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.