plywood behind the skin?

[scanlon]

Hello,
I have not done any major work on the Shasta but I did paint the bumper and tongue this past weekend. I am a little concern withe the plywood by the tires. I noticed that the trim by the tires were just hanging and I looked under an foun a ton of caulk. . I know I have to pull the skin to see why it is not secure to the plywood. How hard is it to replace the plywood?and how long woul it take?
I don't have a garage or carport so I would have to do it on a weekend. I do not have the screws to replace any of the rusted screws, but hey are on order.

[cowcharge]

You've probably already fixed it by now, but since there were no answers and I'm bored...

From the inside?:
I'm assuming there's too much furniture in the way to get at it from inside, although you might possibly luck out, depending on your camper's layout around the wells, and be able to get at it by only removing the inside wall under the kitchen/bathroom counters where no one would ever see the repair... In my camper, the plywood is only a couple of triangular gussets that fill in the shape above the front and rear slopes of the fender. There is "real" frame above the top of the wells. In the original camper layout, the back half of the wheel wells were under bunks in the bedroom, and would have allowed me to get the rear plywood piece out from the inside. The front half of the wells are under the kitchen and bathroom counters and/or tub, which might have been tricky (I never looked since my plywood's ok). But it would be an invisible repair...

From the outside:
On mine, the plywood is only under the very bottom siding strip. It would be a little tricky, but doable. I can only think of two ways to do it from the outside. One, remove/lift the whole bottom strip of siding to expose the wood. That would require peeling the back drip edge and wall seam up first, and if done incorrectly could cause leaks, but it's not all that difficult if you're careful removing the staples, and you would not have to cut the siding. You will damage the skin getting it off, there are just too many staples, buried too deep, to get out without tearing some aluminum, and it's a more extensive surgery, but this method would leave the face of the siding the least disturbed.

The other way would be to cut the bottom strip of siding vertically. You could either make one cut in the narrow part above the wheel wells and peel the seam apart right above the wheels where the siding is narrowest, and peel it open only as much as you need to left and right in order to get to the rot. That method, cutting the siding and pulling apart the seam in the middle and peeling it out to the outer edges of your wheel wells, is hard to do without creasing the aluminum right at the spot where the seam separates, but it's only one cut. Check the pic, you can see the crease above my wheel well where I stopped separating the seam. You would be cutting it right at that point and peeling it both fore and aft to get at each end of the wells rather than from an end like I did. Or you could cut it twice, just outside of each side of the wells, and pull out that one section. Being in the thin spot and partially under the wheel well trim, I'm not worried too much about that little crease, but you would have to pull it apart on a wider section outside the wells, so your creases could be worse. And of course it would require you to find a way to hide the cut or cuts when you're finished, either by being lucky enough to have your wheel well trim go high enough to cover the cuts, or maybe with a lil Bondo filler.

I'm curious what you ended up doing...

If it was me, and I could get at it from inside, I would probably do the single cut on general the-fewer-the-holes-the-better terms, but if I were less confident about sheet metal than I was about sealing, I might cur both sides...

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