Final testing before launch!

Here's someone who likes camping trailers very, very much:

If there was ever any doubt about all the hard work being worthwhile, it's extinguished completely when my little man insists on reading bedtime stories in the camping trailer.  He's very proud of it, and he's excited about it in ways that he's not about even really flashy new toys.  He knows that I made it for all 3 of us to share, and that it's a special thing made just for fun and adventure.

Later, concerned that it might have a ghost, he went to sleep in his own room.

This little project is almost substantially complete -- not done, not really, there are still some loose ends to tie up over the summer or when I find the time, but they're not essential things. I might even change my mind about some of them once it's been out for a weekend or two.  It's ready to use, and that's what matters.

The old Egg has a mattress, and tie-downs for all the equipment.  It has a tongue box with a battery mounted, and the spare fastened underneath the frame.  It has running lights, and it's all cleaned up and ready to get dirty again, but this time with dirt from the outside, not from my dusty old shop.

It's even been for a trip around the block!  Contrary to my deepest fears, it tows quite well indeed.  It isn't jumpy like the empty frame, and the car can handily tow it up and down some very steep hills near our house.  I can feel it, like the car is a little sluggish, but it's not bad.  I think it's well within the capabilities of the vehicle.  It handled minor bumps and a very tame dirt road just swimmingly.

I'm waiting for the final part -- draw catches for the hatch -- to come in on order to a local RV store.  If they arrive this week, we'll be able to take this egg out on the weekend!  At the moment, unfortunately, they are about a week overdue.  These two catches are literally (not figuratively) the last essential pieces to add.

You can imagine how patiently I'm waiting ... !

The end is near

I mean this in a much more positive and light-hearted way than the guy waving the sign down at the corner does.

Look where we are now:

The hatch went on smoothly a week or so ago, which was kind of a nice surprise.  Sealing the doors was a bit of a struggle, but I think I've got it done now.  It was tough to get the right tension, so the seal was getting "squished" a little without needing super-strength to open and close the doors.  I had to adjust the latch to "give" a little more.  The hatch still had a perfect 1/8" gap, just enough for the right seal without pushing too hard.  I'm waiting for the final "closers" to come in the mail.

I could happily go without caulking for the rest of my life, but I realize this probably isn't an option.  I've done kind of a lot of it recently.  I dislike how easy it is to make a smeary mess, though I'm getting better at keeping everything in a straight line.  Damn to the 7th circle of hell the people who allow those little air bubbles to show up in tubes of caulk, splattering my nice neat line all over!

Ahem.

Here's the hatch again, all white and majestic.  The fenders are fresh, as of today at around 2:00.  They were quite easy, apart from having to take the wheels off to access the cramped screws at the very back lip:

Overall, it's becoming quite a handsome little trailer, biased though I may be.  It's got quite a formal "black and white" look to it, with some silver and chrome accents.  Not much of the look was thoughtfully planned, but I always take credit for any happy accidents.

I repainted the trailer frame too, because it got a little rusty driving home 2 winters ago in the salt and sand.  I think the paint was quite new and soft then.  I expect it would have stood up a little better if it had cured for 6 weeks or so first.  But I wasn't going to wait all that time, was I?

I'll say this for the standard "anti-rust" spray paint -- it sure it easy to use!  I roughed up the surface a bit (all the spars underneath too: I spent a fair bit of time on my back), washed it, masked off the clean white trailer with cardboard, and sprayed away!  You can recoat in 5 minutes, and 2 coats does it nicely.  I was left wondering why I didn't use spray for the rest of the trailer too.

I know spray paint is considered an environmental catastrophe, but I do wonder.  Today's paints don't have the CFC agents of yesterday, and one major plus is this: you get to use all the paint.  It doesn't skin over and go bad in there like it does in a can.  I'm often left with half a can of paint after many projects, and if I don't use it right away for something else, it's toxic waste.  I think I should be able to keep the 1/2 can of spray paint I have left for as long as I want.  I tried filling the void space in my paint cans with propane to limit contact with oxygen, but it didn't help much.  I'm sure my 1/4 can of Brightside is unusable by now, as is the 1/2 can of primer and the 3/4 can of interior blue.

Oh, stop ranting.

