Rain Rain, Go Away!

Murphy’s Law wins again…

 In a decade-long drought-stricken Wyoming, we only seem to get rain at the worst moments.  Last year around this time, I was completing an identical AATREC-FM204 for a customer on the west coast.  The day I needed to shuttle things around outside, the skies opened up and it poured for a week.  We live off-road, and the bentonite clay that forms our roads gets slick as snot when it’s wet, and hard as concrete when dry.  It’s not something you want on a project in-progress.

Now, on the exact day I finished the camper’s interior to the point I need to make the same box/chassis shuttle happen, there’s ankle-deep mud again.  Forecast?  Don’t even look!  Rain extending the next five days!  A rare sight in Eastern Wyoming - green grass, gray skies, and wet ground…

Okay, Mother Nature has other plans for us today.   A little update to the build-blog sounds good.  Anna and I were just discussing that a fire in the wood stove sounds pretty good too - on June 2nd.  It’s only 45ºF outside, at 1015.  A fire just might be in the cards!

So how’s the camper doing?  For once, I am (was, until the weather) on schedule.  All cabinets are installed and pre-wired.   Here are the last dinette-area wall cabinets going up.  You can see the Sika 252 on the wall before installation.  What you can’t see is Anna standing behind me, ready to hold the cabinet in place while I get the props and bolts installed.  She’s a fantastic help when it comes to hanging these.  For what it’s worth, each cabinet is bolted, screwed, AND glued to the wall and ceiling.  The mechanical fasteners just make me feel better.  The Sika 252 is amazing stuff that never gets totally hard, yet holds for ever.  It provides at least 70 psi of holding strength.  Do the math and you’ll compute that the cabinets will fall apart before they fall down!

 The fridge cabinet is the largest cabinet of the set, and will not fit through the door.  It must enter the camper through the cab crawl-through, so it’s the last built of pre-built joinery to go in.  It also has to get stuffed in before the crawl-through is trimmed out…

With the cabinet inside, it gets permanently mounted in place, and then the crawl-through is trimmed out and covered with an insulated internal rolling shutter…

And the shutter from the bunk area…

The final step before moving the box to our other building (for mounting to the chassis) is to get the entry door installed temporarily.  The big compressor fridge WILL fit through the finished door, but it’s much easier to bring it into the camper with the door off.  Just a few screws are holding it in place in this photo…

Note the fully-radiused door and frame.  There are no sharp corners cut into the sides of the box, as they create stress risers that eventually fail - especially on rough roads.  Using a conventional RV door with a square threshhold is asking for trouble.  I’ve seen so many “expedition” campers over the years with cracked bodies!  Every crack started at a corner, so NO RIGHT ANGLES.  Period.

So now what?  It’s pouring outside.  I think I’ll apply some decals…

and then move on to some more DC branch wiring.  Might as well get some lights and stuff working.

This entry was posted on June 2 2009 at 09:58 and is filed under AATREC Construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.