Tuesday 21 May 2013

Resuming work after a long winter

It's the May Two-Four Weekend, and I'm back!

I didn't get anything done on the Boler over the winter, but I'm eager to make progress now that the warm weather has arrived. Yesterday I removed the old seam tape, cupboard doors, and the water and power inlets on the left sidewall.
In some places the Ensolite was covering up a lot of mildew.
Most of these parts were quite corroded. Notice how much the original olive colour has faded.
The upper and lower cupboards weren't much trouble to remove.  The biggest difficulty was drilling out the rivets that had the steel driver-pins still inside them; the drill bit preferred to slip off to the side instead of going through the center, since the steel pin protruded just a bit and was harder than the aluminum rivet.  In some cases, I had to use my angle grinder on them.
Pretty crappy door latch strike plate. Not sure what I'll replace it with. 
The closet was a little tricky to remove because underneath the gasket/trim that goes around the edge of the doorway I found that really heavy staples had been used to connect the closet wall to the wall of the body.
These staples had to be ground off from the outside, and then  the wire bits could be pulled from the inside.
And this is what the inside looks like with all cupboards and the main floor removed.
I also tried to figure out how I might lift the body off the frame once more in order to insert some new plywood between the old floor and the frame.  My concern is that the old plywood has suffered a bit of dry-rot, and the only way the body has been fastened to the frame is by bolts going through this old plywood.  I've been thinking that some pressure-treated plywood would help.  A complete replacement of the floor is next to impossible because the original plywood is bonded to the sidewall, embedded in the fibreglass, and so it can't be removed.  The difficult thing about inserting new plywood below the old floor is that I don't think I can lift the body in any other way than by pushing up on the old floor, which of course means that I would need some other way of holding the body up other than placing supports under the floor.  Stay tuned, I guess.

Post Script: Are there any American readers out there who know the significance of May Two-Four?

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