'76 Shasta rebuild

[cowcharge]

Took the furnace apart today, there was just no way to get the mouse nest out of there with a stick. It's a good thing I did, because the bigger room air fan was full of insulation and chewed-up toilet paper. While I had it apart I dumped the soot and rust out of it, adjusted the sail switch, and adjusted the burner air. Seems to work fine, I'm psyched I got out of it without buying anything. I documented it under "suburban dyna trail furnaces" in "interior restoration"/"furnaces and heaters" if anyone wants to look at it.

I also gave my oven it's first wave of cleaning. It's only half as disgusting now as it was. My main goal was to remove all traces of the incredibly ripe mouse corpse that I found in there two days ago. It was in the bottom, where the burner is, and god did it stink. I wrapped a scarf around my face and soaked it with old spice to tackle that. Used most of a bottle of fantastik cleaner, but the inside actually cleaned up pretty well for the first swipe.

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[cowcharge]

Yuk. I haven't touched in here yet.

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[cowcharge]

A little less disgraceful, and I think the smell's gone. I'll probably take steel wool to the stainless top, and do some research on a good oven cleaner. There is some rust on the plate that forms both the floor of the oven and the roof of the burner compartment, so I'll probably take it out and refinish it at some point. I fired it up, and all the burners work and the oven pilot and burner as well. I'll put a thermometer in there one of these days and adjust the thermostat. Have to see how good it is with biscuits.

So that means everything in the propane systems works like it's supposed to except the fridge. A friend has offered me one from a camper in his yard. It sounds kinda too good to be true, lol, but he swears it works. No harm in lookin'... And I can always do the $400 rebuild on the old one next spring if I have to.

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[cowcharge]

Here's the water heater back in place. You can see the new brass check valve on the inlet "T", and the expanding foam where the propane line passes through the floor. There's no permanent bypass system installed, since the heater was bypassed altogether by the PO by disconnecting the lines from the tank fittings and connecting them together with nipples. It's nice to have all the water lines inside the insulation envelope, the only vulnerable things that will be outside in the cold are the two drains and the waste tanks. There's the tiniest little small weepy leak where the upper "T" fitting screws into the tank (like a drop every minute or two), but I'm afraid to try and get another half turn out of it. Haven't reinsulated the tank yet obviously, I'm planning to build a box of sheet foam around it, right up tight to the wall, and then fill the voids with expanding foam, after I wrap the tank with aluminum foil so the foam doesn't stick to it. It'll have waaaaaaayyy more insulation than it did, and oughta save a bit of propane. I'll probably spray everything but the tank with Pam or WD-40 or silicone spray or mold release or something in order to be able to cut the expanding foam off someday. If I do it right, say with saran wrap divider "curtains" stretched between the inner corners of the outer foam box and the outer corners of the water heater, to make separable seams in the expanding foam, I could make 3 separate sides and a top that are custom molded tightly to each side of the heater, and that pull off like a jack 'o lantern with lids on four sides, if that makes sense... Haven't tacked down the water lines, mounted the pump, drilled the new holes for the drains, or rebuilt the two filler fitting mounts yet either, so yeah get off my back. But at least now I have heat! It was 36 the other morning...

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[cowcharge]

I've started adding insulation to the ceiling. I was doing the walls first, working from the bottom up, but I've sort of changed my plans. I've decided that I should first get the old ceiling down and assess the wood all along the whole roof edge, so that I can remove and reseal the aluminum drip edge and be sure I'm watertight, then replace the ceiling, and then worry about the walls. Duh, stop the water first (although I believe virtually all the water damage came from the PO knocking the cap off the toilet vent last winter without noticing for a few months. I haven't see any rain come in from the roof yet). Which means I have to start tearing out the bathroom and kitchen walls, and the kitchen cabinets. Ugh. This is like one of those plastic sliding-letter puzzles that have the one empty square. Every time I want to work on something different, I have to shift everything in the trailer to make room in that spot. The good part is that maybe after the ceiling's in I can seal up the bottom of the back wall. I'll have to see if there are any more full sheets that need to come inside. I'm not finding much of the old interior that can be reused anywhere. The paneling's all cheesy 70s fake-grain crap that's gotta go, and anything "structural" is made out of beaver board. I hate beaver board!

