Thumbnail Ideas for Paint Job

 

 

 

 

I used some of my recent time on airplanes to make these sketches on my iPad using the Brushes app. The Z and double Z at the top are rip offs from looking at old trailers. I think these are nice retro looking motifs. I have seen the blue-on-blue swoosh in the second row on more than one teardrop, often made from two or more different shades of wood. I don't know if I will use any of these but right now I am favoring the Yellow and Red Wave and the abstract Multi-Color Mural designs. If I don't use them at least they occupied a few hours of time on otherwise boring plane rides.

Interior Cabinets are Complete

I pasted the cut away view of the cabinets from sketchup because it is a little easier to see what is going on than the photos below. In order to get the photos I need to sit down on the floor at the far end and hold the camera above my heard right against the wall so I can't see the viewfinder. That explains the kittywampus angle of some of the pics. There are two cabinets with doors on the right and left sides and two openings in the middle. The lower opening has a removable shelf that is sloped for holding a laptop. And when I say laptop I mean "entertainment center". Its what plays movies and music these days so I thought I might as well get with the times and build a place for it here. The small shelf above is for the "sound system". That's where we will set the jambox when we are playing movies or listening to music. If you don't know what a jambox is you should check the link. It puts out great sound and operates wireless from on bluetooth. I can sync it to my laptop or my ipad, its battery powered so I can use it in the trailer or carry it out to the picnic table. I toyed around for a long time with the idea of installing a car stereo system and a flat screen TV but the laptop idea just seemed to make the most sense. It can play DVDs and it can store nearly my entire CD collection of music.

The upper left pic is with the cabinet doors open and the computer shelf stowed. The center pic is with the cabinet doors closed and the upper right pic shows the computer shelf in position and my laptop sitting on it. You can see two openings below the computer shelf. One will have a 110V outlet and other 12V. I have also wired 12V to the back of the upper compartment where the jambox will be. There is another 12V wire pair hanging down from the cabinets. That will be wired to a small electric dashboard heater. An electric heater will draw too much current to use very long but I think it will take the chill out of the air when we get out of bed on cold mornings.

Starting Work Inside the Cabin

 

The pictures above are from the process of gluing together three sheets of 1/8 inch masonite which would become the inner curved front wall and ceiling of the cabin or "headliner". I saw this method described by Mike Schneider in his Generic Benroy plans. I cut the sheets to the inner width of the cabin minus 1/8 inch to give a little room for error. I also cut a 3-inch strip of masonite for each joint. The joints were then glued using gorilla glue by butting the ends together and using the 3-inch strip to overlap each side of the joint by 1.5 inches. I put a strip of glad wrap on the top and bottom to keep the glue from sticking to the garage floor and the boxes. Boxes of canned food were used as weights to do the clamping. I let the glue set overnight. I learned a valuable lesson which will benefit you. Next time I will use waxed paper instead of plastic wrap because, while the plastic wrap protected against glue adhering to other surfaces, the gorilla glue adhered quite well to the plastic wrap so I had a pretty big job of sanding to remove the plastic wrap from the surface. In the upper right picture you see the glue joints after they have been sanded and then covered with bondo. After the bondo set I went over the joints with my orbital sander to produce a smooth and continuous headliner sheet that is 1/8 inch less than the cabin width and a couple of inches longer than needed. This long thin sheet proved impossible for one person to manipulate so, with help of my daughter Sydney, I inserted the sheet for a test fit. I marked the exact length, the removed it and cut it to the correct length. The  final installation was done by applying construction adhesive to the inside of all of the spars then inserting the headliner again and screwing it in place. 

 

In the pictures above you can see the installed headliner from two views. Outside and inside.

I also got started on the cabinet inside the cabin. More to come on this in my next post. Tomorrow is labor day so I hope to have this looking a lot more like a cabinet by the end of the day.