Bedtime

My daughter, S, had the flu on Sunday so I spent the day down in the shop. I know wood working topics are about as dry as toast for folks looking for Airstream related discussions, but restoring the interior is as important as polishing or frame repairs. No one is going to see that your frame is in good shape, but they will see that your cabinets look like shit or that they don't match the vintage of the trailer. Bear with me... I'll get to more interesting topics as this progresses. Plus, the rig is still at Colins.

I dug into my pile of projects and pulled out the original bed to work on. I'll post some pictures later, the bed matches the 4 drawer chest with the bent top, but the bed has this nice bent birch corner with a 3.5 inch base that has a matching bent corner. Very art deco. There is one drawer at the bottom that I am going to covert to a hatch using the deco hinges from rejuvenation.com and push-button latch from leevalley.com. The hatch will fold down so we can get access under the bed to store stuff.

The orig bed top and base were in pretty bad shape. Areas had de-laminated and the prior owner had done a poor job of drilling a large round hole in the rear section.

I started by separating the base from the top section. I had hoped to re-use the base and scab on a new layer of veneer, but I realized that it had way to much water damage and the 3/16th birch ply was completely useless. I rebuilt the base with 3/4" birch ply and used 1/8" baltic birch ply to re-create the bent corner. Had to use a household iron to soften up the birch ply and it took a couple tries to get right. It's a good thing that baltic birch is not very expensive per sheet.....

The carcass of the top section was built out of pine and somewhere along its life, one of the pine rails had been broken. The PO tried patching it with metal braces and drywall screws. Using a highspeed air saw, used typically in autobody shops, I removed the bulk of the carcass leaving only the outer most part which supports the bent birch ply. From there, I reinforced the frame with 1/4" birch ply by gluing it on with Poly glue. No nails. I'm trying to limit the use of brad nails as they tend to rust. Once the glue set I took the router with a flush cutting bit to rout out the hatch opening. I then trimmed out the opening with birch so you will not see the plywood edge when the hatch is open.

My next shop day, I'll apply a new coat of birch veneer to the outside and I plan on crafting some interior supports using sheets of ply. I plan on routing out the centers of this ply to reduce the overall weight. I should net about the same weight as the original frame when I'm done. That's the goal at least ;)