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[cowcharge]

No pics today, but update on the furnace... It's getting cold enough now (it's 35 F here in Casco Bay right now) that running the furnace causes massive condensation on the inside of any bare aluminum skin. So I guess I've got to bear the cold every time I uncover the inside of some skin until I get the new insulation in. Tricky to balance that with not letting the pipes freeze... Also, it was pretty cold last night, and the furnace ran and ran... I know more insulation is gonna help a huge amount, I mean I've really barely begun rebuilding it, but it makes me wonder if I shouldn't turn the burner air back up a tad. If you read my furnace post in the other forum, you know I was trying to err on the side of less air, so I only have the air shutter open about six turns of the adjustment rod (out of 27 total turns of possible travel). Maybe if I let it heat up a bit more, the output air will be hotter and it won't run as long... It's hard to know because while it's easy to see when your mixture's too rich by the lazy yellow flame, adding more and more air doesn't seem to visibly make any obvious changes, so there are no obvious clues to know when you have too much air (unless you consider fire trucks and thirty foot flames an obvious clue). I'll let ya know what happens. When I had it wide open it melted a fridge magnet off the front of the cabinet, so I gotta be careful lol.

So the plan for tomorrow is to try to get all the uncovered ceiling and walls insulated so I can use the heat without getting the condensation on the cold aluminum. I won't tape the edges of the insulation though, until right before I put in the birch plywood, just in case I need to get at the wood. I've been lucky so far in that none of the wood in the roof that I've exposed has been rotted. Of the two aluminum roof cross-seams that I've examined from inside so far, neither has any signs of water anywhere around it or in the insulation below, which is nice to know. There's a central stiffening strip of 1/4" plywood, the same white paneling as the ceiling, maybe 1/4 of the total width of the roof, that runs down the center of the tops of the rafters, between them and the aluminum. The old yellow fiberglass stretches from roof edge to roof edge and gets squished between the aluminum and the plywood stiffener above the rafters. The outer parts of the roof have nothing but rafters and insulation below them. Since the rafters are healthy and there's no sign of water in the old roof insulation or that plywood center strip, I'm going to just leave it in there and cover it up with the rigid foam, 'cause it'd be a royal pain to get it out. Anyway there must be at least half an R left in that yellow crap.

Got all the water leaks closed up. I managed to get another whole turn in on the upper outlet "T" on the water heater without snapping it off in the hole, so the weeping finally stopped, and stayed stopped through a heating cycle. Bought 3' of vinyl tubing to plumb the pump with, no leaks there and no backflow through the pump when on "city" water. Going to both local hardware stores for odds and ends, neither had the particular fittings I wanted, although it seemed they had every other fitting possible. I wanted to finish up the two drains, one in the socket in the tank and one in the lines in the oppsite corner where the city water hookup is. The old line drain's a plastic "T" with a nipple passing down through the floor to the outside, with a plastic end cap, and the tank drain is a 4" nipple with the same kind of end cap. Simple. But they're old and leaky, so I wanted to replace them. I also wanted a threaded-to-barbed elbow to come out of the tank, so that the tank line ran parallel to the tank side instead of sticking out straight from the tank into the bedroom. They had "T"s, they had elbows, they had reducers, they had compression fittings, NPT fittings, nipples and barbed fittings. But not one damned end cap, and no threaded-to-barbed elbow. So instead of using simple end caps at the bottom of my drains, I now have big, fancy, red-handled PVC ball valves (at $4.50 a whack). Makes draining a little easier, but the main thing is that it would have cost me more in gas to drive somewhere that had end caps than the valves cost, so... I'll think of something for the elbow on the tank feed...

