Reinforcing the floor

This weekend I finally tackled the job of adding a new layer of plywood below the original sub-floor.  This was not an easy task, and I changed my mind many times about whether or not to do the job at all.

The first step was to lift the body up and off of the frame using a pair of scissor-jacks.  Knowing that they would be pushing up against the existing plywood floor, and that this force had to be transferred to the fiberglass walls without fracturing any part of the floor or the walls, I had to be picky about the location of the jacks.  This is the part that had me changing my mind about the job -- it wasn't a matter of cost or effort, but technique, because I didn't know how I would suspend the body without interfering with the insertion of the new plywood.  I settled on locating the two jacks against the very back wall where it curves below the sub-floor about 3 inches.

Two scissor jacks located right against the back wall. The frame is held up by a chunk of 6X6.

At the front, two axle stands were used to maintain a little left-right balance.

The next step was to cut a piece of plywood to fit beneath the rear deck of the trailer, below the dinette. The plan was to slide the plywood into position from inside the trailer.  A few things were in the way, though; the wheels, the mudflaps, and the scissor jacks.  The wheels, I simply took them off.

This shows the amount of gap I allowed for inserting the new plywood floor.

I got impatient with the mudflaps because the screws that held them on were completely corroded and wouldn't unscrew, so I just pulled the mudflaps up and out of the way.  The jacks couldn't be moved, so I cut small notches in the new plywood to avoid them.

A piece of 3/4" pressure-treated plywood, cut for the rear deck area.

 The new plywood was cut so that the leading edge (at the step-down from the dinette to the main floor) was exactly flush with the original floor.  The wheel-well edges were flush along the sides but extended to the rear about 3 inches to allow for the bump where the mud-flaps were fastened.  On my Boler, this part is coated in fiberglass.  The curved back edge was cut so that the new plywood comes to about 2 inches from the fiberglass wall/skirt on the underside.  I figured this set-back was still close enough to the wall edge to transfer stresses and loads effectively between the walls and the frame.  I used construction adhesive and wood screws to fasten and bond the new plywood to the old.

Next, I cut plywood for the front deck, and for the kitchen cupboard area.  I used basically the same approach as the rear deck for lifting up the body, inserting the plywood, and fastening it. The old sub-floor for the main floor area seemed to be in good shape, but it was made of two pieces of plywood, held together by corrugated staples and fiberglass.  I cut a single new replacement piece.  The net effect is that I gain an extra 3/4 of an inch of headroom, since the body and ceiling are that much higher but the main floor isn't.

The very last thing I did was insert 2" x 2" pieces of new plywood into the gaps where the frame emerges from the bottom edge of the wall.  The gaps were because my new decking didn't go right to the very edge of the wall.  I figured that much of the load transfer between the wall and the frame happens right at this point.  I wanted to ensure that the fiberglass wall met the frame solidly rather than its load getting transferred back through 2 inches of old plywood.  I'm just guessing that it matters.

Window and Door Removal

Window and Door Removal

I removed the two jalousie windows.  They came out without too much trouble; the trickiest part was dealing with the rivets that still had a bit of the driver pin stuck inside, as I had described in the last post.  First I drilled out the rivets that held the inside aluminum trim in place.  Then I removed the black plastic trim strip that covered all four sides of the exterior window frame.

Left side jalousie window, as rivets are drilled out.  Notice the  sloppy caulking job.

Most of this bead of silicone caulk peeled off fairly easily.

Done.

After drilling out the rivets holding the frame to the fiberglass body, I peeled off all the silicone caulking that someone had chosen to use to seal it all up. (Silicone isn't a good choice for this kind of application.  I agree with Kevin Johnston, who has produced an excellent collection of videos on his Boler restorations, that silicone is to be avoided.  I watched this video of his before I did my work:   http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhpKna85vY8 )  Unlike Kevin Johnston's 13-foot Boler, I had no screws to remove -- just rivets.  Having removed both jalousie windows, I now have quite some work ahead of me cleaning all the remaining butyl caulking, repairing the crank mechanism, and replacing the rubber gaskets which surround each individual glass pane.  I will see if the instructions on repairing the window crank, found at http://bolerlife.com/crank.html , work out.  But I'm unsure about sources for this kind of window gasket.
Removing the tiny window in the door was easy, too.  There were aluminum trim strips fastened to the inside with rivets.  The rivets holding the window frame to the door were hidden beneath the flexible rubber gasket.

Now that these components have been removed, I'll do some research about the best ways to clean and polish them.  It would be nice if I could achieve a bright shine and then treat them with something that would preserve the shine.  Even though the original door window is only 6 inches tall and doesn't let as much light in as the larger windows found in 1980s Bolers, I think it looks cool.

Removing the chromed steel bar that stiffens the hinge side of the door frame.

Removing the door was no big deal.  The nuts on the hinge bolts had rusted and so I had to cut them with the grinder.  I'll have to determine if they'll just need a "door hinge repair kit" from Paul Neumeister, or if I should buy complete replacements from Scamp.  Somewhere on the 'net I saw that someone had managed to give their hinges a really good polish.

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?

Some Pictures

More pictures, this time of the ID markings of my Boler.

Hmm. I wonder if I can polish this up at all.

It's difficult to read at this angle, but the date on the plate is 7, 72.  The grill on the left is an oversize one for the fridge, and the grill on the right was for a furnace vent, although the hole had been patched over with a metal plate.

Likely, I'll make a photocopy of this and either keep it in a file onboard or affix the replica somewhere inside the cupboards once they're done.  The original will have to stay attached to the old door, which I'll keep somewhere at home.