Being finished all this stuff means other things can happen, like putting all the peripherals back into the kitchen:

You can see a bit of the sealing technique here -- a rubber gasket along the outer edge, pinching onto a right-angle aluminium rail.  The rail encourages drips to flow along it to the bottom, where there's a gap for water egress.  This is different from the doors, where there is a wooden rail to pinch the seal sideways, like a car door.

Ooh -- and there's a light in the hatch now!

In fact, there is less and less that really needs to be done!  I'm installing tongue box and battery now now, and there is a small amount of this blessed caulking left to do.  I need to install the spare tire somewhere sensible, hook up the trailer running lights (I recall one of the signals didn't work a year or so ago, so that may be a fiddle) and do some other odds and ends.  This will leave us "substantially complete" ... or, similar to how a manufacturer might sell the thing.  There will still be curtains to make, some small tweaks and customizations ... but it's getting close!

Hard to believe.  It feels like I've been out there for years.  In reality, I started major work in November / December 2014 -- so by end of May (expected completion) it'll have been about 18-19 months.  Of course, there were about 3 months of planning, design, and minor prep before then ...

Oh, hell with it.  I didn't do it to save money, and certainly not to save time.  I did it to build it, to show it off, and to have fun camping in it.  I even said so, right in my very first post.  I may have gotten carried away with some things, but I think I've stayed pretty true to the original goals.

I'll do a few posts coming up, after completion.  I'll skim through the whole process in photos, just a quick summary of the last 1.5 years.  I'll go through what I learned, what I'd do again, and what I certainly wouldn't.  I'm not one of these people that is going to build another one of these -- one is enough, thanks -- so I may as well pass on what I've learnt.  I'll go through the tools that I've needed, the ones I wished I bought, and few I never used.  And finally, there will be some glamour shots!

Stay tuned!

Done the paint!

After much sanding (yes, we've all heard a lot about that), painting, cleaning, and wandering around in a haze of organic chemical fumes, the paint is done.  3 coats of it, with sanding between.  Totally, gleefully done!

This is the standard view, that I'm honestly kind of "over" myself.  It doesn't look much different in photos than those ones I took of the primer previously ... but in real life, it's shiny, slick, very pretty.  It didn't quite come out looking sprayed on, like a body shop would do, but it's good.  You can tell I did it at home, but not on first glance:

If I want to, and it turns out to be worth it, I can polish and wax it someday.  But that's not critical for camping this year, and my guess is it's going to get get pretty scratched and worn anyhow.  That's part of using these things.

The paint went on well, once I learned what I was doing.  The Interlux Brightside is a nice paint, but it's "old-school" -- read that as, "you can really bung it up if you're even a little bit of a sleepyhead".  I found that I really needed to stay on top of it if I wanted it to "flow".

"Flow" is not some lousy hippy rubbish!  Glossy exterior paint like this needs to flow after brushing, so it fills in the brush marks and leaves a nice smooth finish.  Like the hippies, you need to add chemicals -- in this case, a little of the approved brushing reducer -- so the paint doesn't start to dry too soon.  Too much, and it'll drip and run, too little and you get sporadic ridges and overlaps which are accentuated by the high gloss.

I was using a "roll and tip" method -- spreading a small area evenly with a little roller, then lightly brushing to get rid of bubbles and texture.  It was hectic work, but I'm happy with the results:

Now that painting is done, lots of other important events can happen!  Like all that aluminium that I cut -- that can all go on, sealed under with caulking:

How handsome!  And on the trailer door frames too, and then we can drop the windows in, and ... 

Crap ... what?  But I very carefully made sure these cut-outs in the doors were the right size.  Why do the windows seem TOO BIG ALL OF A SUDDEN?

* Makes grumpy trip to hardware store to buy another belt sander *

Don't ask what happened to the first belt sander.  Belt sanders and I have a minor violent history, and I can honestly say I'm a bit "toolist" against them.

After sanding for what seemed like days (but was indeed only hours) the windows fit, kicking and screaming, into their prescribed holes.  I really have no idea how those holes got smaller.  I didn't think that was a thing that holes could do.

At any rate, it was a simple matter after that to put the doors on.  Thankfully, no black magic had affected the roof, and both the fan and skylight went in without incident.

And look!

That was worth the wait!  It's neat to see those doors in place, all gleaming and, erm, door-like.  Adding a little hardware sure makes it look like a real camping trailer ... which of course, it is.  Almost.