[cowcharge]

Hmmm, according to my local RV shop, apparently putty tape was never used for anything, ever, except campers... A lot of people tout butyl tape. I wasn't entirely sure which I had bought. Maybe I'm laboring under a misapprehension about what butyl tape is like. Is butyl tape an actual solid tape, like electrician's tape, or a tape-shaped-but-amorphous putty like putty tape? I read that it's a lot stickier and harder to work with, sticking to itself 'n stuff, which gave me the impression it's an actual tape... After googling, I think I have putty tape because it's got the wrinkly backing paper. Which is fine with me. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I figured since putty tape worked fine for nearly 40 years (The stuff on my '75 camper is all still quite flexible and I have yet to find a single leak in the roof), and it's easier to work with because it doesn't stick to itself, I'm using it. I like how it's a solid, easy-to-apply and reposition tape for long runs, but you can also just press it into any shape or hole you want, like the clay from 4th grade art class. You can fold it over on itself to make a thicker layer. You can cut off the squeezed-out extra and roll it out and use it somewhere else. I used the squeeze-out from the water heater to seal the city water filler. Just ball it up and roll it out into a strip, like modeling clay.
Got most of the bedroom ceiling insulated and aluminum-taped last night. The camper will be entirely sealed just outside of the paneling when I'm done, to keep condensation out of the walls and ceiling. Now I need a disco ball and a laser in there! The foam insulation, even though it's not glued to the skin as in a true composite panel, does add some stiffness to the structure. God can you imagine restoring one of these if the skin were glued on like Formica?
The rafters are tapered, from 1 1/2" at the ends to 2 1/2" in the center, so I laid two 45" x 14.5" x 1.5" pieces of insulation in each bay, pushing them up flush to the top of the rafters, so they sort of "tented" up in the middle. Well, as much as I could, they're too thick to bend and it's easy to push them up too far and lift the aluminum. Then I laid 24" wide x 14.5" x 1" pieces down the center of the ceiling, in the 1" gap left by pushing the first insulation up. Then 24" x 14.5" x 0.5" on either side of those. So the central two feet of ceiling has 2.5" of insulation, the two feet to either side of that has 2", and the remaining foot or so on each side has 1.5" I'm using Dow Tuff-R, foil-backed isocyanurate with an r-value=6.5/inch. So the central 2' have an r-value of 16.25, the next two feet to either side is 13, and the outer foot is 9.8. That's just the foam, not the old fiberglass or the rest of the structure. Of course, the r-value of the rafters and studs is only about 2... I left the old fiberglass roof chintzulation in place because it had no signs of water damage and it would have been a pain taking it out, as there's an extra piece of ceiling panel running on top of the center of the rafters that hides it.

I put aluminum tape over every joint and rafter. A LOT of aluminum tape. If you use this method, buy a case of the stuff, maybe 2. Per wall. The rolls only hold 30 feet, and I've used three rolls just for one 4x8 section of ceiling and the water heater opening. It's not wide enough to reach the foam on both sides of a rafter, so I had to use a strip of tape for each rafter edge/insulation panel joint, overlapping the tape in the middle of the rafter.
More later,
Howard

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[cowcharge]

Thanks an awful lot, Mother Nature. You made my day.

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[cowcharge]

Right through the friggin' skylight. It also drove both vent caps down and smashed their plastic mounting flanges.

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[cowcharge]

It also drove this seam in the aluminum down far enough to start separating it. It now leaks.

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[cowcharge]

And of course, as long as it was there...

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[cowcharge]

Big dent in the fridge vent cover. No doubt that'll cause a leak too. The ONLY through-roof fitting it missed was the bathroom skylight. EVERY OTHER ONE took damage, plus the aluminum skin damage. WTF. My whole plan was dependent on the fact that the roof didn't leak. Instead I've got water running into the brand new floor.

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[diamondrelics]

That is so sad. She was looking so good...I'd cut that damn tree down! I wish you luck!

[effierover]

Ouch! We had a tree go through our shed twice, but this looks so much more painful. Hope you can get it cleared up quickly!

[waywardho]

OHHHH NOOOOOO! Please, don't let mother nature stop you!!! I know how hard this can be and what a major let down! But you have got to finish that Shasta anyway!!! You are doing such fine work and once the shock wears off I know you can overcome this setback. It will turn into a good story someday, I know it! Remember what happened to Beluga?!
Pull up your boot straps.....You can do it! We have all the faith in the world in ya!
Janet

[cowcharge]

Thanks guys, it's like someone waited until I was on the verge of getting it buttoned back up and watertight, and then threw a tree at me. I wasn't even parked under the damn thing, and it fell upwind, for pete's sake. I was going to wait until spring to do the roof and outside stuff, since it wasn't leaking. Instead, I have at least 5 leaks to fix before it rains again. The good thing (I guess) is that all the water's going into the bathroom, where I have yet to fix the old water damage anyway. I've been dreading what the frame looks like under there, and that's where the bees nest was, although I'm pretty sure that between the chemicals and filling their entrance hole with spray foam there ain't no more living bees in there. Too cold for 'em to move anyway, unless being under the furnace has been waking them up...

