damage from road vibrations.   With everything set and bundled up, we’re actually finally ready to close this wall up!  The exterior skins are going on with epoxy, not wood glue. Doing this for a few reasons. The XPS foam won’t bond to wood glue anyway so this would have been an unholy mess of epoxy and glue anyway. I also didn’t love the idea of excess glue squeezings trapped next to the foam inserts with no where really to “dry” to except out through the plywood faces, which will soon have finish on them. Plus, I wasn’t thrilled with my ability to create clamping pressure over huge surfaces like this. So these set up with some nice light clamps, really more of a suggestion to the plywood to stay flat. And with that one in, we also snapped in the rest of the foam bits for this wall. One less pile of random parts in the basement.  
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2023 04:36
|
|
|
Eh, I should be clear, panic is too strong a word. Definitely uneasy though about getting far enough, fast enough, to hit our weather- dependant finish processes before the cold hits and stops progress until next spring. The need to rush did take some of the fun out of this but it's still a pretty great project to be able to work on.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 12, 2023 05:26
|
|
|
189.25 Before going any further, I need to correct for a small oversight. Due to my greed for every possible internal fragment of an inch, I’m not laying the top roof skin on top of the outer most walls, they will instead sit on the inner wall. Which is all well and good up in front inside the cabin – There, the strips I cut off of the top of the wall were cut with a ¼” bit, which will get replaced by two layers of eighth inch sheets. But back on the hatch end things work differently. I’ll make some diagrams when I get to this point, but, the net result is I can’t use a router to remove the hatch “frame” from the walls. I have to jig saw it, which I am not looking forward to. Also there is no interior, or rather it connects differently than things do inside the cabin. Net result is my entire hatch is 1 roof skin too thick. So into the pile of plywood cutoffs I go, to make a new template. This one gets keyed in to the upper bulkhead and the floor, and then flush trimmed to the existing wall skeleton size.  Mark off 1/8”, then trim down and sand to the line.  See if it looks good, flush trim against the template, and check with a piece of roof material:   That seems to have worked well. Slight danger here in that I’ve done the driver side wall but I don’t want to disturb the passenger side, so I’m leaving that for later. It has bold red text in my sequence of events tracker now. Back on that passenger wall, I didn’t even bother to check this next piece of plywood before marking a straight line and getting the tracksaw out. Did check later – Yup, needed it here too. When I get to the next wall I’m just going to line the pieces up and do them together.  Still knocking waste off as I go – That extra template I just made came in very handy for this. No struggling to reach under the wall this time!  Unfortunately this cutoff didn’t quite cover the final segment as I hoped it would. Had to go grab my door cutout and use that instead. I could patchwork this in but that’s getting deep into the hatch area and those have enough difficulties as it is.  Glued everything up, and the next day – We’ve got a mostly finished wall. Mostly! Only… uh, 10 steps to go!   Back to the driver side wall, I did end up getting the lighter duty drawer slides. They kind of look like toys compared to the first ones. Still rated at 190 pounds at this size and fully extended, though. I am also consoling myself that the unlock lever is much nicer on these – Instead of being OBVIOUSLY BACKWARDS as it was on the heavy duty ones (and no that can’t be changed, it’s formed into the metal.) Not sure what I’ll do with those super heavy ones…. Kind of want to figure out how to build a deployment rack for my snowblower or something fun like that.   I did decide to go ahead and lay out T-nuts for the whole length of this slide. It helps that this one actually has nicer hole spacing anyway – There are 4 pairs of two, I just set up a T-nut for a single one in each pair. That way I’ve got the screw hole available if I totally mess one of these up. Before getting to those though we need to figure out exactly where this goes – There is very little room for error on this. These are 28” slides, the fridge itself is 28.25” long, and has a 24.25” length of lid that opens, centered on the fridge. Everything works OK in my model but I made a mockup stick to look this over. I also had to cross check the plan for exactly how far out the countertop would protrude.   The slide does lock open and shut (which is what the blue lever is for) but ideally I also want to make sure that if someone forgets to slide it home and lock it, that the levers don’t stab a hole into the inside of the hatch when someone shoves the hatch into the not-quite-closed fridge. Looks like it should be OK.  With that spot picked, laid out and drilled holes for the T-nuts. Got those installed, and at least they are all in a straight line. Maybe not that 3rd one from the top here – but that’s off in the “up” direction at least, and looks like it’s probably in die grinder range if needed. The real issue here would be if they aren’t quite perpendicular into the wall. We’ll find out.  Not photographed here because it’s all the same as the first time, is cleaning up all of the dados in the driver wall, and extending that one out through the roof. But with that set, we leave the passenger wall in place where it was, and covered it with parchment paper. Then chucked the driver wall right on top of it.  Which means that for the first time in 5 weeks, we can actually move around in the basement again! This actually feels incredible, the shimmying around and between the walls was getting old. And with the wall move, we added all of the foam cores and wired it up. Ready for external wall skin.   With these things getting closed up, it’s a lot off of the metal checklist and a lot less to think about. So far, no major issues have come up and I am trying to avoid this situation. https://thumbs.gfycat.com/ElementaryMedicalCoelacanth-mobile.mp4
|
|
#
¿
Jun 15, 2023 04:51
|
|
|
206 So far as I know, I’ve only had one minor faceplant so far – I forgot to route the path for, and feed wire through, the 2nd heaboard light. As wiring things got this is about the best possible one to forget. I lazily clicked “buy it now” on a 3/8” aircraft length drill bit, and drilled a hole to duplicate the forgotten routing. It’s only about 5” of drilled length so this wasn’t bad to fix at all. That mistake likely had something to do with rushing out the whole second wall exterior glueup in one night on Thursday. Got it done though.   With that finished, time to get the template out again and line it up on the rough wall. I had this whole plan in mind, we had the first wall set up and positioned nicely, finish it off, just put the second one on top of it with a thorough layer of parchment paper (Costco, is why). Then glue our way up, and start fiberglassing back on our way down. But the schedule got a bit busted for that and anyway I didn’t realize the router would basically work like an impeller and just suck parchment paper from below, up into it’s vortex. I think next time I’ll just bother with a sheet of plastic, which I am given to understand is the natural enemy of epoxy.   