Not as slow and not as steady

Things have been proceeding a little quicker over the past few weeks, more at the speed of a tortoise than a snail.  I've been working on a couple of fiddly things, and of course general life is still busy and boisterous.

However, there have been a couple of significant recent wins.  First, take a look at this cute young man playing with this perfectly-hung door:

It latches and everything!  Exterior handle not completed, some assembly still required.

There's an inside lip around the whole works where the seal goes, and that was really fussy to install because it has to "gap" just right.  The door strike was also pretty picky and required a couple of tries.  No real engineering feats to share, just a lot of precise and fussy woodworking.  The top part of the rim was a laminated job, so it needed to be clamped, ripped, and cut to size, like this:

The door hinges I ordered originally were fairly inadequate.  They're now archived in a spare parts box for future projects.  The ones I wound up with, though boring and square, do lend kind of a nice solid look to the side of the whole beast.  It's starting to look a bit less, er, European.

I'm told that I should close off the openings on both sides of this Egg, so I suppose I'll have to go through this whole process again.

But wait, there's more!

The gas springs to hold up the hatch had given me a hard time before, largely because I didn't really pay enough attention to the weight requirements or the ball joint design.  The generic models I picked up at Canadian Tire failed in a fairly depressing way.  As with many half-assed decisions, there was a lot of work to undo and redo.

This time around, I offloaded some of the engineering to Gemini Gas Springs in Vernon.  Henk helped me out a lot and delivered a great set of springs, custom made precisely to fit in short order.  The best part of the Gemini springs is that the pressure is adjustable.  By letting out a little bit of gas at a time, I was able to make sure the resulting force "felt" right without doing a slew of calculations.

Here's the result:

They work perfectly.  The hatch holds solidly open, but begins to fall closed on the bottom part of the movement.  If anything, they're a little on the strong side, meaning they'll push the hatch open quite aggressively if a hand isn't on it.  If this turns out to be a problem, it's simple to take a little more gas out later on.

Here's a slightly closer look.  Once everything's finished, it should look quite nice:

I have a few remaining major tasks for the winter.  I think it's reasonable to expect that everything will be finished for Spring, but sometimes "reasonable" means different things to different people:

1. Install left door sealing surround and latch
2. Install hatch sealing system
3. Refinish trailer frame
4. Full exterior finishing (including epoxy, fibreglass, primer, and topcoat)
5. Miscellaneous finishing tasks (windows, seals, caulking, fenders, organizers, etc)

The last few hardware additions have this project looking less like a dusty pile of wood and a lot more like, well, a camping trailer!  Imagine that.

Slow and steady as she goes

By now, we've all likely guessed that this little gizmo won't be quiiiiite ready in time for camping this summer.  In truth, this was part of the plan all along: it was originally considered a 2-winter project.  There was a brief and ambitious period where I thought I'd be able to have something on the road for 2015, but I had a little sit-down with the build committee (I sat down) and came up with this:

• At the current pace (manic) the project would be tow-able by about late September.
• Camping season is almost over by then.
• That wouldn't make sense.
• Also, work got really busy, and though I still have the same number of hours after Fin's bed-time, I'm more tired now.

So, we're on a little break, the trailer and I.  Oh, no, we still have feelings for one another, it's just that we each need a little ... space.  Actually, as it turns out, a half-built trailer requires quite a lot of space.

We've still spent a few hours together on weekends and evenings and so forth.  Just when I feel like it, not on this accelerated schedule.  I don't really enjoy being busy beyond a certain threshold.  Despite all this, a few small things have been accomplished in the last few months:

• I got the inner skin on the hatch.  I've also spent a lot of time smoothing out the little buckles and dips on the interior and exterior of the same.  Nearly done, I believe.  I'm going through Bondo like it's Wall Street cocaine.
• I've got the troublesome and fiddly outer hatch ribs all gapped and ready for what I hope will be a nice outer seal.  I've got a plan for the inner seal, but it might involve a lot of aluminium cutting, which I'm coming to terms with.  It's overcomplicated, which is really the only way I'm comfortable doing things.
• I started the doors, which is fun and easy compared to the hatch.  I've hung up the frames, built a nice little surround, dry-fit the handles on the doors, and installed the foam core.  Today, I even glued on the inner skin on one of them.

