'76 Shasta rebuild

The catch of course, as I believe it is with all of these trailers, is water damage. Lots of staining around the edges of the ceiling and the vents, and a large soft spot that goes from outside the bathroom back into the bedroom. I only got it yesterday, so I haven't really started tearing into it yet. The belly pan is pretty hard plastic and intact, so I can't see anything from below. I did tear out most of the bathroom ceiling and insulation in ten minutes, without a single tool... What they cal plywood was completely delaminated and tore off in strips. What I can see of the rafters in that one spot are solid though, so maybe there's hope. The outside of the roof has big nasty wide swaths of black goop on every seam, and I have spotted gaps in the seams between the back and side wall siding, so I suspect it leaks like a sieve. Gotta go to work, more later!

Addendum: No idea why I thought the aluminum belly was plastic...

Mmm, cozy...

Hmm, those tongue-and-groove boards don't look stock, better check under there...

Aww hell I don't like bunk beds anyway.

Thanks for the wish of luck, you just doubled my operating budget.

This is the picture that I tried to post in my last message.

There's no water pump, the filler neck part of the water tank is just sitting there loose like the lid on a jack-o-lantern, and the fridge tried to kill me with an ammonia surprise party.

At least it's 90 degrees out and I get to be inside a toaster tearing out moldy insulation and decomposing acorns for Memorial Day weekend! Woohooooo! If I'm lucky, I'll even get to find one of the dead little buggers that put the acorns in there, and wasps will decide it's a great place for a condo.

The 110 works, so I can use the outlets. No battery yet, so 12v is out.

I thought the lack of response might have been because it's only 35 years old, lol.

So I took the lower rear panelling off to get a look at the wall, and was happy to see that the studs and crossbraces all look good on their bottom halves, at least. The corner posts may be not so good, I'll know more when I take the side wall panelling off. The back and side walls don't sit on the floor or trailer frames, they're merely attached to the back and sides of the floor, clinging on, with nothing to rest on but the belly pan. I expected the walls to be sitting on the floor frame. The floor sill and wall footing (that the right names?) are both too rotten to save, and I suspect the corner posts are gone too. Funny, we've been getting a lot of rain lately, and other than when I leave the skylight open, I haven't seen any water come in, even though there are stains all the way around the ceiling...

Here's the aft corner on the starboard side. A black mess. That loose piece of wood laying there next to the paper cup is the old back end of one of the two central joists. You can see the 3/4" sisters they had on each side to beef up the connection point to the sill, right at its carriage bolting points (it's pointing the opposite of the way it was in the floor, the skinny end was the front). As I said, the wall framing that I can see is solid, and only a little stained. Boy it sure isn't very beefy, though. I now know that I can kick my way into any Shasta ever built, lol. More later!

Hi all, sorry for the long break. To answer the last question, I don't yet know what I'm going to use for the inside paneling, if I ever get the money to do it, lol. Probably birch. My priority is to do the structure and insulation and systems as I can afford them and worry about the finish later.
I've got the floor replaced in the bedroom and partway up the hall, so it's like a fatheaded "T", with the vertical leg being the hallway and the crossbar being the bedroom floor. I can't gut the entire trailer at once, so I built this repair as a stand-alone panel, with the ply edges flush with the frame, so the edges have a whole 1 1/2" piece of frame to mate with, instead of only 3/4" like if they shared an edge with the next sheet. When I replace the next section of floor, I'll screw the new edge frames to the frames on the earlier repair (inside the armpits of the "T", so they'll be screwed on two sides), as well as bolting the joists to the steel frame. At some point I'll take the bathroom floor apart and reframe and insulate under there (and clean out the bees' nest that I think I've finally silenced), then do the same under the kitchen counter. The dinette floor seems strong, although eventually I'd like to insulate it, and I'm sure the edges and wall plates have water damage like the back end did.
This pic is of the left side of the new frame, looking aft. You can see the hole where the water heater goes, its propane line, and the city water fitting and low point drain holes in the belly pan. The frame is glued and screwed.