With the wall shape finished it gets flipped over for review and further work. Some epoxy seepage is going to require the gentle touch of the belt sander to remove. I also ran around the profile, it was pretty easy to pause briefly over small epoxy rivulets and buzz them down without really changing the shape at all.   Also less than a week after we celebrated not having the second wall up on saw horses, we… put it right back there so we could access both walls again. With the schedule being adjusted there wasn’t much else to do. In fact, it’s time to tackle a task I’ve been dreading for some time. I think before doing that though I should explain a bit about how the hatch itself is going to be constructed, or, the edge of it anyway. The method we’ve chosen to use for our galley hatch is the one detailed in Tony Latham’s Building A Teardrop Trailer book. The hatches on these trailers are probably their biggest source of random issues, leaking being the most obvious one. But the method Tony goes through makes a lot of sense to me – Plus, this is the method used on a Teardrop we’ve seen annually for some years now and they’ve never had a problem, so good enough for me. Here’s a cross section of the galley wall and hatch edge as it will be constructed on our trailer:  For the color coding in that image: Blue is ¼”, brown is the ¾” skeleton layer, pink is 1/8”, and the straw color are ½”. The exterior blue sheet, left in this image, is the main exterior wall. What you do then is build your complete wall, with these outer edges of the hatch still attached. If you’ve wondered why I didn’t cut the top 2” of skeleton off the entire way around, this is why. After the wall is complete you separate the hatch edge, and add some more layers. These layers on the galley wall are a 2nd layer of 1/8” plywood to act as a spacer, then a ¼” layer. Up on the hatch edge, you add a ½” piece which the D seal will be attached to – the ¼” below it, will push up into the seal and actually close things off. It also makes something of a dam wall against blown in water. Finally, the larger piece of ½” plywood you see is the internal hatch gusset. The gusset does a couple of important things – First, helps keep the seal squished in place. Second, makes a nice strong attachment point for the gas springs you will need to hold the hatch up with. And third, as it will swell out a bit wider in the curviest sections it helps prevent “spring back”. Apparently this is a thing that happens to some builders – You toss an inner and outer sheet of plywood around a curve that they don’t want to follow, and leave one end unsecured (the bottom of your hatch door). They may want to distort back into their original shape. The gusset stiffens everything up enough to prevent that from being a problem. So the task I’ve been dreading is cutting off these hatch pieces from the main wall. I need a thin kerf cut. Router is out – This is over an inch thick at this point. Figuring for how many I’d break, I’d need a whole box of those needle-thin CNC milling bits and about a hundred passes. I did briefly consider going for a ¼” bit and just gluing a strip of 1/8” plywood back in there, but this is still more gap than I really want. I’m pretty much left to jigsaw this freehand. I don’t like to try to use the jigsaw for anything precise at all, especially not with BOTH sides of the cut being saved. Nothing for it but to jump in. I used a marking gauge to indicate my 2” space. I also put a stiffer blade in the jigsaw rather than a narrower “scroll cutting” blade. None of these curves are too steep, except for the radius where this will flair out and exit the side wall. So I set up a test block with the same radius to make sure I could do it – and check my square at the same time. I could tell the blade was a little off but the shoe on this thing is a pain to adjust, and it’s not out too badly over the thickness I’ll be cutting through here, so I’m calling this good enough.   The other fiddly part will be down near the floor – I decided to leave a little lip of ¼” material, attached to the hatch itself. I think this will help protect the edge of the D seal down here that seals off against the galley floor. Later on the floor end itself will get backed away from the hatch a bit further, but I don’t think this will stand out oddly.   I set myself up with the shop vac nozzle acting as a blower to clear chips, and a steep raking light to help me see the knife edge from the line. And then, went slow as hell. I tried to put almost no pressure on the jigsaw because I usually end up distorting the blade left or right a little bit. It can’t distort if I’m not shoving it!  Anyway in the above photo it took me a minute and a half to travel from where the saw was shown, half way to the blower nozzle…. But it was working and I just kept slowing working my way around. Ended up missing my line (I was on the outside of it) in the radius to exit, I always turn wide with this thing. But it’ll work.   Actually I was extremely pleased with how well that all worked out, so of course I immediately simulated opening it up. The laminations inside look good, too.   With that off, I can start adding those extra layers in the galley area. This first 1/8” piece can be made from random offcuts that are laying around, precise fit won’t be important in the interior. But the first bit does matter – and I made this harder on myself. Since our bulkhead is not vertically in plane, I need this to follow the lower bulkhead, sit above the counter shelf, then follow the upper bulkhead.   With all of those bolt holes pre-set, I have to open access for them as well. Missed the first one of course, and had to open this up a touch with the router.  Got that piece glued in and started on the 2nd wall with all the same stuff. Had never used the back of the template for anything before, so I first had to sand through my seams well enough for the router to travel over smoothly.  This wall, I had not yet done my little roof spacer trim on the hatch area, so I did that now before forgetting about it. This also made very handy clean up of the epoxy leftovers in this area and I kind of wish I had waited to do the other one, too.  Also got the 2nd hatch cut off complete right away, still had my marking gauge set at the same depth, same for the compass radius. Lined up the other part and sanity checked what I was doing here, looked good. I had a little more trouble with this second one – overconfident probably. Still, no significant problems and now that’s complete!   At this point I started messing around with the doors. They aren’t going to get mounted for a long, long time yet. But I wanted to check how they were fitting (they weren’t) and also check on the depth. The fit issue really wasn’t a big deal, the radius in the corners just needed to be opened up a little.  The depth, and the whole reason I was doing this, is because they didn’t bother to publish the complete depth of these doors in their specs. It’s for a camper wall, thought I, how thick could they be? My wall to this point is a hair under 1-1/8” thick. These doors are more like 1-1/4”, plus some thickness for the interior trim ring. So to deal with this we’re going to build a spacer to sit around the door frame, on the outside. This may end up looking a touch bug-eyed, I don’t care. I’m not giving up a full ¼” of bed width! I did not actually get around to laying these pieces out and making them yet- We have a slight dilemma around how to design them. We could hug the door very closely, which would probably make them less obtrusive. We could also make them into a bit of an oval so that it stylistically kinda fit the rounded shape of the overall teardrop – Plus it could pick up the porch light this way, which I worry a bit might be too recessed behind the lifted door. But we didn’t get to that because we found some weirdness with the doors. Firstly, lumps.  