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Mark Lee · 10-31-2012, 11:32 PM

Yes Christina, I was also thinking about heating up the tubes and syringes in warm water while in bags. If the weather holds out I might be able to do some of the seam work here. The type of syringes that I found look to be what you describe as the feeding type. The store only had a few. It is very possible that I might have to use your clip the cover on an injection syringe idea. Thanks And Steve, I sorta had my camera buried in a cabinet that had all kinds of junk piled around and on it.So I didn't get any pictures I'm sorry to say.

Steve Bryant · 11-02-2012, 09:39 PM

Today was a big day for Ralph and me because we made a lot of progress. Actually, we had been patiently preparing the way for this progress for months, but things started coming together. We started the morning by going to a local lumber store and bought four sheets of ACX fir plywood. Then we re-measured a few dimensions and made a cut sheet for the four sheets of plywood so as to try and not waste any wood.

Next, we marked and made the initial cuts with a circular saw and labeled each piece and its orientation. That’s me with the saw.

Then, we marked the wood according to the previously made cardboard patterns (Ralph doing the marking on this one).

Then, we cut out the curves on the plywood with the jig saw, made the rabbit around the edge, chamfered the top and bottom edge with the sander. Thanks Mark Lee for this suggestion, I was going to use a router and it was one less tool that I had to set up. The C Channel was widened one last time with a pry bar and the two front corner pieces were persuaded into position with a mallet and a block of wood. I backed it up with a big square steel bar on the outside of the shell as dolly.

Today was a big day for Ralph and me because we made a lot of progress. Actually, we had been patiently preparing the way for this progress for months, but things started coming together. We started the morning by going to a local lumber store and bought four sheets of ACX fir plywood. Then we re-measured a few dimensions and made a cut sheet for the four sheets of plywood so as to try and not waste any wood.

Next, we marked and made the initial cuts with a circular saw and labeled each piece and its orientation. That’s me with the saw.

Then, we marked the wood according to the previously made cardboard patterns (Ralph doing the marking on this one).

Then, we cut out the curves on the plywood with the jig saw, made the rabbit around the edge, chamfered the top and bottom edge with the sander. Thanks Mark Lee for this suggestion, I was going to use a router and it was one less tool that I had to set up. The C Channel was widened one last time with a pry bar and the two front corner pieces were persuaded into position with a mallet and a block of wood. I backed it up with a big square steel bar on the outside of the shell as dolly.

Steve Bryant · 11-03-2012, 08:29 AM

I don't know what happened in the last post but a lot of the pictures and text posted twice...sorry about that.

Steve

ROBERTSUNRUS · 11-03-2012, 10:33 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Bryant

I don't know what happened in the last post but a lot of the pictures and text posted twice...sorry about that.

Steve

Hi, I think that, that means, it's twice the work on a 34'er.

Nice job, keep up the good work.

Steve Bryant · 11-28-2012, 10:22 PM

It’s been about a month since I’ve last posted and I wanted to offer a progress report. Here’s the front end of the trailer shot from below (which is easy to do since my driveway slopes uphill.

In this picture you can see the rivets outlining the internal doublers that have been inserted and the bolts that spread the clamping load of holding the shell to the frame over a much wider area. I used stainless steel hardware (standard hardware store grade, nothing fancy) ¼”-20 bolts with flat washers on top and bottom and nylon locking nuts.

Here’s a detail of the right (curb) side in the front. The dangling blob near the front of the frame rail is not a fastener, but a blob of TremPro 635 where a hole had been mis-drilled.

This is what the internal doubler looks like on the right (curb) side from the inside. You can see the 1/4” load spreading plates that I cut out with my band saw.

TremPro is spread under the plates, on top of the C Channel portion of the extrusion, in any unnecessary screw holes or voids, but not in the ¼” drain holes that I’ve drilled in numerous places along the bottom outside edge of the C Channel.

Steve Bryant · 11-28-2012, 10:24 PM

The left side floor is now replaced and bolted in place on the outriggers and using wafer head screws toward the interior side. All of this is goodness!

However, the right side of the floor was rotted in front at the gap between the straight side and the beginning of the radiused corner and fore and aft of the threshold of the entry door.

Steve Bryant · 11-28-2012, 10:36 PM

Here you can check out the rodent residence bedding under the right side belly wrap. The mice even made a small attic annex just forward of the door frame.

With the stove and furnace removed, I decided to cut the right side out from the centerline of the frame rail outboard and from the new plywood I the right front corner to just aft of the gas supply lines for the furnace and the stove.

