June 13 2009 by Darrin.

Today under a mostly blue sky, Anna and I got the camper mounted to the chassis.  It worked out really well, the pins tapped right in, the bolt holes lined up, nothing interfered anywhere, and the crawl-through came out perfectly.  What a relief!  Check it out…

See those wicked clouds in the background?  That was a tremendous thunderstorm over Glendo, about 25 miles from here.  It produced 1-inch “destructive hail” and intense winds.   Fortunately, it missed us!  We’re not out of the water yet, as another system is heading for us.  The AATREC-FM204 is safely parked inside at the ranch, to protect her from hail.  However, I never trust Murphy, and predict a micro-burst will flatten the building!

Anyway, Anna and I rolled tape while we did the big install this afternoon.  It took about an hour, but I’ve condensed it into a time-shifted video for YouTube, and you can see it here…

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0bWEf9VSf4

Sunday, I think we’ll take a break from physical work, and I’ll plan the steel we need to build the dual spare tire and motorcycle carrier.  Lots of welding to do next week!

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June 11 2009 by Darrin.

Every time the mud puddles nearly dry, the heavens open up again.  On Tuesday, I saw the process about to repeat and had to intervene with the loader.  A couple of strategically placed buckets of shale and the road was clear enough to make a move - as the clouds built! Here’s the cabin coming outside for the first time since January…

And the chassis on the way back to the workshop to get the torsion-free subframe components bolted down - note the ominous sky…

Sure enough, the rain started within an hour and as of Thursday morning, it really hasn’t quit yet.  We’ve had 1.9″ of rain at the ranch since Tuesday night, with solid rain coming throughout Wednesday.  We’d hoped to spend the weekend camping with old Unimog friends in Colorado on the 19th - 21st  of June, but the weather has finally killed all chances of that.  There’s just no way to make that happen now.  It’s fairly disappointing, as we’ve worked to that goal for months!

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June 7 2009 by Darrin.

Another week’s passed since rain destroyed hopes of swapping the camper box for the chassis on schedule.  After cleaning up a few hundred pounds of tools, I wound up getting them all out again and scratching many more interior items off the list.

 Even though the ground was finally dry enough for the move yesterday, I had other plans.  I’d volunteered my minimal radio knowledge to the Converse County Rural (Volunteer) Fire Department and had to install some new VHF radios for them.  That process took a tad longer than I’d expected and I didn’t get home until after supper time, having left 0700.  Today was the day to make the swap - after taking care of a couple last minute items.  And, well, Murphy won again.  No good deed goes unpunished.

Here’s the Doppler radar image of the moment before I planned to head outside with the camper…

And a shot out the shop’s walk-door a bit later…

 I give up!  Now the tools come out again and I’ll run more wires here and there.  It’s starting to look like I won’t be able to make my planned shakedown cruise to the 2009 Rocky Mountain Unimoggers camp-out in Colorado the weekend after next.  I was really looking forward to that!  It would have been a perfect trial run, to be completed in Denver with a mandatory break-in service at Fuso.

Oh well.  C’est la vie!  I’ll close with a photo of the AATREC-FM204, ready to come outside…

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June 2 2009 by Darrin.

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.

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May 15 2009 by Darrin.

Greetings from Baltimore, Maryland.  Before departing Wyoming, work continued on the AATREC and she wound up with some preliminary internal systems up and running.  Most notable is the supply wiring for the AC/DC distribution center and Inverter/Charger.

  Here’s the electrical center, installed and hot…

And behind it…

It’s important to keep things organized here!  You virtually can’t use enough tie-wraps, cable clamps and clips.  The more you support your wiring, the longer it will last.  And by keeping it clean, you can find problems later, if any arise.  If you see a better way to route a wire, DO IT!  You won’t be sorry down the road.