I thought this might have been some shipping damage that we didn’t notice, but then later realized that both doors have this in the same spot – I assume a manufacturing defect from how they form these pieces. I tried pounding it a bit using a block of wood as a striking piece, but that seemed to do nothing. Then clamped it with some crushing dies. That helped a good bit, but not enough.   So it went back into the crushers and this time got a persuasion popsicle stick to try to over-bend it a bit in the area where it is deformed.  This got it most of the way there – enough that I think it will pretty well flatten out when screwed down. But that was when I noticed the 2nd issue.  That popsicle stick isn’t putting any pressure on the seal – it just fit in there, loosely. Yes, the door is latched shut. And, the other door has the same issue- both in the bottom left corner. I can fix this one to some extent by making the door close a little tighter, I’d need to add a spacer to the bolt catch area and that would make the door squeeze shut more tightly. I’m not thrilled about that though. I should add that these have a double seal. Anything that leaks past this first seal, gets caught in what is essentially a single piece bucket where it will naturally run down, and “out” is the only way out for it. But this seal isn’t doing squat so now I’ve got a single seal door. I think I’m going to contact the manufacturer and see what they say about it, but I am expecting to get nowhere with this. Might have to add a thicker piece of weather stripping here, or something like that.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 19, 2023 03:10
|
|
|
devicenull posted:Sounds like it's too late, but did you look at the Anderson Powerpole connectors? They are fairly robust (way better then the one you pictured) Yes indeed! Anderson Powerpole are actually what I'm going to be using. From what little I've played with them, they seem great. What I couldn't find was any kind of purpose built through-wall connector socket for those. It probably does exist, I just couldn't come up with it. So I'm using what's technically a roof cable entry thing, with the wire gland facing down. I'll have a very short stub of wire running out of it to the connectors, should work just fine. I'll cap them when not in use.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2023 04:12
|
|
|
208.75 In an update that will challenge no one’s scroll wheel, I finished up gluing my 1/8” layer in as a galley spacer on one wall. The template formerly used for trimming up the inside of this wall received a nice second life filling most of this space. But, I apparently managed to pay no attention while clamping this little wedge piece because the edges were not held down. So I brutalized them off with the plane. This area doesn’t even need to be solid, frankly, so this won’t mater in the least.  More importantly though I spent the better part of two days fretting over how I was going to determine a shape and match and place and cut and position for these door spacer things since they were not a part of the original plan. And then I just went and clamped two sheets together did the loving thing and it took like an hour. Will I learn any lessons from this? No.   
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2023 02:21
|
|
|
219.5 Continuing on with the galley end buildup on the first wall, I cut out a piece to fit of ¼” plywood. This is the one that will sit proud of the hatch edge and actually engage with the seal. In my SketchUp model, theoretically I could cut two of these out of one sheet of plywood, but I didn’t expect it to actually work. Sometimes you get lucky though.  I did my preliminary cuts and lined everything up with the existing bulkhead slots and the bottom of the floor and got it knocked out to shape and…. Damnit.  There is not supposed to be a step there. That offset happens to be the same as the distance the outer wall will hang over the edge of the floor, so I assume that was involved somehow in my measurement. Not really a big deal – That spot will be in the bottom back corner inside a cabinet, and I have the cutoff that just came out of that spot. So I chopped off a bit and glued it in later after this piece was set. Was planning to pack the seam with a little wood glue and dust from sanding on the birch, but didn’t even need it. I under cut the bottom edges of the piece a little to make sure it went back in tight and it turned out fine. More than fine enough for the dark inside of a cabinet anyway.  The reason that whole piece had to be precisely lined up to everything is the 6 bolt holes I need to make passages for in this sheet. The 4 holes along the bottom for the fridge sliders were pretty straight forward and not a problem. But the two for the bottle opener are way out in the middle of nowhere.   And looking more closely at the bottle opener holes, I realized that these two actually got some epoxy squeezed into them from something or other. Not enough to get into the threads but enough to be a problem. So before going ahead adding more layers I stopped to clean this out. I first tried picking at it with a little rat tail file, and while that was working it was incredibly slow. Switched over to the router with a small flute bit and carefully nudged the depth lower and lower. Success!    Ultimately as far as actually locating the things, I finally just triangulated off of two of the holes from the fridge mounts, and went for it. I was off a little, but close enough. This got me the lower bottle opener hole, which I did first because the opener has a much larger surface area around the bottom hole. The top one is pretty tight. Once I could actually see the bottom one though, pinning down the location of the top hole with the T-square was simple.  With that ¼” sheet prepped I epoxied it down, and used the leftovers to make a bit of thickened epoxy. Took care of a bunch of random screw holes in the outer face, plus this gap between the exterior skins on the first wall I did – This was an artifact of discovering mid-process that the factory edges were pretty not-straight.   Using the right tools for the job – thin nap foam rollers in this case – makes everything to do with epoxy much easier. It’s also entertaining when you forget to clean everything up!  Sometime about now I remembered that I still hadn’t actually put a wire in for that one headboard light. Instead of actually doing it I stuck some zip ties through, on the theory that I will go “why the hell is there a zip tie here” when putting the roof on. Assuming it doesn’t break off before then.  The driver side wall then got flipped over so outside faced up, and both walls got their door booster seats attached. This is actually the final piece that needs to be attached to the driver wall – Passenger still needs the same galley thickness buildup, but that’s it.  