Unfortunately, some of the photos of the door construction didn't make it off a cell-phone that suffered a bit of an incident at work.  Oh well.  On the plus side, the photos from here on should be of a significantly higher quality that those of old.

Here's where those handsome doors are at now:

Lovely, fine work as always.  The little cut-outs will house the handles, and will be routed flush to the inner skin as well.  There will be some type of plate cut to hide the ugly mechanical workings from the fair passengers, but that can wait until closer to the finishing stages.

Here's the inner skin on that hatch.  Look at that beast:

I'm struggling with 2 things to do with the hatch besides sealing:

• The "holding closed" mechanism.  I feel as though it needs to provide some kind of pressure to compress the seals so the hatch doesn't "flop" and leak on the road.  I might be wrong.  I think that'll need to be evaluated on install.
• The gas springs to hold the whole guillotine open.  These have been a bit of a pain to find in the right size and tension, though I think I've found a supplier in Vernon.  There was already a failed install with a pair that were the wrong of both variables, but I've learned from the experience.

Here was today's project!  The inner skin is hidden under the template which is used again as a clamp-up stiffener.  You can see a bit of the lip that will overlap a future bumper to form the door seal:

Here's to another summer of tent-camping!  If I was stuck in the garage all the time, we'd have done nothing, but as it is, we've been out for 3 trips already, and another 3 weekends and 2 weeks of holidays on the way.  I've been mountain-biking regularly, which is much better than being in a hot garage all the time.  I'm almost coming to the conclusion that this whole work-life balance makes sense!

Hatch part II

OK, on with the show!  The first, second, third, and 150th things I did were filling in all these little squares with foam.  Because of the necessary scoring and bending, it would have been easier if the inner skin was in first, but I couldn't think of how to do that with the hatch attached to the trailer ... you know, without literally living inside the galley for two days.  Maybe I lack commitment, but that seemed like too extreme an option:

Tedious, and sticky work.  But, it progresses:

After a week's worth of evenings doing that, I was done!  Hooray.  I'd rather eat a bowl of broken glass than vacuum up any more foam dust.  Time for the main part of the bottom skin: the hatch is a little longer than 5 feet, so we'll need to do a join and a small extra piece.  However, since the hinge will be in the way of all that, we'll need to do that once we take it off.

Here's the glue-up.  This was a tough one, as the hatch had developed a slight middle bow.  This made the edges prone to buckling, and it was a real pain to tack them all down.  Drywall screws helped, but even so, there were a couple of spots that popped up after the screws came out:

Distressing at first, but no major problem.  More glue, and more screws to clamp.  It's a nice looking hatch, once I got my mind away from the microscopic problems.  The small bare spot is just visible at the top:

It even opens!  I'll be honest, it would be quite upsetting if it didn't.  Shown braced with a stick, but the final build will eventually need gas springs to guard against the very real possibility of decapitation:

Off it comes for more work.  The outer skin got finished without event.  The real task moving forward will be making sure the inner skin doesn't distort the hatch too much during gluing.  A skew would prevent it from fitting the hole squarely, and too much spring-back would cause sealing problems:

Here we are, with the requisite gobs of glue cleaned up, all ready for the inside skin:

Once this is built, it will get sanded and filled like the outer roof.  It'll then get reattached, and I'll fiddle with the seal gaps to make sure everything works.  It will stay on while I build the doors, then everything will get finished in pieces.

Summertime camping?  Yes please!  But it's getting warm out already, and I still have work to do!

Hatching the egg!

Ooooh, what a clever title for a post.  Ho, ho.  Because I'm writing about building the hatch.  Get it?  Of course you do.