Steve Bryant · 11-28-2012, 10:39 PM

The right side plywood is now replaced and bolted in place. I had to drill new holes for the threshold that were further inboard in order for the threshold to really clamp the plywood and bolt through to the steel strap below. The factory had screws in the holes, but they didn’t attach to anything. It did look OK if appearances count for anything. I’ll put three additional SS screws back in those holes to seal them up and make it look right again.

Tomorrow, Ralph and I are going to do some more miscellaneous riveting, sealing and then re-evaluate/inspect the work that we’ve done up front prior to moving to the flooring in the rear next week.

We’re also looking at having the dinette and couch cushions partially reupholstered. Carolyn has bought some great looking plaid indoor/outdoor upholstery (remnants that were on sale at Hancock’s)!

PhilipKS · 11-29-2012, 05:18 AM

Looks good Steve! One question: are you going to replace the rodent rally zone in the belly pan? Thanks again for the documentation.

Philip

Steve Bryant · 11-29-2012, 07:12 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilipKS

Looks good Steve! One question: are you going to replace the rodent rally zone in the belly pan? Thanks again for the documentation.

Philip

Phillip, I'm reluctant to attempt to evict my tenants, but yes...the source of their pink nesting material is gone and I plan to replace it with solid foam core insulation (probably Super Tuff-R from Home Depot). I also plan to do everything that I can to prevent entrance for my little mammal buddies. I know that it's discriminatory, but this is a type of exclusion that I hope will work.

Steve

HiHoAgRV · 11-29-2012, 06:48 PM

Now THAT is how an Airstream should be built!

Steve Bryant · 11-30-2012, 10:01 AM

Vernon, thank you very much! I'm mostly consolidating and perhaps refining many of the ideas that I've gotten here at Air Forums.

Steve

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 09:55 PM

In the past week and a half, Ralph and I have put in some long days on the trailer and I’ve put in some extra days and evenings myself. It’s all bearing fruit and hopefully soon I’ll have some other details taken care of and the furnace reinstalled and operating as the cold weather is setting in again.

We finished up the last bit of riveting (well, all that I can think of right now). These were blind rivets (rather than bucked rivets) that we installed behind the shower and refrigerator. I used the “Q” Style Blind Rivets from Hanson Rivet and Supply because they are supposed to be water tight and have very good shear strength compared to Olympic rivets (see http://www.hansonrivet.com/w28.htm). We drilled out the 1/8” rivets with a #20 bit and installed the QAAD502 or QAAD504 rivets shown on the hyperlinked chart. These rivets are not a shaved style rivet and the mandrel can be slightly below the surface of the fastener head or can protrude slightly proud (depending on material thickness and grip range of rivet). They all go under the beltline molding and won’t show anyway. As with all our other rivets, we drilled the holes, used some 5/64” Clecos as place holders along the way, injected some TremPro 635 into and around the hole with a syringe and installed the rivets. Then if the mandrels were sticking out, I ground them down with a sandpaper disc on a die grinder and we put a small dollop of TremPro on the rivet head for additional water sealing.

Picture of the rivets (note rivet on lower right of Cleco)

Ralph installing one of the Rivets

Rivets in different conditions: some with short or long mandrels, some have their mandrels ground down, some have been sealed with TremPro.

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 09:56 PM

This post is a little off topic, but since this thread deals with leaks as well as floor and frame and is some of what we’ve done, I decided to include it. Some of you may recall that the lower left skin panel on my trailer had been damaged and was re-skinned with a second layer of 0.040” aluminum. In the area of the water tank, this left two layers of skin.

I decided to tie them together with Rivnuts that had internal threads for #8-32 screws. That would tie the skins together and allow the use of threaded fasteners rather than sheet metal screws. I also installed a shim plate using TremPro on the bottom because the bottom edge (on the outside of the C Channel of the shell extrusion) was a long ways from being flush with the plane of the rest of the skin where the water heater was installed.

Here’s what it looks like on the inside (Styrofoam insulation removed to inspect water heater tank).

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 09:58 PM

Another thing that I’ve dealt with is sealing all of the holes where someone had installed the lower left side second skin with Olympic rivets that plunged directly into the OSB. Once the Olympic rivets were drilled out and de-burred, I injected TremPro into the holes and widened and straightened the C Channel where necessary.

This picture shows all of the extra holes in the C Channel before sealing. Note: I used the biggest common nails that I could find in the hardware store to keep the shell on the outriggers for the past ten months or so.