And this ugly thing... I don't think it needs preservation.

Yeah, I know this posting isn't much of a blog entry.  I just thought I'd add it to the mix.
LT

Awnings

AWNINGS
It's time now to talk about design features for the Boler.  This post is about awning choices.  I've seen three basic types so far.  One kind seems to be a basic tarp extending from the awning rail out to a couple of corner poles, with guy ropes pegged to the ground.

This is the awning track on my Boler.  It's  about 7 feet long.

I don't like the way this type of awning sags in the middle, and how they require the guy lines.

Another kind I've seen provides support for the middle and sides of the awning as it extends from the trailer.  There are support rails that run back to the wall of the trailer.
These pictures show the support rails.  I like how this Scamp awning looks flat on top, and the side supports look like they detach for storage.  The 17-foot Boler here has side supports that do not detach, meaning they must catch a certain amount of wind while travelling.

This is my old trailer.  It was great for our family because we have 4 kids.
The Boler is our "just the two of us" version trailer travel.

I think I want something a little more compact.  My former trailer, a Coleman tent trailer, had a conventional "bag awning."  It had 3 rails that extended outward to support the awning fabric and keep the far end rail in position.  Because there was an end rail, you always had a nice straight edge.  There were two support poles that went straight to the ground, and they didn't necessarily need guy lines -- so long as there was no strong wind, everything stayed in place.

Here is a page from a standard online RV parts supplier.  It's probably the route I'll take.  It's just that the colours they offer don't match the classic Boler scheme that I want to maintain -- olive green and a creamy white.  The narrowest awning on this page is 8.5 feet, which is too wide for the Boler.  I'm looking for a 7-foot awning.  I'm wondering if I'd be able to make the support poles work -- I like the idea of them mounting down low on the wall of the trailer, although poles running straight down to the ground would be fine too.  If anyone reading this blog knows of another source that could furnish something like this in a better choice of colours, please let me know.

Portable Shelter

Gimme Shelter!
Here is my Boler's new shelter for the winter:

72 Boler in its winter den

I had some sheets of 9/16" Aspenite, full and part sheets or scraps, that I put down on the ground, over top of a polypropylene tarp.  This has given me a pretty nice floor for the inside of the shelter.  I've done this once before with a previous shelter and it kept the level of moisture down considerably through the winter.  I also ran power out to the shelter, and now I have a duplex outlet, light switch and light.  I have absolutely no idea how many jobs I'll be able to get to over the winter, but I'm hopeful!

72 Boler on axle jacks

I've taken some of the load off the new suspension -- I cranked the tongue jack down to the bottom, put axle jacks below the back end, and then jacked the front up 'til the trailer was level again.  Maybe it should be up a little higher, but I'm sure that taking even a little of the load off will help.  If I have to move the trailer inside the shelter at any point, I can do it easily.  In the photo you can see that I've also got the original trailer jacks under the "bumper" section, too.

Original Boler jack

Here's a shot of the original Boler jack, taken before I did the work on the frame.  At first I thought I would install modern crank-down stabilizer jacks like you would find on a new tent trailer -- like the kind I had on my '03 Coleman tent trailer.  But then I got thinking about which parts of the Boler could or should be kept original and which parts might be updated.  They would have cost a little over a hundred dollars to buy a complete set, and then they would have had to be welded to the frame.  I wasn't sure how to go about positioning them because the bottom edge of the fiberglass wall extends past the steel frame.  My former tent trailer's frame was below the side wall, and access to the crank /screw was easy.  So, I decided to keep the old jacks. They have character even though they don't provide any lateral stability.  I'll clean them up and repaint them.  They'll go on my winter list of jobs that can be done indoors where it's warm.

Photos of things to change

Okay, I'm back at it! I'll start this posting with a couple of pictures taken before I began my restoration work. This one was from just over a year ago:

The picture below was taken this past spring:

I moved my Boler into a brand new "portable" garage/shelter today. It's one of those cheap ones from Crappy Tire, but I think it will allow me to get a few jobs done over the winter. My list of jobs this year includes making a new counter top and matching table, making new door fronts, refinishing the jalousie windows, and repairing the ensolite seams. I also want to check out my options for water and electrical fittings for the sidewalls, and for power converters and interior lights.

Here is the original water inlet and the 110 volt power outlet. Both need to be replaced. I'm pretty sure I'm going to go with an inlet that has a screw cap. Yes, it would be a more authentic restoration if I continued to use this one, but I'm not crazy about that lid thing.
Below is the 110 Volt connection. I'll see if I can get a new unit of the same design. The Coleman tent trailer that I owned until last year had a power cable that pulled out of a port in the side wall -- the cable was always connected to the power converter.

I don't suppose I'll have any trouble finding a standard hose connector.  I'm not sure if there's anything wrong with this old one, but it's not like it's a distinctive design that has to be preserved.

And here are the sink taps. The one on the left is connected to the hose inlet. In the seven years that I had the Coleman tent trailer, never once did I use the "city water" faucet. I always used water from the tank.  The hand pump faucet here was made by Coleman. I'll probably replace it, and install a pressure-activated 12-volt electric water pump.

So, where will I go with the blog this fall? In addition to documenting the "research" that I've been doing regarding replacement parts and design ideas, I will provide detailed coverage of the repair work as I get to it. I think the first job I'll tackle will be the table mounting cleat:

The plywood has swelled and de-laminated. The metal strip should be fine, though. I'll have to see if the fiberglass work can be done in cool temperatures. Hmm. Maybe I'll have to rig up a heater inside my new Crappy Tire shelter.