First, here's what I've been up to time-wise: filling in all of those blessed nail holes with Bondo.  Nail holes, you say?  Why, that doesn't sound tricky at all.  Well, it is and it isn't.  Each of the nails produces a localized depression where it compresses the glue, no matter how gentle I was when I put it in.  Evening out the surface wasn't difficult, but it was a little time-consuming.  Bondo is a delight to work with, but it still needs to be mixed and applied in small batches.

On the second roof sheet, I tried using drywall screws and buffering with little squares of MDF.  I think that helped a little, but there was still a fair bit of filling and sanding to do.  The first batch is largely done, and I'll go over it once more to get the leftover dings and any wows that I missed.

However, it's turning out well:

I had some time last weekend, and I decided not to spend it all doing body filling.  I did some tracing, cutting, and sanding, and came up with two templates for the hatch ribs.  There will be 6 in all: the outer ones will fit nicely into that back notch we've been looking at all along, and the internal 4 will hold it all steady at a consistent 1.5" thick.

It was a simple matter to cut them all out with the router, even though my second flush-trim bit is getting a little dull and tired, like its owner.  I put together another spar, notched it out, and attached the ribs at the top end.  Here's the whole assembly just kind of leaned on up there for a photo:

Neat!  But definitely, well, floppy.

After drilling out the hinge, shimming with a bit of 1/8", I attached the top spar at the hinge point.

I've been worrying about sealing the hatch for some time now, and I want to make sure to do it right.  To get a consistent gap and the proper shape (and hopefully to stop it from springing back when the plywood is glued on), I'm going to build as much of the hatch as possible while it's fastened precisely in place.

I measured the gap with a little piece of 1/8" and fastened the side to the main wall with blocks and drywall screws.  This holds the thicker side ribs quite tightly, correctly gapped for the outer seals and flush with the outer wall.  I built a base spar and fastened that onto the ribs using glue and blocking spacers:

Now the ribs are constrained (in 1 direction at least), and it's time to get to work on the short spacer . torsion spars.  With Terri on the table-saw and me doing the installation, this was short work:

Now that looks like a hatch!  A little "transparent" still, but better.

As I said, I'm going to do as much as possible without moving the assembly from the trailer.  I'm part way through the foam installation, and I'll skin it, countersink some nails, and go over it with some Bondo once that's done.  From then on, the shape should be quite firm.  I'll take it off and do the interior skin and further touch-ups while it's loose.

Action item #1 is to take all those tools out of there before they get trapped inside.  Note to self.

That scrap of grey conduit is for the lighting electrical.  It needs a clear path to get shoved through on installation, since the wires can't stay locked in place like on the main trailer.

What a nice curvy little frame.  Onto days and days of fitting in little squares of foam!

Insulation and outer roof skin

I spent the last week or so making a huge mess from little pieces of foam bending and gluing building foam into the roof sections, like this one:

Of course, there are wires everywhere, so I needed to cut out the appropriate channels like on the right.  This particular piece was a curvy one, so it needed to be ripped partway through so it would bend, like this:

It all went far better than I thought, honestly.  I expected a lot more breakage and thickness differences than I actually experienced.  Here's a piece all nicely clamped, the LePage PL Premium slowly drying underneath.  I feel like I've finally gotten a handle on how to use this stuff properly:

On the subject of the PL Premium construction adhesive ... I'm using a LOT of it, far more than I naively expected at first blush.  Likely well over 2 dozen 875ml tubes for the whole project.  It makes sense when you mull it over, since the whole structure (walls and ceiling) is foam laminated to wood on both sides.  But that's 50 pounds / $300 of adhesive!  Holy moly.  Something to keep in one's mind when doing a laminated foam project in the future.

But it's great stuff.  I'm happy with it.  It does a better job than nails or screws and it bonds, permanently, to what seems like anything.  It has a thickness, unlike wood glue, and it'll happily fill gaps.