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 10:00 PM

I want to go back to widening the C Channel and making sure that the plywood edge is a uniform thickness of just a little under 5/8”. If you get this right and put a small upper and lower bevel on the top and bottom edge of the plywood, it will easily go into place with only a modest amount of persuasion (AKA…use of bigger rubber mallet).

Here are a couple of techniques that I used to widen the channel.

And the result

I used a small piece of C channel to check the plywood edge and a piece of planed plywood to check the C channel. If the plywood edge fits into the C channel gage all around and the planed plywood gage will slip into the C Channel extrusion on the bottom of the shell, the floor piece should slip right in with gentle persuasion.

Plywood thickness gage being used to test width of C channel.

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 10:06 PM

We reinstalled a portion of the bathroom floor (all that was left) and marked it up to make a better pattern for the new floor.

The C Channel was fairly beat up just aft of the left rear (roadside) wheel and we decided to install the bathroom plywood as three separate pieces to work around the damage while it was being repaired. I lowered the nose of the trailer nearly to the ground to get nearly all the weight off the outriggers aft of the wheel well, but it wasn’t enough. Then I put a jack stand with a 2X6 on top just aft of the water heater opening and raised the tongue jack a bit so that we got a little clearance on the adjacent outrigger and enough clearance to straighten the crumpled bottom of the C Channel aft of the wheel well.

We also had to use a heat gun on the wheel well to reshape it back to its original shape and clamp some boards on top while it cooled (see previous photo). This frame and floor work is not for the faint of heart!

Here’s a photo of the new outboard bathroom floor in place. The forward portion was replaced first and the jack stand with the 2X6 was then moved forward so that the weight could be relieved off of the rear outboard section for repair and replacement.

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 10:07 PM

Once the outboard portion of the bathroom was replaced, we turned our attention to the inboard section of the bathroom floor. Using the old flooring that we’d temporarily installed to verify hole centers, we cut the plywood out and did a test fit and some tweaking. Then we assembled the first section of the conversion to PEX plumbing (also a part of this project while the trailer is this gutted) before the floor covered up the black water tank. Here’s the new PEX hose and fittings for the black water tank with the old sitting on top.

Then we cut and installed half-inch sheets (R 3.3) of Super Tuff-R insulation over the grey and black water tanks. Note the factory hole for the black water clean out tank was too big, so we took the plug that we had cut out and modified it with a pocket knife and taped it in top and bottom.

Then we installed the inboard floor, the toilet flange and even place the throne temporarily on the flange to check out how the flange was clocked before I add screws in the next couple of weeks.

Observation, this project is really getting exciting now!!!

Steve Bryant · 12-08-2012, 10:08 PM

Once the rear bedroom plywood was cut to shape, planed and sanded, I installed the outboard sections in the rear. With the front edges in approximate position, the rear radiused section can be started outboard and the front and back can be alternately tapped outboard to seat the plywood.

Then, I clamped 2X boards onto the cross members to maintain the plywood’s position while I took the five pound rubber mallet outside to gently persuade the C Channel the rest of the way home onto the plywood.

Note: before I seated the plywood into the C Channel into position, I had put some pieces of masking tape on the frame and marked reference marks onto the tape for the outrigger positions. Then I made green marks on the edge of the U Channel for the outrigger centerlines and red marks on the U Channel for the cross members and put my color coding on a piece of masking tape (to be removed later). If all of this stuff seems anal and overly-analytical, remember that I’m a retired engineer! When the outboard sections of plywood were installed, I transferred the green outrigger locations to the plywood and removed the tape. This tells me where to put an outrigger screw when I won’t be able to see where to drill later on. BTW, I tried my electronic stud finder on the floor and it didn’t work very well (showed the 2 inch wide steel structure to be about 4” wide)

Post
Then I installed one inch Super Tuff-R (R 6.5) from below. The insulation was held in place by being a slight interference fit and it also has one inch aluminum angle on the forward and aft sides of the cross members.

Once the insulation was in place I installed the center sections of Plywood in the rear. Praise be to God…it’s starting to become a trailer again instead of a project that turned very ugly about a year ago!

I ordered some more wafer head screws from Fastenal because I’ve run out…they’ll be in Monday morning. I need to get the water heater (or a filler panel) installed and the left rear tail/turn signal housing installed so that most of the incoming air will be kept out. I’ll stuff rags in the smaller openings. Then I’ll add bolts to my rear separation area and screw down the floor. After that, I’ll work on the furnace so I’ll have some warm air inside.

Saga to be continued....