We’ve changed up our fiberglassing from way back when we did the floor, and as suggested did a seal coat on this wall first. Doing this, plus applying with the foam roller instead of trying to squeegee it around, went way better. I’ve left a gap along the top where it isn’t going to get glassed right now – that will get getting filled in later with a narrow strip to link the walls and roof together. With the seal coat down I also put in a thickened fillet around the door spacers, to start the process of smoothing that transition out. I did this on both walls, one with the general seal coat (which was wet at the time) and one dry. Doing it dry was probably the way to go.   Once that cured, time to trim up the hatch end. I have a 1-1/4” router bushing, which are apparently no longer made by Porter Cable. That, plus a ¼” flute bit, leaves a ½” raised edge for this seal engagement rim. Annoyingly I couldn’t quite push the router bit far enough to actually cut completely through, and my flush trim bits couldn’t reach past this wall thickness. So I cleaned all these fibers up by hand.   Switched to the passenger wall galley thickness spacer, fortunately this wall only has 3 holes. That larger ½” hole is a wire pass through so I can just drill that from the outside, later.  Still, in order to locate those 3 I need to have good references for the location of this sheet, which means edge trimming these parts before they are glued down. Got the locations set close to dead on though.   I am taking no chances with edges bending up this time.  DAMMIT!  So, I think a few things are going on here. First, I was just using edge-on clamping cauls without any kind of weight distribution boards, and that was a mistake on 1/8” plywood. I did that on the next piece after this one, and It did mostly help. The other thing though is that the piece I’m gluing down in the photos above is actually about 840 square inches of surface area. With one of those surfaces being a super flexible “wood”. Which means that whole pile of weight plates is good for… About Zero point 19 PSI. Assuming it was loaded evenly. I suspect that the reason this was never a problem when I used wood glue to put the interior sheets on, is that they were mostly just attaching to the skeleton frame. You know, the thing I reduced the area of by a tremendous amount. Anyway, through doing all of this I’m not particularly worried about it, the pressure isn’t loaded evenly and there’s definitely plenty of area that has bonded well. I don’t think this kind of thing will even come up again in the build but it’s for sure something I would use epoxy on in the future. All that is pretty boring anyway. Or rather, I am getting very bored of slowly laminating more things onto these walls. Partially I think that’s because I grossly glossed over the complexity in making these and they took way longer than expected – We started making the templates for these way back on April 13 and my original goal was to have them done before Memorial day. Glad to see the end of these in sight. And THAT in turn means I need to get the axle on the trailer, so we need to pin down a location. My brother came over to help flip these things around and nudge them about on rollers to find their center of balance. He’s also previously threatened to doxx me in here by showing the true state of my  See my French cleat boards with two (2) things hanging on them? Yeah that was the project I had just finished before violently veering into this project. But yeah things have only gotten worse as we try to push through the last of this. Fun part is that that workbench actually needs to be disassembled and moved before we can get any of these things out of the basement. Anyway! Driver wall weighed in at 93.4 pounds, and the floor is 152. Floor is a bit heavier than I hoped but I’m very pleased with the wall. So while the pure “clock hours” are kinda low for a weekend update, I spent a bunch of what I decided were un-countable “planning hours” roaming around the house with a scale and getting data / performing magic tricks by levitating a fridge   I’m also fairly sure that what I did here with the axle is legit from a balance planning point of view. It’s held level with the boards so I’m weighing the part that will actually drag on the frame, while the hubs and the rest of it will be directly supported at the wheel pivot point.  Made a copy of the trailer model. Which by the way SketchUp seems to do in a really bizarre way? When you “save a copy” it takes that as “We’re gonna eject a copy, and you’re gonna keep working in the same file you were already in.” Which nearly caused a heart attack this morning, since I had been deleting components as I measured their surface area and came up with weights.  81 line items of entries in here, but we’ve got numbers:  Dry weight with all fixed / major gear should show right about 1500 pounds, 170 on the tongue. This is on the heavy end for a 5x10 but not into outlandish super heavy territory, and I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve been messing around to find a sweet spot for the axle that’s OK with everything between empty and loaded, with a test pack and calculation of up to 170 pounds of food, drink, random gear, and personal junk. Max load could push up to 1700 and that gets a little light on the tongue, but it’s easily solvable by taking the water tank out of the trailer and putting it behind the car passenger seat. Fun thing with leverage – 10 pounds of spare blanket rolled up and stuffed in the headboard cubby, has 15% more rotational force on the axle than 3, 12 packs of drinks in the fridge do, given their locations.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 26, 2023 03:58
|
|
|
227.25 Got the exterior glass on one wall. Having the seal coat down, then positioning the glass, then using a foam roller to distribute epoxy onto the glass worked way better than what we had done before.  Also did some color testing – On the inside of the cabin we’re going to just use Rubio Monocoat. I think inside the cabin it will hold up just fine. Plus, I love how easy this stuff is to apply and fix, and it feels nice. We did dabble with the idea of some color variations internally. Thought being – The galley end is going to get spar urethane and I thought that might darken the wood more than it apparently does. A comparable accent on the cabinetry might have been nice. So I wanted to check some of the tinted Rubio colors out – I’ve only ever used their pure/natural before. Turns out their colors are… not to my taste. I would not have named “goose poo poo” as “Dark Oak” personally. At least they sell these samples in tiny ketchup packets now. We also had been considering making the ceiling and/or walls white instead of pure wood, just to break up the internal space. But we aren’t liking these options either so the heck with it, we’ll live in our tiny wooden coffin.  Trailer frame also went back into my dad’s garage. Realized that the POR 15 primer not only ate the top of the sawhorses it sat on while curing, but also for some reason did not at all bond to the mill stamping on the steel. Will have to grind that off and re-do it.    I also buttoned up the other wall with the last galley end ¼” spacer. I ended up just cutting a complete square opening for that water jug tie down. Not only was this easier than aligning 3 holes, but it also recesses that anchor a bit and it didn’t need to protrude so far anyway. That done, it’s moving day! Had to disassemble my work bench, and then start the migration. This was not as bad as it could have been.  As we leave the basement, I’m just gonna say it. I’m disappointed none of you noticed Gary, or his baleful visage.  Gary is the purveyor of irregular plywood, and I noticed after about 3 updates that he was lurking in the background, watching. Anyway it’s too late now, so we leave him behind.  