The first sheet of plywood's worth of floor insulated. The center three joists are bolted to steel crossmembers and sistered at the joint with the rear plate, so the screws can go around the plate bolts. The two outer joists ride on those white longitudinal steel frame pieces that connect to the bumper. I cut the left stud in the rear wall so I could fit a whole 4' width of plywood inside.

Here's the bedroom floor with the plywood down. Yay, walking and working space! No more tightrope walking on the frame, woohoo! That short "wall" is the old face of the right side bottom bunk. I'm using it as a visual aid in deciding which way the bedroom layout's gonna go. You can see the black water lines on the floor, and the cut-but-not-installed-yet left side wall plate leaning on the bunk face.

I don't really have room for a queen bed back there without giving up any hope of floor space for getting dressed or anything else, so I'm planning on a full-sized mattress (75x54), and building the frame about 22" high. I'm also going to use one of those hinged upper bunks to make a folding settee/loveseat/bench/whatever so that I can sort of turn it into a living room. It will be part of the long edge of the bed and support the mattress, but can be flipped up like it is in the last photo, revealing the seat of the couch and forming its back. If that makes sense. I'd much rather use the space for storage, but the dinette isn't really big enough to do much with in the way of making it convertible, so...
There are really only two ways to do it: putting the bed crossways or longitudinally. This pic is crossways, and was my first idea. I think I can just barely fit the old closet drawers in the space in the bottom of the new closet. The water tank and heater are yellow, the counter/headboard is green, and the folding bunk is blue. With this layout it would be a squeeze to sit down between the couch and the counter, like sliding into a dinette, but there would be more standing room in front of the closet.

Filler pipe on the wrong side of your tank? Move it!

Well, the patch didn't blow out of the water tank when I filled it two hours ago lol, so so far, so good. It might be weeping the tiniest bit in one corner, but I'm not yet sure it isn't condensation, or runoff from what squirted out of the filler. I'll let it sit over night and see what's what. But structurally, since the tank will be supported in the trailer and isn't right now, I think I can safely say that the hot-glue-gun-and-soldering iron method that I used is good for water tanks (subject of course to the first trip down a bumpy dirt road).
Bought 2 more sheets of foil-backed foam insulation for the bedroom walls (single 1-3/8" sheets instead of the stuff for the floor, where I had to stack two sheets in order to get the right thickness, half the cutting to do and saved $3/sheet!). It and the extra foam left over from the floor should be just enough to insulate the entire bedroom, except for the ceiling. Also invaded my friend's shop to rip 4-8' spruce 2x4s into 12- 1 x 1-1/2" stud-sized pieces, since I don't have a functioning table saw. I'll use it to replace a couple of corner posts in the back corners, any bad wood that I find around the windows, and for framing the bedroom furniture.
I'm re-using as much of the old camper as I can find a use for, because my budget is lower than Darfur's Peace Corp budget. For example, since I'm replacing the original 4-bunk-central-rear-closet layout with a single-bed layout, I'm going to use the big folding part of the old upper bunk and its hinges as a new folding couch back that unfolds from the edge of the bed. It's built like a hollow interior door, nice and light, so I'll just use it like it was designed, just as part of a much bigger bed. I'll re-use the old drawers and closet door too, at least for the time being. I may get fancy later on, I'd love to go to town with glowing hardwoods etc., but right now it's structure and systems and bare cold function I'm concentrating on. I'm also saving all the old yellow fiberglass wall insulation to use in odd places, since it it isn't damaged like the soggy crap from the floor was. I'll probably use some to improve the old blankets over the wheel wells and around the water heater tank. Since the only cold-vulnerable things that are outside the insulation layer are the waste tanks, maybe I'll use the old fiberglass to make insulating blankets for them and add a couple of those tank heaters. It needs to be a winterable trailer.