The storm knocked out power for 60,000 people in Maine, with at least one 63 mph gust reported at the airport, and 15-foot swells. Some of my friends have yet to get their power/internet back, and some have damaged houses, so I haven't got it too bad. I should be (am) thankful it missed the rear of the roof where all my new insulation is, and that it wasn't heavy enough to do any structural damage. I WILL be removing the rest of that tree, once I plan out how to drop it in the only direction that won't destroy something else.

The actual torn hole in the roof I'll fix with bondo and the sticky metal screen patch I bought from VIP to fix the hole where the water filler used to be. The package came with two screens, and bondo's waterproof, so eh, whatever. I'll buy a new roof vent, since the one in the bathroom doesn't have any mechanical guts left in it, and use its old lid to replace the shattered one. I'll buy new plumbing vents too (sigh). At least the parts are cheaper than I expected, I found plain-Jane 14" roof vents on Ebay for about $30.

I'm most worried about the "stretched" seam in the aluminum. All the roof seams have a foot-wide stripe of old black tar crap smeared on them, and I'm not looking forward to working on that in 40 degree weather. First I'm going to try to prop it up from inside with a flat board along the seam with a stud wedged under it, like they do to hold up sheets of drywall, and then try to recompress the seam from outside. Maybe I'll get lucky.

The pic shows the stuff I bought at VIP to patch the old water tank filler hole with (remember, had to move it up to reach the rotated water tank). The spreaders are the same color as properly-mixed Bondo, so you can tell when you have the right amount of hardener in.

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[cowcharge]

Here's the old hole. You can see the welded seam on the tank through the empty hole on the left. And then with the metal patch in place on the right.
I should have thought about it a bit more, because by my just peeling the paper off and pressing it into place, the aluminum patch resisted being bent into the correct shape to match the corrugations in the aluminum siding, and kept un-sticking itself in the low spots (which are the high spots outside). I should have left the backing paper on the patch, and used the long edge of a piece of wood to bend the patch over, like a mini sheet metal brake. That way it would have been a perfect custom fit to the corrugations before I peeled the paper off it, and would have provided a corrugation pattern for the bondo all the way across the hole, requiring less shaping and sanding later. And the closer fit would have required less bondo. Next time. That's why we all read these forums anyway, right, to avoid the-guy-who-did-it-first's mistakes? You're welcome, lol.
The screw holes puckering inside were kind of a pain to push the patch on, too, might wanna squeeze those flat with plyers.
Make sure to press the edges of the siding hole inside a bit all the way around so that it is below "sea level". Not much, just enough so that all the sharp edges are folded in. On a car it would take a gentle hammering, but fingers (with gloves!) are fine on this wimpy aluminum siding.

I wish I'd read this before I did mine...

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[cowcharge]

Here's the first application of bondo (all applied from the inside, making sure I squoze it into the space between the patch and the siding that shouldn't be there), inside and outside views.

I spent way too much time and hardener trying to get a perfect color match with the spreaders, because the spreaders have a "deeper", "richer" hue to them the mixed bondo does. The spreaders look pretty much like the outside view and the bondo looks like the inside view. It ended up setting up faster than I liked, which is why you can see the little playdough-like extrusions poking through the holes in the patch on the outside view. It hardened up before I made it outside to smooth them down.

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[cowcharge]

Then I took a coarse wood rasp and took off the high points. Hard to take it down very far, because you're so close to the surface. You have to do this only 20 minutes after you mix the stuff, and it sets up harder and harder the whole time. You can see where I moved the filler to.

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[cowcharge]

My old Craftsman palm sander seized up on me, so I took it apart. I had to break the lower bearing free with plyers, and even after using PB blaster and regular oil on it, and moving it back and forth for like half an hour, it would still stick on me at random points, like it had a couple of misshapen, umm, balls... But I put it back together again anyway, hoping it would last long enough to do this. It worked fine though, and still does, lol. Powerful lil motor to drive that bearing when I couldn't with plyers at some points.