 The plumbing systems are almost complete too.  I only lack the hoses to the sink faucet, and the shower valve.  Here you can see one of two hydronic galley heaters…

  Like an automotive heater core, these water-to-air heat exchangers use spare engine heat to warm the camper.  When the engine’s not running, coolant is heated by an Espar hydronic furnace and pumped through these heat exchangers if cabin heat is required. In the above photo, you can also see the 1-1/4″ transfer pipe, that connects the two 50-gallon fresh water tanks.  The 1-1/2″ drain is also visible as it exits the floor (upper right of image).

In the following image, you can see the water compartment. It’s accessible from the outside through a hatch, or internally underneath a bunk lid.  To the left is the supply pump and accumulator tank, in the center, another ducted heat exchanger, and on the right, a water-to-water heat exchanger for producing domestic hot water (from engine heat.)

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April 26 2009 by Darrin.

Sunday night now, after a long week of joinery and finishing.  The bunks are complete, and house the water tanks, storage areas, and the plumbing compartment…

While the bunk panels’ polyurethane topcoats were drying, I ran the drain plumbing from the sink and shower sump behind the cabinets and out under the camper.  (There’s a 45 gallon gray water tank mounted between the frame rails of the big Fuso Class VI chassis, and it will be hooked up to the drain outlet when the camper is mounted to the truck.) I also  managed to get the water fill, water compartment door, and electrical (shore) inlet installed, as well as finally assembling and installing the electrical center…

I’ll start this coming week tomorrow by building the sub-floor between the bunks, and getting everything plumbed up.  That will involve tying both 50 gallon fresh water tanks together, plumbing in the water-to-water heat exchanger, and running hot and cold potable water lines and engine coolant lines to the proper places.  Hopefully, if I can swing some 12-hour days, I’ll get a good start on the electrical, and Kalzb’gon may be running on her own limited internal systems by next Sunday.  I’ll try and post a progress report in a week.

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April 20 2009 by Darrin.

With the basic cabinets in place, the next step involves constructing and installing the bulkhead/partition wall that separates the galley from the bunk area.  Here are a couple shots of that wall now in place…

Now that the bunk area has been created,  I can start building out that section.   The first step is water storage, and the 2 x 50-gallon water tanks are now ready to bolt in.  They are bedded inside wood framing, and will get bolted to the floor with steel straps…

Built inside the living space, the domestic water storage is protected from freezing.  However, every choice in life has alternative cost and in this case it’s a potential for water damage should a tank break.  For a four-seasons camper, it’s a risk we’ll take and limit damage by providing drain holes beneath the tanks.

Around the water tanks, the two couch/bunks will be built.  My goal is to have them finished by next Sunday, stain, polyurethane and all, including the 6″ “joists” for the sub-floor that goes between the bunk.  The subfloor allows for water lines, heating, and other mechanical stuff to be installed and hidden away, yet accessible for easy service.  If all goes well, electrical, plumbing, and heating system construction can start on Monday, April 27th!  Here’s hoping for a good week coming up.

On the ranch, our most recent snow (6″ of heavy, wet stuff) melted off and soaked into the ground.  Looking southeast again, there’s a touch of new green starting here, as the snow on the plains in the distance finishes melting.  (Two hours after this photo was taken, it was gone.)

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April 15 2009 by Darrin.

Nothing sounds better than breakfast when you’re out camping in the wild, the bacon sizzling, the coffee brewing…  That used to happen on a white-gas Coleman stove, but now it happens on a stainless steel Force 10 thermocoupled marine range, built into a set of custom cherry cabinets.  It might not sound as romantic, but it’s pretty refined and it sure tastes as good in the bush.

As of tonight, the galley cabinets are installed.  The long wall cabinet was pre-wired before it was hung.  I like to use a lot of cable clamps to keep everything organized.  That keeps the potential for electrical trouble at a minimum, and facilitates repairs if they’re needed.  Here’s the galley wall cabinet being prepared and a shot of what you’ll typically find underneath the floor panels of the wall cabinets…

This is the same cabinet, in place on the wall and powered up for a simple lighting test…

And the complete set of galley cabinets installed…

One last comment: Rain!  We don’t get it much, but when we do it really changes the landscape.  The road to the shop looked mystical this afternoon, as the precip fell and the clouds sat low on the mountain…

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April 11 2009 by Darrin.

