How interesting. Mine pulls out and you have to insert the three legs into it. Please post a picture of what yours looks like. I wonder if it's just the difference between 67 and 68?
I just spent a couple of hours digging around in my Caravel's furniture. What was supposed to be a simple upgrade (adding drawer slides) turned out to be not so easy ... the upshot is that to add slides I either need to build smaller drawers, or re-build the entire frame.
So, I've put everything back together and I'm THINKING...
Stef, the P.O. of my Caravel attached the three bed-support legs with hinges beneath the gaucho. A bit of velcro holds them up in the folded position until you need them, then a gentle tug causes them to fall into place as legs! It's a simple enough modification for anyone to do... If you want I'll email you a picture.
Yes, I'd like to see a picture. That would be a good improvement. So it sounds like '68 gauchos do have legs. Heidi's 67 is slightly different I guess. Though I'm still interested in seeing how hers works.
I was afraid the drawer mod might be a little tricky. I find I can often come up with a solution when I stop and think about it for a day. I'm sure you'll think of something.
Count me in also on the happy Caravel owner's club. It took me 2 years to find my ideal little Airstream because like so many other folks I thought Bambi was the only way to go in a little AS.
I traveled 800 miles round trip to pick up this little gem but the trip was more than worthwhile since I've gotten it home and checked everything out.
It's perfect for my needs in a travel trailer. Everything is original and works fine except the Dometic fridge works on gas but not elec. I know there is a thread here somewhere about troubleshooting non-working AC Dometics and I'll be looking that
up next.
I'm not saying that vintage Caravels are equal to or better than Bambis, just saying that I luv my lil 18' Caravel.
I bought and sold 4 other bigger AS's in my quest for my lil jewel and I got attached to each one.
AIRSTREAMS RULE!
So, at this point the "Caravel Owners Club" has four members!
Rog, we traveled 1100 miles round-trip to get our Caravel and counted ourselves lucky! There's darned few up in the Northeast to choose from ...
Stef, I'll post a pic of my gaucho legs tomorrow. Your email address was bouncing on me yesterday, not sure why.
BTW, our first updates will be a small fire extinguisher, a permanently mounted smoke/CO detector, and (after I figure out the drawer slide problem) I think we are going to change out the current vinyl flooring to a wood-look vinyl or laminate. This is all pretty low-cost stuff and within my "handyman" skill level.
We're also thinking hard about where to add permanent organizers (for reading material, kitchen stuff, supplies, etc.). With 3 people in a 17-ft trailer you can quickly see the need for organization!
I'm not at all fond of the shag carpet in my '71 and would love to install Pergo. Problem is that my dinette sits at a slight angle rather than parallel. I dunno why it was built that way. Were the older Caravels like this?
Rather than trying to cut the Pergo at matching angles, might it be easier to install it under the benches then reinstall them?
Problems? Thoughts? Suffer with the shag?
BTW, my photos are at: http://f1.pg.photos.yahoo.com/bc/roj...tos.yahoo.com/
We still have the original tile in ours. Fortunately the pieces
are coming up on their own! We are waiting for our new
Armstrong Linoleum to come in. (Any day.) Its all one sheet
so it seems really practical. Just wondering what to do around the shower pan. How to join them. Wish I could take the shower pan up but I 'm afraid I'd break it.
I'd be afraid of Pergo because if you had a leak or water problem
it seems it would have more chance to seep through. The shag
carpet would have to go though.
As far as organizing- I've been amazed at the amount of usable
space in the Caravel. We're going from New Orleans to Santa Fe
in a few weeks so we'll see how well we do with space!
Rog, the dinette is very much at an angle in our '68. See pic. This is not a bad thing as far as laminate (e.g., Pergo) flooring goes, it just means a lot more cuts. Once you get the angle, it shouldn't be all that hard.
The reasons I wouldn't go under the furniture are that (a) it's a lot more trouble to remove & reinstall everything; (b) when you raise the gaucho to accomodate the Pergo, you'll find you have to raise other things, too like the wood shelf that lies above the gaucho. Especially in the kitchen, this looked like the kind of thing that would cascade into a whole interior refurb, which is more than I'm willing to do.
It's funny you mentioned this because I sat up until 1 a.m. last night figuring out exactly how to put laminate flooring in without causing a nightmare of problems. An example is the the drawers beneath the gaucho -- with a 3/8" floor in place, mine won't have clearance to open. But since I plan to re-build those drawers anyway, I guess I can deal with that.
In the next few days I'm going to look for a remnant box of laminate flooring in a warm wood color and put it in. I'll post pics as I do it.
Although some laminate floor manufs claim some level of waterproofness, I'm not going to include the bathroom. I'll use an edging strip to "step down" the floor from the new laminate to the old vinyl, at the bath doorway.
A rough measure of my open floor space (not including bathroom) is 28 square feet. That's about half a typical box of laminate flooring, so even with a LOT of waste (which is to be expected given all the tricky cuts), I should be fine with just one box. That's about $40-65 -- not bad.
Part of the reason that I need so little is that I will put the new floor only in the trafficked areas, directly over the vinyl. The vinyl already goes under all the furniture, and it's in good shape, so why remove it? The vinyl will serve somewhat as a floor leveller and waterproofer. But in your case, you'll have to take up the shag before getting started.
This is really interesting. Your interior is much lighter than mine. Here's a picture of mine (with tropical dog-proof slipcovers). You can see there are two magazine racks, one next to the door, one to the left of the window. They look original to me, because there is a third little rack next to the reading lamp. I'll past a pic of it in the next message.
Here's the reading lamp racks. The wine boxes on the wall were a previous owners addition. We removed them because there's plenty of space for us so far. We aren't even using it all as it is. And we like the way that wall looks without the boxes on it. It has a beautiful woodgrain that I just love looking at.
Well, I ended up making a new drawer under the gaucho so I could have slides installed. In case anyone else is considering this, keep in mind you'll need to (a) build new drawers, because the old ones are too big to have slides mounted; (b) build a new sub-frame to mount the drawer slides; (c) if you want to keep the same "look", you need to pry the existing drawer fascia off the old drawer and attach it to the front of the new drawer.
The picture below shows the subframe I had to build. It's the lighter-colored wood (actually maple veneer plywood leftover from another job). Note the drawer slider mounted on the left side -- there's another on the right you can't see. Also note that the subframe doesn't fit square, because the original gaucho frame is not square. I'm finding that carpentry inside an Airstream is much like working on an old house!
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