One year old....sorta

Just about a year ago I was sitting in an Art Deco hotel in Miamia's South Beach negotiating with John to buy his Caravanner. In a years time we have come a long way already with the project, but not as far as I had expected. Frankly, everything takes longer than expected if you're going to do it well and right. I've also learned some fairly expensive lessons, which when I do my next renovation/redesign I will not make.

Carte Diem.

At night I've been tinkering away with odds-n-ends before it's S's bed time story session. Right now she's into Spiderwick, very cool story. I took the rear license place light apart and cleaned the paint off it and replaced the 12v lights with LEDS. Then resealed the whole thing and re-attached it to the trailer.




So here are some pictures from this morning. I hitched our TV to the trailer last night to see how the LEDs look. Pretty cool and the rear tail lights that Rob Baker picked up for me are SUPER bright.





Just a little different from the rear side ;)

Fun house mirrors

I have been making incremental improvements to my project and taken some steps back, but I'm still making progress. To give you an example, I fixed all my windows, resealed them, replaced the broken glass and so on. Last week, I was trying to attach a window lock and I broke the window. What a pain, but again I'm making progress.

Since my last post, I've finished wiring the rig, settled on a re-designed layout and have 65% of the new skin on the interior. My good friend Bill came over yesterday and we got two of the top panels attached plus the panel over the door, which had to be buck rivetted. Bill is a school teacher and loves hands on work. He's a fantastic cabinet builder and does custom furniture on the side, but he had never buck rivetted before. He ran the rivetter and I held the bucking bar. Below are some picture.

I have loads more rivets to set but the two hardest panels are up now.

Another item, I installed prior to putting the wall panels up is ice and water sheild over my floor. If you are not familiar with this stuff it's a rubber membrane reinforced with fiber strands. It is typically used on roofs to seal them from water, shingles are then nailed ontop of it. I figured if it's good enough for a roof it should work great on sealing my floor from pesky leaks. I've taken a great deal of time to seal the trailer up both inside and out. I like this ice and water shield because it's super sticky and it good for sealing up seams and other patches. Very handy stuff. I haven't seen anyone else use this stuff but so far it's been great. To give you an example, I left a vent open and it rained durin the night. When I came out the water was pooled up under the vent and had not touched the wood.

I'm still debating on my final flooring, but I need to get under and reinforce it. The floor is a bit bouncey in one spot. I suspect it's the way the floor was put down.

Here are some pictures.