Here's how it would look if you were a bird:

And here's that very handsome door again.  The other one is in too, in case you were worried I'd forgotten:

The paint is done, the doors are installed, and so on to the hatch!  There's some tricky aluminium there to do, which is next on the list.  This will be the part that presses into the seal.  It needs to be bent around the curves, then sanded and filed to just the right height.

After that, there are some little fiddly things, like installing the running lights, giving the trailer frame a couple of coats of paint, sorting out where to put the spare tire, and a bunch of minor installation.

See you soon, campgrounds!  * knocks on wood *

Prime time

It's hard to think of clever titles for posts.  I do my best.

Yes!  Finally this little camping trailer is a little less, erm, blotchy?  Here it is in all its current grandeur:

It's just primer, but it sure feels good to cover up all that Bondo.  It ties everything together and lets me see the shape I designed in CAD some 2 years ago!

Goodness me, has it been that long?  Well, I suppose great work takes time.  Some terrible work takes time too.  Let's all hope for my sake it's the first one.

I've been over this monster with sandpaper more times than I care to count.  This Interlux PreKote marine primer needs sanding too (of course it does -- boat people like to sand things almost as much as they like to argue) but that's all been done as of 4:00 today!  Sanding the primer was nothing like the epoxy.  I took great care to clean the epoxy before applying and allow lots of drying time.  By the time the grit hit the walls, it came off like chalk.  Beauty.  It still took a few evenings to get through it all, but that's better than the nearly 3 months for the epoxy!

Neat stuff, really.  It's classed as a one part filling primer, which means it does the last little part of the fairing process for you.  It feels as smooth as glass already, and there's paint and polishing left to do yet!

I do complain that this stuff did "sag" a little on the vertical walls.  I'm sure I put it on too thick or committed some other infraction.  This is something I need to watch for the paint coat, as I'm fairly (get it?) uninterested in sanding that, other than to scratch out the gloss between coats.  According to the wise Internet, rolling a thin coat horizontally and "tipping" with a brush vertically should help.

I primed last weekend, and I'll get the first paint coat on tomorrow.  Overall, the finishing process is hurtling ahead significantly more quickly than I thought!

Here's another view.  I need to turn the doors and hatch, of course, since I can't paint the top and bottom at once:

"Will you be done soon, then?" people ask wearily, all no doubt tired of hearing of my efforts ad nauseum.  Well, yes.  Soon, but not immediately.  There is still a hatch to seal, a frame to touch up (whoopee ... more paint!) and doors, windows, fans, plumbing, tie-downs, caulking, and electrical to install.

For all who were waiting with bated breath, the aluminium from last post went swimmingly.  When installed, the doors still closed as they should.  It has been removed for painting, and I'll pop it back on (replete with sealing silicone to prevent water seepage) after paint is complete.

But (barring disaster) the Egg should be on the road this summer!  It might be a little "half-baked" this season (for example, I won't get time for curtains, and the final version should really have a light-weight canopy of some sort), but I'm sure it'll be more than acceptable!  The goal is June 1, and I do believe I'm well on track!

Tomorrow -- paint!

Just call me Ali

Like, for aluminium.  Hmmm, not very catchy.  I think that's the end of the post titles that try to turn construction terms cleverly into people's names.

So, in sequitur, we might think that some aluminium is getting added to the trailer.  And we'd be right!  Look as this snappy looking piece:

I think it's going to look pretty sharp.  And it is sharp, so that makes sense.  The purpose of this stuff will be to protect the outer edges of the doors and the inner edges of the door frames from dents and dings, all the while adding a certain panache to the whole look.

There will be 16 lengths to install in total, around 4 sides inside/outside of 2 doors.  There will be some aluminium in the hatch as well to aid in sealing, but it'll a slightly different approach there.  (Read: not yet fully sorted out.)

It took a bit of finishing and fiddling to arrive at the splendid piece you see before you.  Firstly, I couldn't buy the right widths locally, so I needed to rip wider pieces on the tablesaw.  Sounds easy (and it is) but ripping a long piece of metal like that is a little scary, and little curly razor-blades do tend to spray around everywhere.  It makes for a lot of clean-up, and I had worn a few minor cuts and nicks after I was finished it all.  After the main widths, everything else can be done with a nice clean hacksaw.

