Monday, December 29, 2014

Wheels for the Egg!

The long-awaited time has come!  Today, battling the occasional snow-drift and a 5 am start, I drove to Abbotsford to pick up this lovely monster!  Ted and the crew at The Trailerman did just a bang-up job:


I really couldn't be more excited.  Well, there may be other situations, but those aren't for discussion here.

A brief weigh-in with each supporting member on the bathroom scale shows a base weight of 360lb, without the spare tire.  That's even a little below what I was expecting, and with an extra cross-member yet.  Walking around in the thing, I'm glad Ted put the extra angle iron in.  There is still some torsion, and it'd be worse with fewer supports.

Look at how shiny and new that beautiful thing is!  It stayed that way for another 20 minutes, until I started driving behind a calcium truck on the Coquihalla highway.  Now it needs a wash:


The suspension sure is chattery!  Ted tuned it for the final weight of the trailer, so it's a little, er, jumpy at the moment.  It spent a good deal of time airborne on the way home.  Only one solution for that: build a camper on top!

Onto the floor!

Sunday, December 28, 2014

Making clones

Today was a fun one: I got to finally make use of this template I've been fussing around with and cut out the side walls.  I just got the exterior ones done, but I'm hoping to get the interior ones done tomorrow.  Flush-trimming with a router is fairly quick and easy.  I was very careful to keep the material clamped close to where I was working in case the template sagged away, which might cause me to carve catastrophically through the middle of my wall.  That didn't happen, so, great.

Here's the gizmo hard at work.  I'm not there because I had to take the picture.  It's not on; I'm not that thick:


The process produced excellent results.  De-burring the edges left a clean, usable cut.  There were a couple of very minor divots where the template wood was soft or dented, but they won't interrupt the "flow" of the final profile, and they'll be covered by the exterior skin and the edge moulding.

All went well until the last door positive cut, when the router started to drag a little.  I pushed it for a minute before I realized that the bit was sparking and smoking.  I guess the pressure of working for such a skilled craftsman just became too much in the end:



Here come the clones, gathering their strength, multiplying and getting ready to take over.  The exterior walls are sitting upright; the template is on the saw-horses.  After cutting out the exterior walls, I cut notches in the template, which will transfer to the interior skins and allow the spars to pass through:


The rough idea is this: tomorrow, I'll go and get a new flush-trim bit (maybe one that isn't such a sissy), then finish the last door and cut out the interior walls.  On Monday, it'll be frame pickup day, assuming the sky stops snowing like is is right now.  If all goes as planned, I'll put the walls away for awhile and start working on the floor.

Fun stuff!

Friday, December 26, 2014

Filling time (and screw holes)

Christmas was a busy time, and there were few hours left over for the Egg, but I got a little shop time after the house cleared out today.  I spent it as any good teardropper would, carefully filling screw-holes and seams in my exterior wall plywood joins with Bondo:


The screws were for clamping the lap joints, and I took them out before filling the holes, since they really serve no purpose now.  Assuming I did a half decent job, the strength now comes from that expensive Titebond III.

I'd never used Bondo before, and it's quite fun stuff.  A little stinky, but easy and effective.  It cured to sanding hardness in 20 minutes, so I see why it's so popular for autobody work.  The purpose of the exercise was not to finish to "pre-epoxy, pre-primer" smoothness, but to just get rid of the obvious divots and do some of the major sanding while the thing was still horizontal.  

Here are the lovely, professional-quality results as promised on the package:


Terri got me a great work light and shop stool for the project, and they help tremendously.  The stool to make it easy to pat myself on the back for long periods, and the light to point out glaring errors in the finishing work.  Look at that cosy space!  My folks also got me a fine power tool guide for making many long cuts with the Skilsaw and router later in the project:


On Monday, I pick up the frame!  Before then, I'm hoping to zip out the walls with the router and start getting the floor ready for fitting.  If all goes well, maybe all this plywood will start looking like a thing we could pull behind the car!

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Giant holes cut and trailer frame complete!

While I've been busy hacking away at my template, cutting handsome-looking door-holes into it like this one ...


... Ted from Trailerman in Abbotsford has been doing something useful: that is, finishing up the frame that the Thunderous Egg will ride regally around on!  We're busy preparing for Christmas with 245 relatives (they say they're all related to us), so I can't pick it up until the 29th.

Ted's been a real pleasure to deal with.  I haven't seen what he's made yet, but he's done a good job giving me advice, and he's really stuck to a long-term schedule.

I don't have any photos of that grand event, but here are some more of the piece of wood I've been seeing in the evenings.  If you look closely, you can see that I've laid out the spars.  They'll be cut out of the inner wall, but screwed and glued to the outer skin.  So I'll use the template to zip out the outer walls, cut out the spar notches, and finally shape the inner walls:


It's quite a big door, really.  It's got a big window in it (better ventilation makes for happier campers).  It'll put a lot of strain on the hinges, so I'll need to make sure the whole thing closes and latches as precisely as I hope.  But that's for future Mark to worry about:


Christmas will be largely unproductive on the Egg front, though I do hope to get the walls cut out at some stage, and maybe get a start on the internal wall structures.

The pictures are pretty terrible.  I'm aware of that.  As a former photographer, it's fairly shameful.  But the blog was meant to be a quick easy update of progress, not a chore, and cell phone photos are by far the easy route!

Sunday, December 14, 2014

Cutting board (bored?)

