April 1 2009 by Darrin.

Wow, what progress!  Most of the interior is finished!  Check it out…

 Ha!  April Fool I am.  No chance.  That’s the last one, about a year ago now!

In all reality, the progress is slow but steady.  The base cabinets are being fitted, after being prepped for plumbing and electrical.  There’s a hole in the set of base cabinets because there was an error with the width of the stove cabinet.  It was an inch too narrow and would have been a fire hazard whenever baking!  Here they are, laid out and ready to glue in with Sikaflex 252…

I have to admit, I get a warm feeling when looking in a window and seeing stained cherry in place.  It means things are happening, and in another month, she WILL look like the photo at the top of this post.  But for now, you get your inspiration where you can.  This is the fifth camper I’ve built since 2003 and I can’t get enough of seeing them come together.  This may not mean much to anyone else, but I know that soon she’ll have some nice halogen and LED lights set into a wall cabinet in this location, and will be running on internal power…

Once the joinery is done, there will be a month of wiring and plumbing to do, so I’m getting a head start.  The electrical center is being cut now, to hold the main breaker panel, multimeter, solar charge controller, inverter control, generator control, and AC source selector.  Oh, and the cassette toilet’s in and its access door installed…

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March 28 2009 by Darrin.

The walls for the head (combined Thetford cassette toilet / shower stall) are finished, and the last coat of polyurethane is drying on them.   Here’s the wall panel with the door opening…

Without kicking up too much dust, I started the breaker panel pre-wiring while the poly was drying.  This is the main electrical distribution center for the camper, and covers both AC and DC circuits.  It’s got about three times the circuits of the average RV, but in this camper you won’t kill everything in your living space if, for example, you cell phone charger shorts out in a DC (lighter) outlet.  Here’s the front of the panel…

 and the back…

The panel itself is from Blue Sea Systems and comes with six or eight breakers installed at the factory.   I install many more, and also break the AC distribution buss so that the bottom three AC breakers will only work with shore power or the generator.  While the inverter is large enough to power those circuits (individually) the load on the 600 A-Hr battery bank would be far too high and cause terribly premature battery failure.  Battery limitations are something 99/100 RVers don’t understand, and often they are riddled with poor electrical system performance!

Next step: Install those panels and cut the small opening for the cassette toilet access hatch.  Maybe tomorrow.  Anna’s a pizza artist, and I smell one cooking now.  No chance I’m going back to the shop tonight.

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March 17 2009 by Darrin.

Last night, we installed the five German Seitz windows.  Anna and I discussed it a bit, because there’s an error in my design.  There are two kinds of windows available: top-hinged and sliding.  Each has its advantages, the most critical being that top-hinged can be open in the rain, and sliding can be open while moving.  It’s good to use at least one of each type on every wall, so that in any condition the camper can naturally cross-ventilate.

The design flaw lies in the curb-side bunk window.  It is top-hinged, and the entry door can damage the open window if the door is allowed to open 180 degrees.   Instead of ordering a new window (like pulling teeth from the US distributor), we kept the design and plan to be careful and install a door-travel limiter.  It does allow the perfect combination of window types for ventilation, and we’ll be grateful when camping in the rain.  Here are a few shots of the windows.  Note the integrated fly-screens and sun-shades..

After building five campers, the last two (both designated AATREC-FM204) have used a fully composite upper body, built on a steel floor.  To this point, I have not released photos of the system I use.  However, this is a good time to publish a little peek at how it all goes together.  It’s really pretty simple.  I fabricate the steel floor from square tubing and then have it powdercoated…

The composite walls and roof are made from a composite foam-cored panel licensed from a company in Belgium, Composittrailer.  The upper system is bonded to my steel floor using a proprietary composite pultrusion.  This system yields an incredibly strong three-point torsion-free chassis interface, a low center of gravity, light overall weight, good insulation, and an upper structure virtually immune to corrosion.

Is this stuff strong?  Absolutely!  The company used to have a video showing a drop-test from 10 or fifteen meters.  A container was suspended by a crane and dropped onto one corner on concrete.  Sustaining minimal corner damage, the structure remained completely intact.

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March 11 2009 by Darrin.

The folding ladder is now complete and disassembled.  In a couple weeks, it’s going for a ride to North American Galvanizing in Denver, where it gets cleaned and hot-galvanized.  The only thing left to do is wrap all the exposed bolt threads with a special high-temperature sacrificial tape from Argon.   That tape protects the threads when the ladder parts are pickled in acid, fluxed, and then dipped in a bath of 835ºF molten zinc.  Here’s the assembly before I took it apart…

 With the ladder done, the next step is to get a topcoat of paint on the inside of the box to prepare it for the interior construction.  The empty box awaits the Sherwin Williams Duration exterior latex paint.  Duration is one of the best exterior paints I have found, and due to the temperature extremes of an RV in use and in storage, exterior grade paint is the only way to go.  The Duration adheres to the fiberglass superbly after priming the glass with XIM 400 Bonder.  Without the bonder, the paint would peel right off. This is where we stand right now…

 When the paint is dry, the German Seitz windows will go into the rough openings in the camper’s walls…

 The first load of cabinets arrived last week too.  There’s a bit of work to do before I can start on these, which will commence with the construction of the multi-use shower/toilet module. These are the galley base cabinets, awaiting installation…

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March 8 2009 by Darrin.

We’re about five and a half months from departure now.  Alaska!  It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, and something I think I’ve convinced Anna she wants to do too.

Of course, the first priority is to get the camper finished.  For those who aren’t aware, I build “expedition campers” on big Class VI four wheel drive trucks.  I’m finally building what I hope to be our own camper, and as always, things are running a little bit behind schedule.  The current project is another set of folding stairs for an entry ladder.  You can see how they work in this little video.

Once the stairs are done, I need to put the top coat of paint on the inside of the cabin, install the windows, and get to building the interior.  With luck, I can have the interior finished by the end of May, and get her all wired up and functioning in June.  (Thinking of the work load makes me panic.  No time for blogging…)

On to Alaska…  The goal is Deadhorse and a bus ride to the Arctic Ocean.  Once that’s done, it’s back by Denali.  We’re seriously thinking about the Inside Passage on the way home.  Should we do it?  It saves some road miles and lets us visit Haines, Juneau, Petersburg, Ketchikan, and Prince Rupert.  But our puppy…  He loves going on trips, and loves the campers, but he has to stay in the RV when it’s on the ferry.  And he’s not a puppy.  He’ll turn eleven on this trip.  Can a 77 year old man hold his bladder for nine hours?  We’ll have to see!

I’ll close now with a thumbnail of our currently proposed route…

Posted in AATREC Construction, Alaska 2009 preTrip | 2 Comments »