|
|
#
¿
Jun 29, 2023 14:30
|
|
|
250 Ugh kind of a lot happened and I didn’t make any posts. First up: While the floor was laying in the garage, inside facing up, I just jumped into smoothing that up. This was from our original experiments with fiberglass and attempting to spread epoxy around with a scraper cart. So, there’s lots of variations in the epoxy thickness. This doesn’t really matter as it’s going to be covered by the mattress, or the fridge slide tray, or the stack of drawers – The only spot this will ever really be visible is in the utility bin area. But I spent a little time smoothing it up anyway, at least to a half-assed degree, and then tossed a skin coat of fresh epoxy on it via roller just in case I sanded through anywhere. The sanding really shows how lumpy it was. I was pleased in that I was initially kneeling on that scrap of plywood from the door cutouts, but the floor seemed to bear my weight just fine even just haphazardly laying on top of a few 2x4 chunks.   Then I got the passenger side wall out and finished prepping it – It really should have been sealed and glassed in the basement yet but my moving help was available. I had a slight wobble with the jigsaw blade right in this curve when cutting the hatch rib off, here I just packed in some plastic wood filler that I had on hand. I’ll have to do something more permanent later but this was enough for the router guide bushing to follow a nicer curve and not cut the weird divot into the galley hatch seal piece.   Back at the trailer barn, we plotted out exactly where the axle needed to be placed. This was a little tricky to dial in, mostly from trying to select something on the axel to actually measure off of. There was a lathe center point on the back of the spindle though, toward the inside of the trailer. That proved to be a pretty stable point to measure from. We used that, plus a spiky center point attached to the tongue, to find our triangle. Then measured from a bunch of random other points just to make sure things lined up. With that set the paint got cleaned off and the axle brackets welded on.   And then dragged it out behind my car even though it doesn’t have a hitch yet, just to see how it looked. Felt nice to see this complete.  I am slightly annoyed at how much room there is between the frame and the pivot arm for the suspension though. They have a bare minimum that they demand, between your bracket and the hub face for the wheel itself. Beyond that they get cagey about what exactly lands where. I also have to account for the cabin body being slightly wider than the trailer itself, and wanted to make sure these had no chance to collide. From various internet sleuthing I thought I had a reasonable solution to it, but this is a larger gap than I wanted. Not a huge deal, just slightly annoying. Might make fender mounting a bit challenging later on. But, it’s also riding a little higher than I expected – Granted, with absolutely no weight on it. Whenever the suspension in this one wears out and/or if it just really bothers us, we can tweak both issues on a new axle and use the same mounting brackets.  Towed the light-less, fender-less trailer back to our garage. My dad insists this is completely legal “because you can see the truck’s lights”. I’m pretty sure he’s completely full of poo poo and/or remembering something from ages ago. Regardless, it’s not even 3 miles so I just acted as the chase vehicle. It was nice to see the frame track nice and straight behind his truck, though. Trailer in its new home, let's get to the first order of business: take care of that issue from the frame heat distorting while welding, I need to add a shim to the front of the trailer. Had a little more distortion happen while putting the axle on, lowering the galley area. I kind of expected that and we tried to control it by doing a short weld at the leading and trailing edges of the axle bracket to hopefully help prevent it from pulling. Still happened a little though, but it’s pretty uniform so whatever. Another shim. The front needs a full ¼” in one spot.   What’s really fortunate is that the whole shimming issue really does seem to just be around the leading (and now trailing) edge of the trailer. The platform itself sits pretty flat on the trailer, including on the interior support bars. There’s a few air gaps but it’s never far from contact, so I’m not going to worry about it. With all of the spacers test fit in place, they got epoxied down, and then later coated over with epoxy themselves for water proofing.  Once that epoxy cured I started to prep the bottom surface for paint. Here, I don’t care at all about leveling out the weird epoxy bumps. But I am trying to scuff all of the surface to give some tooth for the primer to stick to. The bumps are making this something awful so I abuse the hell out of my orbital sander by digging in with the edge. Fortunately/unfortunately this sander is dying and keeps cutting out, so it has been replaced and designated as the beater sander.   Once that was done, it got hit with the primer. I’m using topside boat primer and paint for the bottom of the floor here – Just a one-part rust-oleum product; we’re planning on using a higher grade 2 part paint on the cabin itself. But this will be some experience with this class of paints at least. First lesson, the primer is oddly heavy, and that’s because the bottom half of the can is just full of solids that you need to disperse by mixing for 25 minutes. Also it’s suspended in what smells like nothing but xylene.  Time for a brief intermission, I think I should at least try to get my poo poo together and start off on the right foot this time. For starters, this is just not OK…  So I pulled apart that whole corner of the garage and moved the workbench and tool chest to the side wall, to make more space for the long trailer.  And then I made… well, it’s a shelf. A free standing shelf. Mostly from scrap cutoffs and a pair of 2x4s. On the principle that any horizontal surface just gathers crap – well, this is a horizontal surface intended to gather crap. If the tape isn’t readable, I labeled the two sides as “measuring, mark, and layout only” and “Free Parking – for that thing you need to put down”. This will be the extent of my workspace 5S efforts. We’ll see how it goes.  The trailer itself then got disassembled back down to base components. All of the newly attached parts need to get cleaned up and primed – and this whole thing still hasn’t been topcoated at all yet.  Wire holes for the side marker lights get added before I forget about it again –  Axle mounting bars get a good cleaning   And I ask myself why I didn’t just do this at my dad’s house when it was upside down on stands, instead of having to lay on my back on the garage floor…  Because he seemed to be getting annoyed about grinding debris, that’s why. I made a feeble effort to deflect the grinding blast with a box, and then gave up approximately 30 seconds later. Of course, my nice floor magnet sweeper is still at his house where I took it for all of the welding activities.  Went through the whole degrease and etch process again on the exposed metal. This time in the garage and I don’t know if those cleaners were going to do anything to my already traumatized concrete slab. So for the “rinse thoroughly” step I just dragged the hose into the garage.   Painting on the primer was uneventful, so I went back to the floor and painted that.  It’s a very different paint to work with than anything I am used to. It’s extremely thin – And also should absolutely be getting tipped after rolling but I’m not bothering with that down here. The only reason this is getting painted at all is to add a layer of protection, UV in particular, to the epoxy. The bubbles were mostly self-popping except at the very end, where they went just crazy both in how many appeared and how many stayed there. Guessing this may have a very short open pot time, and I had just dumped half the can into my tray. I’ll give this a light sanding before a second coat.  