Next, cut to length with appropriate angling, sand the rough edges with trusty old 80-grit, and buff out the scratches and imperfections with some #0 steel wool.  Drill and countersink screw-holes, and install with #6 stainless wood screws.  Under a microscope, it winds up looking like this:

"Why on earth would you install the aluminium before painting?!" you cry.  "You'll just need to mask it all again and again, and that just makes more work!!"

True!  But it occurred to me that I was adding quite a bit of thickness with the layers of epoxy of recent memory, and finding out about a door not closing or other nonsense after full finishing would be a little ... disappointing.  Better to install the trim now, test-fit the doors, and do any needed adjustments before the show-room coats go on.  I think I'll put a smear of silicone or something very thin underneath to prevent water creep anyway, so this likely isn't the final install.

"Does this mean we're done hearing about sanding?!"  Well, yes it does ... for now.  I believe the primer will need a quick once-over, and maybe more.  But the real lion's share of sanding for the project is over.  And it feels magnificent!  The plastic epoxy sands smooth and lovely and should make a perfect water-resistant layer under paint.  I'm not sure it's going to look good from 10" away like a showroom car, but it's just a camping trailer.

Hey, this thing is getting done!  Gee whiz, if I keep going at this rate, it might only be a year late!

Just call me Sandy

Because of the sanding.  Lots and lots of sanding!

So, to clarify, when they say, "get ready for lots of sanding", with projects like this, they mean LOTS of SANDING.  Like, when you're expecting a child and they say you should expect to lose a little bit of sleep.  Or when you're in World War I and they say, "it might be a little muddy."

So I exaggerate a little.  Or do I?

Anywho, not too many photos this time.  Why?  Well, because the damn thing looks precisely like it has for weeks to months, only with varying amounts of plastic-y coating:

I'm getting the hang of epoxy just fine.  It is tricky.  The mixing and quantities are fine (if you can count and stir you can do that), and I haven't seen much amine blush (waxy coating produced during the cure).  However, a couple of other things are non-simple:

• I got burned by cheap rollers on the first round with the doors.  They lost a lot of fluff in the mix.  That produced a lot of stippling and resulted in excessive sanding.
• Because this stuff is so transparent, it's easy to think you've just sanded it all off accidentally.  I made that error, again with the outside of the doors.  I washed the dust off (but not well enough), and thought I felt the wood knap underneath.  In retrospect, it was likely the grainy plastic-dust I was feeling.  I've since sanded through the epoxy in other areas, and it's obvious.
• There are a lot of dips and drips.  It's tough to get it totally even.  My preferred method is to apply with a roller, then "tip" with a soft brush.  I tried applying with a drywall knife, but it wasn't as easy.  Even when applied evenly, it sags a lot, particularly on vertical surfaces.  This makes for more sanding, but the results are still excellent in the end.
• Speaking of sanding, the old random orbital sander works well for finishing things off, but it's surprisingly slow on the smooth shiny plastic that we start with.  My current solution is to do the bulk of the work with a hand sanding block, which is way faster, and finish with the ROS.  Good results.
• If you want to wrap the fibreglass around a corner, you need to do it at the same time as the main portion.  I waited with the hatch, and it got crusty and wouldn't bend.  I wound up cutting it off.  Not a big deal -- the joint should be quite strong without, and it'll get aluminium trim eventually anyhow.

So, all that said, here's the summary of progress:

• The hatch and the doors are mostly done, inside and out.  The hatch got glass on the outside only.  There are a couple of spots to fill, but these are 98% done.
• The epic glass and sanding job is done on the roof!  The wrap-around on the walls still needs to be sanded, as does the hatch hole, and the fibreglass join area will need a little filling.  As a rough gauge, this took about 4 part-days of sanding!  Part days because I thought my arms might fall off otherwise.  Sanding gets tougher as the surface gets flatter, which makes me think I need a smaller sanding block.
• The walls and door frames still need to be done.  That should be simple compared to all the glass I've already put behind me.

I'm worried that the epoxy is going to cause some fit issues with the doors and the hatch.  So, like a good boy scout, I plan to take care of this issue before it becomes a problem.  I'm going to fit the aluminium trim right after the epoxy, then test hang everything.  Any fit and potential sealing issues can be solved before paint.  I think I'll just leave the trim in place, and mask it for paint.  Then I can sleep at night and not dream about doors that don't close!