This week, we took an overnight trip down to Denver to pick up a bunch of stuff for the camper.  While there, we…

• Had the ladder project galvanized in Commerce City
• Picked up a bunch of aluminum trim at Alreco in Brighton
• Got a second 11R22.5 Bridgestone M711 mounted on an Accuride wheel for our second spare.  (We’ll carry two on the AATREC for extra safety.)
• Loaded up on American Cherry quarter-round trim and 1×4 lumber for interior trim at Austin Hardwoods in Denver

Yesterday, I bolted the 14 ladder components together and mounted the whole assembly to the bottom of the camper.    Here’s how it looks when stowed under the body…

 And partially deployed (it’s just 2.5″ thick when folded up)…

And finally, fully deployed…

Note that in the above photo, the camper is much lower to the ground than it will be when it’s mounted to the chassis.  In its final state, the ladder lets you comfortably climb 54″ to the camper floor, and at that elevation the stairs yield almost exactly 8.5″ of rise and run per step.

Oh, one last thing!  We have a new addition to the PC family.  It’s a “netbook”and I’m writing with it now.  It’s an Asus EeePC, is amazingly compact yet comfortable to use, and offers some great features for the sub-$350 price…

•  Intel Atom N280 processor
• LED backlighting for the LCD display
• 9.5 hour battery life (task-dependent, of course)
• 160GB HDD
• built in web-camera and mic array
• Bluetooth and 802.11 (b, g, and n)
• 2GB RAM (okay, I bought a 2GB module - standard was 1GB)
• WinXP Home

I have been looking at netbooks for over a year now, and finally decided to take the plunge because I wanted XP and MS says they’re no longer going to support it after April 14th.  I chose Asus because great reviews and the fact that I’ve used their motherboards in my last three desktop builds, and ALL THREE PCs are still running perfectly - the first build for almost nine years now (and three power supplies)!

 Today, Saturday, I met my cabinet builder in Wheatland and picked up the replacement stove cabinet.  That means I can get back to installing the galley cabinets, hang the partition wall, and then get to working on the two 50 gallon fresh water tanks and bunks which house them.  Gonna be a good week next week!

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April 5 2009 by Darrin.

This weekend, I almost finished the electrical center that localizes all electrical control to one panel.  In the photo below, you can see how it’s laid out.  Clockwise from the top right you’ll find:

• the large AC/DC distribution panel with breakers for all circuits
• an AC source selector, to choose what feeds the AC circuits
• the remote start panel for the 7500W diesel genset
• a control panel for the MagnaSine 2000W power inverter
• solar charge control (40 amps)
• a digital DC multimeter to monitor battery condition and current flow

 I also got a good start on the rear dinette bench seat. Inside the bench, the Inverter sits in its own compartment and attaches to the House Battery Bank through a master switch and 200A fuse.  This compartment will also house an isolation relay to allow the chassis alternator to charge the house batteries.  The empty area to the left of the Inverter will be partitioned off and offer about three cubic feet of storage space.

 This bench seat compartment sits almost directly above the external chassis-mounted House Battery Bank, which is comprised of three 200 amp-hour absorbed glass mat (AGM) batteries.  Here are a couple shots of the 4D Penn-Deka marine batteries in between the chassis rails…

 There’s quite a bit of woodwork to be done while waiting for the replacement stove cabinet.  I’ll be busy with that this coming week, and also (wx-permitting) will get the entry stairs galvanized and installed.  A week from today, I hope have the galley cabinets installed and be about ready to hang the bulkhead/partition wall that separates the bunks from the galley.

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