|
|
#
¿
Jul 3, 2023 01:06
|
|
|
259.25 In an effort not to fall behind, an update after a productive day. We’re really pushing to make next Saturday the 8th, the assembly day. I have helpers lined up and certain food-related promises were made. Problem is that until a few days ago, I had sort of forgotten to account for things like “painting the trailer” and “finishing the bottom exterior of the floor” as being needed steps, before permanently bolting those two things together. And that is quite a bit of work to forget about. So this morning with the primer touch-ups cured I started sanding the trailer frame for final paint. I think there intention is that you not do this at all and instead just top coat right after the primer layer. But I wasn’t able to do that right awat, so the instructions call for scuffing with 320 grit. This was… incredibly tedious. The random orbital seemed to aggressive with the very small pieces of metal so I did the whole thing by hand, over about 3 hours. And of course, it’s a pitch black object with the sun blazing away outside – I couldn’t see squat.  I pretty much had to keep the flashlight in one hand with my face shoved into the area I was working, sanding away with the other hand. I will say though that those little “sanding mouse” things for 5” random orbital disks are great, if you’re ok with blowing the disks on them. That’s usually the kind of paper I have in the widest variety, so I go with it. I think I’m going to get more of these and just write grit numbers on their back. After a while of that my arm was going to fall off so I switched tack and went to finish glassing the passenger wall. Being completely out of work space, I took a set of sawhorses out in the driveway and did it there. This photo is from about 8 AM, despite how the shadows look. I was hoping to get this done before the sun got too intense.  Was a little apprehensive about doing this in full sunlight and this heat – mid 80s today – But I needed to get this done. One thing I did not expect – turns out fiberGLASS can be really blinding in direct sunlight. So that was fun.  You can also see in the photo above that I completely cut the glass around the door bump out layer. On the first wall we didn’t do this and tried to force everything together. That was a waste of time though and it really didn’t work, so I just cut this from the getgo. This glass isn’t here for strength – certainly not at the door where it’s now a lamination of 4 layers of plywood with staggered seams. It’s just to help hold a solid epoxy layer for waterproofing. Pre-cutting the door piece like this did make for a more stable work experience, although it did leave some gaps around the door frame as the glass pulled away while I rolled epoxy. I was able to shove most of it back in. This will require some decorative sanding cleanup. But, whatever, it’s done. The heat and light did really blast the epoxy and it wasn’t even tacky 4 hours later – I dragged it back inside at that point. Hopefully the UV in that time didn’t do any significant damage to it.  I then sanded back the paint I put on the floor yesterday – Photo below shows the same bubbled spot that I previously showed. When I put the second coat on this I did make the effort to tip it as I rolled, skipping that really wasn’t doing the paint coat any favors.   With that done, back to the trailer. For whatever reason, one of my patch spots under the frame got… clear coated? I think this was the first spot I painted, and I have to assume I just hadn’t stirred well enough. But the spots right after this were fine, and I didn’t stir any further after brushing this spot. Maybe the initial brush load mostly washed away in solvent or something? This was upside down and I couldn’t really see what I was doing.  It’s also corroding. I decided to just sand this all the way back to bare metal and skip the primer. The top coat claims to be OK right onto bare steel – This spot is facing down anyway and I’ll be able to check on it when inspecting the frame condition. Once I finally finished the trailer sanding – including getting it flipped over upside down again – went on to the first paint coat. This is no sprayed finish or anything but it does brush out fairly well to a nice smooth matte surface. Painting this was still fun though in the black-on-black sense, couldn’t see crap.  Surprise! We’re back in the basement, where it is now blissfully cool. And, oh look, it’s that workbench I made 4 months ago. Now with copious walking space around it. And what’s that? A full sheet of plywood not haphazardly propped on random other objects? How absurd!  I managed to cut out the rough sheets for the headboard, lower bulkhead, and the panel that will form the bottom of the cabinets in the galley and the cabin. At that point I decided I was exhausted for the day and probably about to make a stupid mistake, so I quit.  I also felt dumb putting the track saw together in extension mode for this, but it was the right thing to do. I wish they made a ~65” piece just to account for these 5 foot sheets, but 55 is the biggest “reasonable” size they have in one part.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 4, 2023 01:46
|
|
|
Oh I like that idea, something extra to protect the front face of the axle sounds like a good idea. I'll have to look into that. You're probably right about the wheels too - I'll have to find some alternate fenders to what we had been planning on using, fortunately hadn't actually bought those yet.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 5, 2023 12:38
|
|
|
Yeah any kind of a step up onto the roof might be handy, but I'm not sure if we'll need it. Should have a much better idea in the very near future for that, at least.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2023 04:49
|
|
|
300.75 We’ve been hammering on this project in order to hit our self-imposed deadline of tomorrow, to start assembling everything. Looking back to last week Thursday when I took a day off – just shy of 25% of the entire time spent on this project has happened since then. Because we are insane. Also, we are very much looking forward to tomorrow, now that we actually got everything ready. We’ve had a few things running in parallel here. I’ve mostly been working on the primary interior panels, the ones that lock into the dado slots in the walls and therefore have to be done for the walls to go up. At their core, these are panels with a tab.  The lower bulkhead between the galley and the cabin is one of the more complex due to the number of things attached to it. Which leads to my moto of ABSCE, always be sanity checking everything. I can’t actually remember what it was at the moment but something in here was fucky and laying out the parts helped identify that.  But anyway took care of that, cut everything up, and added to the pile of things that needed sanding and finishing work.  While working on that, my wife took care of most of the finishing work on the walls. This is all stuff that will be way, way easier to do now, flat on a table, than once they are installed. These got sanded out, and all of the dados got masked off. That’s to protect the wood in those areas from contact with the Rubio wax finish. We’re going to need strong epoxy bonds in these areas.   In order to make room we dropped the trailer to the floor and set up sawhorses in the middle of it, then put a wall on top of that. Did I mention that we’re really looking forward to tomorrow? We’ll never have to, or be able to, move any of these pieces around again. Some of the panels are split with epoxy and Rubio on the interior portions. Those are slightly annoying to handle but haven’t been too bad. We also moved the walls around into a double stack so we could get at the more time consuming epoxy areas and ignore the middle, while also freeing up half the garage.   But everything seems to have turned out pretty well with these. The floor itself has also had a few coats of spar urethane put down. Given that this will be almost entirely covered with a mattress we didn’t bother to totally smooth out the floor before putting this down. So I’ll admit here that this photo makes it look better than it does in reality.   The last interior panel I had to make was the headboard, and this was proving more challenging than I expected. I had wanted to make a flush mount, grain matched panel here for the doors, just like we had drawn in the model.  But, I couldn’t make a decent template for this. I couldn’t get 4 points locked down for my router circle jig to be in a dead square, and even once that was done I was concerned about being able to cut the rest of the shape, tangent to those circles. I think this really called for a CNC, which I don’t have access to, and I was ready to give up and call this beyond my skill. But then I had a stupid idea- I’ll just cut out a circle in some scrap  And I’ll mark some parallel lines from the adjacent face of the board, tangent to the circle and cut those  And if that tape holds together, I can cut out a thing  Then thin the walls down with some sanding until I almost sand through  Then cut it into quarters with a marking knife  Then I’ll have a set of 4 almost identical radius pieces with a right angle back to them. Just need a little hand sanding to feather the edges out.   And those in turn, can get mounted into the rectangular template that I made, for cutting my doors out with. I’m sure there’s a less stupid, less time consuming way to do exactly what I just did. But I don’t know that way and I’m pretty pleased with having pulled this off.  Of course there’s still the issue that the template was way to big because of math, or something, and I had to make a second one. At least the corner pieces could just be moved over.  It did work perfectly, at least. The masking tape I was using to hold the pieces down would tear every 2nd or 3rd pass, though.   I cut through most of the way, and then just finished with a jigsaw and used a flush trim bit to clean up the leftovers. Before completing all of that though I laid out and recessed some groves for hinges here. These are just simple utility hinges – I could do fancy internal wide opening soft close hinges – except there is almost no room in this cabinet and those would be in the way. So I’m settling for these, and just recessing them to make them less likely to scrape your hand. Will mostly be behind pillows, anyway.   The headboard also gets some reinforcing bars added inside of it, so that these flat doors can be leaned against.  We also got the floor back onto the trailer, and pilot holes drilled up through the mounting tabs into the floor.   Those pilot holes got enlarged, and then spot faced on the trailer side. This lets me recess a prong washer (gooped up in epoxy, of course) so that the carriage bolts we’ll be connecting the body to the trailer, have something to lock up against.  With my leftover epoxy from that project, I also threw down a rib of thickened epoxy to help reinforce the headboard door supports. I completely forgot that part of the reason I was doing this, was to test color matching from some of the wood flour filler that I have. Oh well. 