If I do say so myself, here's a great-looking cutting board that will fit on top of the sink!  Along with plywood joining and some other little prep projects, things like this help make progress while I'm waiting for the trailer frame to get finished:


Here's the bottom.  Those feet are getting tough little rare-earth magnets glued into them so the board will snap onto the rim of the sink or any iron or steel surface.  Interestingly, it turned out that the sink is fairly non-magnetic, so there was little point.  A couple of rubber bumpers should fix it right up:


This fine looking beast is made of maple and cherry.  It wasn't too difficult to rip it up, glue it, and sand it smooth.  I expected to need the services of a friend's planer, but a belt sander and an orbital sander did the job just fine.  In retrospect, I might not round the corners like that again, but it looks fine as is.  Mineral oil makes a nice-looking and non-toxic finish.

It's really a strange thing to do to spend loads of time sanding and finishing something only to cut away at it with knives.  But it's definitely not the strangest thing we do as a species.

This post will have a slight "publish delay", because I made another two of these for Terri's birthday (I'll be damned if we're going to have a nicer cutting board in the trailer than in the house), and it's all a huge international secret.

Fin (2 3/4) knows this item as a "special surprise" because I knew he'd run straight upstairs and blab the whole secret right away.  There were lots of conversations like this:

  - "Mommy!  We have a special surprise for you!"

  - "Really?  What is it?"

  - (looking concerned, like she's gone thick in the head) "It's a special surprise."

  - * long silence *

We'll teach him the real name someday.  Finished on the 26th of Nov, to be published after the 13th of Dec.

Friday, December 12, 2014

Whipping this egg into shape

I cut out the template profile this last week, cutting large with a jigsaw and sanding to my carefully marked lines.  The whole process was fairly quick and painless.  Sanding a few mm off was short work with a belt sander, though the two inside corners on the hatch join required a little bit of filing.

Here's that nice looking spot where the hatch joins the body.  The final profile will be totally smooth(ish):


With the whole monster tidied away in the corner of the garage, it makes it easy to go and do a few minutes on this thing every day or two without a ton of setup and takedown.  I think that's important: it's fun to keep momentum on projects like this.  When we have motivation, we don't need discipline!

This looks weird, but it's just where the floor intersects the walls.  I decided it was easier to make a little tongue in the walls than in the floor.  It's dangerous as far as accidentally snapping off, but it's really just filler and it would be easy to fix:


Here's the shape of the thunderous egg!  It's cool to see it come to life from a CAD drawing.  (It's Aliiiiive!!!)  It actually mostly just sits in the corner, but it's pretty neat nonetheless:


Aaaand, another angle.  I'm like a proud Daddy.  I am actually a proud Daddy to a great 2 3/4 year-old little boy.  That was just a funny comment about how many photos I'm taking of this piece of plywood:


NEXT: Portals to other dimensions and/or holes for doors into the trailer!  Don't touch that dial!

Flight of the Silly Goose

Here's a really cool boat that a friend of mine is building.  Quite an interesting thing: part rowboat, part sailboat, it breaks down small enough to stow in your jacket pocket.  Well, in the back of a truck anyway!  It's a neat project, and a lot to take on.  May we wish him well!

Monday, December 8, 2014

The profile layout was just like a day at work!

As a day job (when I'm not in my cape and mask by night as THUNDER-EGG MAN), I'm a mild-mannered land surveyor.  So, the task of laying out the profile and door was right up my alley.  Instead of fiddling with the base geometry (particularly since many of the curve centres are a long way off the trailer edge) I opted to cut the template sheet to a known size and pull offsets at even inches, like so:


Worked like a hot damn.  It's not as tedious as you'd think.  I worked in millimetres like a good Canadian ... even so, you can see some effect of rounding errors in shallow parts of the line.  I don't think it will cause a problem: I'll cut it a big big and sand to the line, so that will let me "BS" the very small errors out.  Here's the layout in full swing.  I even tested out the camping lantern when the power went out:


"Hang on!" a voice in the mob shouts.  "I thought this was a quality product we're building here!  That's just boring old standard plywood!"

Not so fast, sir.  This is merely the template!  All 4 wall skins (2 inner and 2 outer) use this as a guide.  No need for repeated measuring, cutting and sanding.  Naturally, they're all fashioned from the highest quality Baltic Birch.

* Crowd murmurs abashedly, shuffles feet * 

And here's a fine-looking door, whose shape I'm still warming up to.  There are three outlines here: one for the hole, one for the outer skin, and one for the inner skin, which is smaller to make room for a seal system:


I've got this arranged along the wall of the garage, so I can work on it whenever I have the time.  Cutting and sanding to taste won't make too much dust, so getting this tuned up will be a nice little mid-week project.

After it's done being a guide and mentor, the template will get chopped up and used to make spars, ribs, and various internal supporting members.  Shows what respect our society pays our elders.

Friday, December 5, 2014

In the news: impatience triumphs!

I was intending to leave the "dimensional stuff" until later.  All the stuff that depended on the real-world size of the trailer frame (that I still don't have).  But I talked myself out if it for 3 reasons:

  1. I really want to make something now
  2. If the trailer is slightly the wrong size, I can fairly easily "fudge" to fit.
  3. If the trailer is a LOT the wrong size, then it was a cock-up and the dude needs to fix it.  But I don't think this is likely.  People can use measuring tapes.
I'm going to lay out the profile on the template tomorrow.  Depending on how it goes, I'll think about cutting out the walls in profile too.  Fine-detail stuff, like the galley, really IS going to wait until I see this trailer frame.  I promise.

Wordsworth said, "To begin, begin."  That sounds super-wise to me.  That is, until you think, well, that can be applied to anything.  To cook, cook.  To be a millionaire, be a millionaire.  To jive, jive.  Then it sounds like the rantings of a damp Vancouver hipster.

If only things were so simple.