"Why not use contact cement?" I hear future builders crying from their computers.  Well, I'll tell you why:

• Lots of types of contact cement releases in the heat, like "summer day inside a camper" type of heat.  Not awesome.  The other stuff is harder to find, weaker, and expensive.
• Contact cement also tends to melt foam.  So that limits us again to an even smaller selection.
• Contact cement can't deal with thickness.  This was kind of a big deal for this job.  The foam really is hard to get perfectly flush with the wood.  It would have taken ages to sand it out before the second lamination.
• Especially when laminating thin sheets, it's hard to align them properly at first.  You need some re-position time.  You get about 2 hours with PL, and about 1/5 of a second with contact cement.  I can't think of a good way to perfectly align a huge, floppy, 1/8" sheet of plywood before dropping it into place.
• You'd need a substantial amount of contact cement too, and it's not free either.

"Why not use epoxy?"  Because it's super-expensive.  The adhesive would cost more than everything else put together.  That stuff is $175 / 3.6L + fillers, which would do just over one side of a 5 x 5 sheet (see below).  Nope, nope, nope.

Here's the math, done unfortunately in retrospect:

For a 5 foot x 5 foot sheet, laminating 1 side with 1mm thick adhesive.  Metric, with apologies to USA, Liberia, and Myanmar.  5 feet = 1.524m.

1.524 x 1.524 x 0.001 = 0.002323 cubic m

Huh.  That doesn't seem like much.

But wait!  1 cubic m is a whopping 100x100x100 cm, or 1,000,000 cubic cm.  Let's move that decimal place over a bit:

0.002323 cubic m = 2323 cubic cm = 2323 ml

At 875ml / tube, that's about 2.7 tubes for a 5 x 5 sheet laminated at 1mm thick.  When I combed the adhesive for the outer skin (below), I used just under 3.  I think that's a little more than I used when I didn't comb it, but some small voids in the walls were acceptable.

Of course, you need to do 2 sides of a roughly 15 x 5 roof and both 10 x 4 walls.  That's about 37 tubes.  But the area is smaller due to curves, cutouts, etc, there's some waste, and I didn't really comb the adhesive for some of the work.  Right now, I dead recon on about 28 tubes, but it could be more.

Enough of that.  The takeaway is: "Plan to use a lot of adhesive to glue really big things."

Here's the top:

And here's the foam all nicely placed.  It all got a bit of a sanding to make it flush before I skinned it, but it wound up fitting quite well:

This is what happens to the foam scraps.  It's really hard to explain to a 3-year-old why it's more important to build my little toy fort than his.  So I just took his down in the middle of the night and hoped he would forget:

Finally, I got part of the external skin on!  I decided to do it 2 parts, which I think was a good idea because it became much less unwieldy at the start and also much easier to "steer".  The walls wound up being pretty square, but there is still a small amount (<1/8") of overlap on one side and a gap on the other.  It would have been more severe if I kept going with the same sheet.

I don't have photos.  I was rushed as it was.

To start, I set up a jig on which to rest the plywood, then combed out the adhesive with a notched trowel to a uniform thickness.  Except for the top end (which does not land on a spar), I used 1-1/4" nails for clamping.  Other than straps, which would not clamp the straight parts as tightly, I couldn't think of another practical way of doing it.

I saw the nails as little adjusters.  I didn't drive them in hard at first.  I tried to adjust them all until the whole piece was following the contours smoothly.  There may be some valleys around the interior nails, but that can be sorted out with Bondo later.  There wound up being quite a large number of nails around the edges, which was necessary to control the bowing.  With plywood this thin, it was more like upholstery than carpentry!

I'm quite pleased with how it looks:

There will be some work to do to make everything smooth.  Once the adhesive is dry, I'll countersink those nails and even everything out with Bondo.  There's a second act as well, from the clamps in the photo to the front of the trailer.  There's a bug in my brain saying that this distance might be longer than 5 feet, so there might be a little fiddle at the front to correct that problem.

I'm now debating adding fibreglass to the 1/8" skins before painting.  The wall I've got seems extremely strong, but the bend will check quite easily (even under epoxy, I'm guessing) and we need to consider flying rocks from the highway.