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2023 04:51
|
|
|
325.75 Well this somehow took longer than expected, yet went more smoothly than we could have hoped? Started the day off with a few last minute prep items. Chiefly, I had to make fake duplicates of the ends of the internal roof shape pieces, since these actually dictate where the wall sits on the floor of the trailer. I also made a set of spacer sticks, the exact width of the floor – on the theory that these could be jammed into the roof and then clamped against, to help hold everything true to dimension.   My dad and brother came by to help and ended up spending a good chunk of the day helping out. Having more hands here made this possible, I don’t think we could have done this alone. Got things set up - Bolting the floor onto the trailer was uneventful. Whole assembly then got maneuvered into the middle of the garage and leveled out. There was just enough room to splay the walls out in preparation with a bit of wiggle room to get by everything.  Then it was time to start dry fitting and seeing if everything actually lined up how it was supposed to. Just seeing the first wall set up against the floor, was pretty exciting for us.  Everything was fitting really well, too – The lower bulkhead and the cabinet shelf above it were overly snug in their slots, but they fit. A bit of sanding smoothed them out to slide in. The headboard, I don’t think I had to do anything with at all. The bulkhead I did have to do one final trim cut on; I had left it tall just in case of any unexpected fit issues. I wanted to make sure it would properly support the cabinet shelves, and by extension the upper bulkhead. Pretty soon, we were able to get everything set up as a dry fit. We were incredibly happy to see this:  The location where I had the air vent holes set up, made a really handy spot to slide in a pipe clamp to help hold everything together. Beyond that though – we almost didn’t need to clamp anything at all. We have the safety clamps attached to the frame, just to make sure a wall doesn’t drop off of the trailer. But it’s actually holding… pretty much where it’s supposed to? We ended up not even using any of the spacer sticks that I made up. There are a couple sitting up there in the photo, but that’s all they did. Until someone crashed into them and then they got chucked out of the way. We had to temporarily shim one corner of the headboard to push on the wall a little in that location – Other than that, everything is plum and seems to be holding the right width. I’m not going to argue with it. I did apparently double-remove intersecting material by taking it off of both parts, leaving myself with a nice hole here. Oh well, plastic will fix it.  With that set we spent about an hour masking everything off.  This is all being glued together with epoxy, with a handful of screws sent through into the cross members and the floor. But there will also be epoxy fillets on the inside in these corners to really help anchor everything together. At the start of the day we discussed two different ways of doing this – Either a first wall, then a ~4 hour pause while the epoxy gelled up before doing the 2nd wall – Or just doing both in one shot. Decided to just go for the one shot method. The epoxy doesn’t go off all that fast but we still had to work quickly. The actual assembly process took a little over an hour with multiple rounds of making fresh epoxy. We wetted out all of the areas that were going to contact each other to try to get the wood to take up whatever it would, then dabbed in some thickened epoxy at the edges of the dado slots, and along the entire floor edge. The floor in particular got coated with a ton, just to try to make sure there were no voids or gaps at all.  Actually popping the parts together, went pretty well. We had a near disaster on the cabinet shelf, which can slide back and forth a little and needs to be positioned right behind the cabin cabinet face frame. Which, I forgot about entirely and it ended up in exactly the right place by shear luck. With everything assembled, it took us about another hour to handle all of the epoxy fillets and pull the tape, and then try to clean up the fillets. Those turned out ok enough – I’m not thrilled with the color, but it’s fine. We used some wood flour along with the cabosil to thicken the epoxy up. We bought two different types and this was the lighter of the two – still darker than I would like. I think as we move up to some of the more visible components I’ll tweak how and where we are using this stuff to minimize it a little more. My wife did suggest that I should change the thread title to “how long could it take?” or “Why is there epoxy everywhere?!” And to that later one it did end up kind of like one of those public bathroom horror stories. How did you get poop on the ceiling??   We are really glad to finally see it in this shape, and we love how the profile has turned out. We also never have to pick up the walls or floor again, which is a nice change of pace!   As a bonus, we chucked our air mattress in there to try it out and make sure we were going to fit how we thought we would. It turns out, what we thought was a queen air mattress was actually a full. This is technically a bit wider than the bed we’ve been camping on for years. Of course, you can’t hang a leg or arm off of the side, but this is still a pleasant surprise. My feet fit too! Actually getting into it isn’t bad at all, the door seems to be in a good spot to allow you to scoot and roll with a minimum of awkwardness.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2023 02:24
|
|
|
PerniciousKnid posted:Thank you for this thread! I just learned about these things and was thinking about making one. Do it! I feel encouraged to recklessly egg on anyone else who is thinking about this, now that we're at the phase where we have a thing with a shape! Actually, it's now at minimum viable product stage I suppose - Just need a good tarp to chuck over it and we can go camping in it!