I have a few days off over Christmas.  My hope is to finish the existing sanding and apply the wall epoxy before the break is up.  I could be doing aluminium trim by early in 2016!  Gosh, there's still so much to do ... !

Onwards and upwards!  I mean, time for more sanding.  (I'm less excited than I sound!)

Painting with warm honey

"Well, that's a strange title."

You know what they say -- any attention is good attention on the Internet.  No wait, that's not quite true.  Hmm.  Anyway, you're here now.

What's the warm honey bit about, then?  Epoxy, as it turns out, is just like painting with warm honey.  Nowhere near as tasty, but a quite similar texture.  It's my first experience with the stuff, and I'm pleased to say it hasn't been wholly unpleasant.  Which is good, because I've heard some stories that have sounded wholly unpleasant.

Here's a quick view of home sweet home garage, way back when I was totally new to using this mysterious substance and not yet an expert (about 10:00am today):

It took longer than you would think to spread that fibreglass cloth out.  I couldn't get 5 foot wide cloth, so I'm joining 2 sheets by kind of spreading together the little fibres at the seam.  Though this apparently becomes quite thin stuff, I have a sneaking feeling it might require some fairing, even after a couple of fill coats.

It is kind of neat stuff though, very strong and silky like a spider-web.  It also makes you itch like fibreglass insulation, which makes complete sense, unfortunately in retrospect.

Here we are again, all prepped and ready:

I was planning on using acetone to clean the wood prior to application, even going as far as buying a bottle of the stuff.  However, when it came right down to it, I didn't.  I used to use acetone in a shoe repair shop I worked at in the industrial revolution, and the stuff is simply nasty.  It eats holes in your mind.  Every decent sniff deletes something important, like how to tie your shoes or who you're married to.  I think that's why I'm colour-blind and I can't swim.  Also, gerkashnitzel.

What instead?  Well, elbow grease.  I started with a brush, then a vacuum, then a shop cloth.  Terri had some micro-fibre cloths, and those worked great on the final lap.  Any remaining dust (not much) will be forever encapsulated in the epoxy, and that's OK.

Cutting to the chase, here's the workshop after the few hours it took to mix and spread all this gunk out:

I'm now at the "hope that worked" stage.  I mixed lots of small batches of the West Systems epoxy (that's epoxy that boat -builders approve of, so, yeah, I'm pretty cool).  I measured carefully with the approved pumps, and I made sure to mix the heck out of it, like I was told to.  It is a little tedious with all that mixing, but not as bad as, say, transferring a 10-pound bag of rice grain-by-grain to another bag and back again.

It's thick stuff compared to paint.  It soaked into the wood doors (no fibreglass going there) quite easily, but it took some patience and persistence (and a lot of epoxy!) to wet out the fibreglass cloth.  It likes to grab dry cloth and pull it all out of alignment, so you need to hold it down and go very slowly.  No problem. I do have, you know, an unlimited amount of time for this.

It's pretty easy to kind of shift it all around as you go, since it's a loose weave.  I don't have any folds or anything dramatic, but I have a suspicion that some of the denser areas might wind up a little ... wavy?  I hope not.  Who knows. I've never done this before.

I mainly used a thin roller, which I'm not totally sold on.  It does OK, but it leaves texture and little fibres every once in awhile.  I may try the next round with a brush (which I will use the acetone for, in an enclosed jar) and see how it goes.

Here's a closer view of the stuck-on cloth:

The ends (left) will get trimmed off, but the sides (right) will get wrapped over and epoxied on once the first coat is cured.  This makes the roof joint all the tougher.  The plan is the same for the roof: I'm told that this fabric should blend into the fibreglass-less walls fairly easily.

Apparently, I'm on a bit of schedule now.  To avoid sanding the thing every time, I apparently need to apply the next coat within about 24 hours.  We'll see.  If it needs a sand anyhow, I might just do that.  Read: if I'm tired after work tomorrow, I'll decide it needs a sand anyway!

Hopefully, I look at this stuff tomorrow and it's nice and hard.  Otherwise, the next blog post might be, "Why I decided to cut the camping trailer into little sticky pieces."