All things considered, this is progress!  At this rate, I'll be hatch-building in no time.

Energy and colour

There are a lot of strands of wire in this gizmo for something with such a simple electrical system.  I can imagine that more complex rigs look like a drunken Radio Shack vomited behind the wall-board.  Still, running electrical is fun and fairly satisfying.  Here's the upper raceway before it was all blocked in behind the cabinets:

The AC system is quite simple: a breaker in line with 3 plugs in series, the first being a GFCI, and the second powering a trickle charger for the 12V battery.  The 12V system has a main breaker, a fuse box (below left) and a bus bar (below right).  There are 5 existing circuits and 1 spare, as though I could ever stuff more wires anywhere:

1. Galley 12V and USB plugs
2. Cabin 12V and USB plugs
3. Voltage tester
4. Vent fan
5. Lights
6. ---

Here's the bottom raceway without the cabin cabinets or raceway door.  The 120V breaker box is on the left.  That plug will get mounted in a wall eventually, promise:

Not shown: the path for the primary wire from the raceways up through the galley, over the roof (on a 6" offset to the trailer left side, for future nailing and screwing reference), and out the front floor to the tongue box.  I put the battery in the tongue box to save space in the galley.

Here's the first coat of paint on the interior!  While painting, I realized, somewhat suddenly, that I'm almost done inside the cabin and the galley.  Oh, don't worry, there's a lot to do yet.  This little novel still has a few more chapters:

Just a lovely little space.  See how simple the electrical system looks from the outside?  The little flap opens up in the second tier down for the lower raceway, and a little door inside the cupboard allows fiddling in the upper one, in case I have the urge to go back into the bird's nests:

As of this moment, the interior ceiling has a coat of primer and 2 coat of paint.  I believe I'll find the motivation for coat 3.  The electrical is more or less done, but will need to be tested once everything is installed.  There are some fiddly trim pieces to do, then it's onto the exterior!  I'll dryfit the tongue box first, then start on the roof insulation and skinning.

Raising the roof!

That previous open and airy feeling is being traded for a little more privacy and bug-resistance.  After a minor amount of struggling and cursing, the interior roof skin in place, like so:

All those bracing pieces are temporary, of course.  (Why thank you, Captain Obvious.)  After some back and forth, I did manage to get the whole thing squared up and flush with the spars.  From there, it was easy to remove each spar, apply construction adhesive (bless that thick, gooey nectar) and re-install.  Here's the terminus at the galley:

Oooh, and here are some really, really nice looking base cabinets.  * whistles *  There's another layer on now, but why would I take another picture when I have such an awful one already?  The little knobs I finished a few months ago really add a little rustic charm:

Here's in inside.  Originally, this was going to be finished with a head-liner fabric, but the adhesive I wanted to use soaked right through the fabric backer I ordered on a test swatch.  Yuck.  I wasn't totally sold on a fabric ceiling in the first place.  It would be tough to clean and very hard to repair.  So, to be simple, this will be painted with a nice mildew-resistant paint.  I'm warned that without an absorbent liner, the sound could be a bit "brighter" inside.  Who cares:

The holes for the skylight and vent fan need to be zipped out with the router still, when I get around to it.  Lately, I've been installing the cabinets and electrical components as I go.  The electrical raceways are quite tight, and it's worlds easier to put these things in now rather than once everything's built.

Here's the outside.  That construction adhesive really produces a very strong bond: I did a little test piece with an on-end spar scrap, just like they'll sit on the trailer, and I still can't pry it off with my hands.  It would tear the wood first:

Here's the view from the galley.  I think this will look nice in a cool, calm light blue.  Not baby blue, I'm told, but I'm trusting Terri, who has a better eye for colour than I.  I believe she's beyond picking funny colours as a practical joke, but I can't be totally sure.  Either way, I'm sure it'll be a nice looking place to call home:

I'm busy installing 120V and 12V goodies and cabinets.  Once that's all ticky-boo and I'm relativity certain I won't create any electrical fires, I'll start in on the interior painting and finishing work.