|
|
#
¿
Jul 10, 2023 02:25
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 21, 2024 08:20 |
|
|
Final assembly? Just the end of the beginning, friend. 350.75 Haven’t updated in a bit. We took most of a week off after getting the walls put up, things were getting a little death-marchy there to make that happen. After getting started again, I’ve mostly been spending time making various internal panels that need to be installed before the roof project can get started. One thing that was fun, I realized I forgot to flush trim this last panel somewhere in the wall build process. It was close to where it needed to be by feel, but not close enough. Also I didn’t realize this had happened until I had already sanded the panel itself enough to make it fit. As with many things on this camper, this will be fixed with the nature-friendly miracle of plastic.   It is a really nice change of pace though, having the walls up. I’m no longer building things to a theoretical, I’m building them to a fit. So I left this panel long, and I can simply mark where the roof is. And since the roof panel will lay right over this piece it only has to be approximately close, I can just eyeball the track saw angle and it’s good enough to never be seen again.   There! Perfect!  Perfect execution of forgetting to take into account the thickness of the roof panel itself. Do it again. Like I said, it’s great building to a fit where a mistake like this is immediately apparent. Once the sizes were set, this one gets a hole knocked in it for the passive air return out of the galley. I also slotted a line into it for the interior layer of the roof structure, to seat into.  We still had some epoxy fillet welds to finish up. After our previous experience my wife wanted to use her baking experience and insisted on making some disposable piping bags out of parchment paper. I also tweaked the color down – This was one of those things where it never looked dark enough and then turned out way too dark. These changes were an incredible improvement, I’m never going to try to freehand deploy thickened epoxy again.   I also bought a laser level, mostly for use later on but it was immediately handy, now. I was pleased to find that the headboard was only about 1/16” off across its length, at least according to what the level here though. I used the line to fit a few blocks to the wall and the back of the headboard. This will let the nightstand shelf sit on something while getting fixed in position.  The shelf itself is just a small slab with a bevel on one end to reach the headboard. Needs to have two switches, a standard 12v outlet, and a dual USB power port socketed into it. These trim panels for the switches I am using, leave almost no clearance between the edge of the retainer nuts and the edge of the trim itself. Fortunately my standby of Always Be Sanity Checking Everything saves the day – It’s really only the two switches that have this problem because they aren’t thick enough to stick through more than a very thin sheet of anything. The two power socket items will drop right through, and just need a clearance hole the size of their own bodies. The finished board seats in perfectly, although I still need to trim the final length.   The cabin cabinet face has been a bit more of a pain to make. For one thing, more than any other panel the size here between the dado and the tab, was just wrong some how. Doesn’t seem to be twisted relative to each other or anything- just a wrong thickness. Took a fair bit of work to get the panel to actually drop into place, but eventually got it.  This was also where I had the lucky accident of not setting the shelf too far forward, after forgetting to position it horizontally at all – was left with total luck as to where it came out. It isn’t actually quite perfect but it is at least pretty uniform. There is a gap that will need to be dealt with though. Didn’t exactly leave myself much spare meat on the height, either. Clearance is clearance, as they say.   The cabinet face is supposed to have an open central section with a door over a cubby on the left and right. This is going to be done the same way as the headboard, with a one piece construction that the door is cut out of, leaving a perfect grain match. To do this I made up another square jig, with just two of the panels. One cubby, and the wider central section.  Plotted everything off of a center line, for the central opening. Plan is to fit the same radius pieces that I used for the headboard, into these template holes. I can cut one cubby, flip the entire thing over and re-align to the center of the board itself. Cut the other cubby, and then cut the central section. That way, any weirdness in the template should at least be symmetrical since it will be mirrored.   Parts one and two went no problem. I was pretty much just muttering “don’t gently caress up.. don’t gently caress up….” To myself as I did the last one. If my hand twitched or one of these guides came loose it would trash the entire piece. Fortunately, no such problem.   With both of those panels ready, I was able to sort out a pair of dividers that will separate the central open area from the cabinets. Also whoever said something about welding on a step next to the fender…. Yeah, maybe. Even at 6’6” and with this coming out pretty close to what I estimated in the model, the top of the camper is just at my eye level. Half stood on the tire to trace this shape.   The cabinet doors themselves, I haven’t actually broken free yet – I’ll do that with a jigsaw later and then flush trim the edges to clean up. First though I want to get the hinges set. I hate dealing with cabinet door hinges and in particular like this where I have an intentional visible gap. If the alignment is bad it will stand out terribly. I had to add an extra ¼” piece to the hinge edge of the door – these are only ½” panels and the hinge expects a thicker piece than that. I’m still working on making up some small mounting blocks for the hinges to actually attach to. My plan is to attach the hinges to the door, with the doors attached to the frame. Set and balance mounting blocks for the hinges to attach to. Then, unlock everything and only THEN cut the doors out of the frame.  I’ve also made up what will be our hatch spar. Traditionally this is made of some heavy block of wood, and I have a slab of Ash bought for this purpose. Except, I screwed up and it isn’t thick enough – or, won’t be once it is flattened out. So instead I’ve laminated together 3, ¾” pieces of plywood.  And here we come to a style decision. We’ve pretty much settled on NOT trying to hide the fact that this is made out of plywood. I mean, nice plywood, it’s mostly Baltic birch. But we’re not going to edge band anything. We’re going to leave the “live” plywood edge and have that be the accent trim look. The decision we have to make is, does this beam for the hatch spar go too far down that path. I can always make it a hair narrower and use a strip of 1/8” plywood as a veneer to cover it, if we want. I think I’m going to wait until we clean this up and drop it in place, to make a call. A bit of work in the galley is done also – Strictly speaking this is not needed to get the ceiling on, but it is annoying and I want to be done with it. The counter top has two pieces of ¾” plywood vertically in the center of the galley, that hold it up. These two pieces also support the fridge on one side, and carry a stack of drawers between them. The trick is that while everything is relatively flat and plumbish, it actually isn’t. So these pieces need to finish flush and level for the counter top to sit on. They need to meet a very close but not-quite-plumb wall in the rear. And they need to follow the slope of the galley floor toward the open end. Yes the galley floor is sloped, this is a drainage feature THAT WAS TOTALLY INTENTIONAL AND I PLANNED IT OUT THAT WAY IT’S PERFECT. Point is there really isn’t a square corner on either of these boards. I started trying to scribe this on a little piece of scrap wood but was having a fair bit of trouble with it. I think what I’m going to do now is get a position locked in that I am happy with on the galley floor, and back wall. Leave the panels tall. The use the laser level to mark a flat top to them. Cut that off, then lock these in. The panels themselves are also not identical – they have different knockouts for air passages and wiring clearances.  
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2023 03:03
|
|