I mostly used the front edge of the thing, running it side to side in one groove at a time, trying to get them to match the aluminum on either side. You can still see the shape of the pimples from the bondo squeezin' out the holes, and you can see the patch in a couple of places where I guess I poked it too far out the hole, again the result of not corrugating the patch. Got pretty close to finished just with the sander, though. Not there yet, but almost.

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[cowcharge]

Where'd it go?

Feedback's welcome on anything, like if I talk too friggin' much... Sure wish I could post more than one pic per entry... Coulda done the whole thing in one post.

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[cowcharge]

I sprayed a bit of paint on it to show the contours better for my next hit with the sander. You know, I sprayed that on very lightly, and it didn't run at all, but those runs were there two hours later... But I don't mind sanding a bit farther out than I had planned when I get ready to paint it. By the way, an acetone-soaked rag takes the original paint off one of these trailers in seconds with a lil' rubbing.

Looks like I'm gonna have to sand down through the metal patch in some places in order to get deep enough to be flush (again, from not corrugating the metal screen properly), then put on another, finish layer of bondo. That will be the third batch of bondo. When I mixed the first batch, like I said I tried too long to get a perfect color, but no matter how much hardener I added it never got as "deep" as the color on the spreader, and hardened too fast. The spreader's color is the same hue but more intense, like it's blushing... So I used a lot less in the second batch, and had way more time to work it. The second batch was only applied on the inside, because the first batch more than filled the outside.

I learned from all of this to do it in this order next time: Squish the screw holes flat, corrugate the patch better, apply the bondo to the edges of the patch on the inside of the wall first, but only on the area that's outside the perimeter of the hole, in effect gluing the screen to the siding. Then apply it from the outside over the whole screen, so the bondo squirts inward and you have a solid patch outside. Then smooth in the rest of the inside.

If I painted it white right now, probably only one out of fifty people would notice it... But every time I walked by it would be like that talking stain on the guy's shirt in that job interview commercial.

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[effierover]

Nov 10, 2010 1:23:16 GMT -5 cowcharge said:

If I painted it white right now, probably only one out of fifty people would notice it... But every time I walked by it would be like that talking stain on the guy's shirt in that job interview commercial.

Ain't that the truth! Nice work so far...

[cowcharge]

If I ever buy another used camper, the first question I ask will be: is there any, and I mean ANY, butyl tape in this thing? If the answer's yes, it's a deal breaker, lol. This where the tree-smashed roof vent was. Judging by the number of screw holes in the aluminum, this was at least the second or third vent that had been on here. After using a putty knife dipped in the flame of my torch, and then scrubbing with acetone, this is how much of that black sticky stuff I got off (that last paint-thin layer just won't come off). What a PITA. Putty tape! Putty tape, I say!

There were plywood shims between the rafters and the aluminum (as well as a four foot wide strip of same-as-the-ceiling plywood running the length of the trailer) that raised the vent above the surrounding roof, and they were nice and soggy and falling apart, so I replaced them with 1 x 1 1/2 spruce stud stock (and the sheet of "ceiling" plywood as well, with birch). I also replaced the short side pieces of the frame, that connected the two rafters at front and rear of the hole. The old vent screws only went into the plywood shims, they didn't reach the rafters, so I replaced them with 2 1/2" stainless #8s, and sealed it with PUTTY TAPE.

You can see the crunched stink vent caps too.

Can you believe the amount of crap smeared on that roof? No wonder it leaked, all that crap was like the berms they build around oil tank farms, it just makes reservoirs around everything.

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[cowcharge]

Here's the new vent. I lined the entire hole with aluminum tape to make any future leaks go right down the inside of the hole and out through the trim ring where it will be visible, and can't get into the ceiling. I did the same thing when I put the water heater back in, and plan to do it to the new stink vent caps, and all the windows at some point. You can see some of the new frame wood as well, the innermost pieces on the left and right of the hole, and the filler on top of the rafter.

I squirted fat little doughnuts of clear, non-silicone sealant under the heads of all the vent screws as I screwed them in.

You can also see the new birch plywood on top of the rafters. There was no way I could slide a whole 4' x 8' sheet between the tops of the rafters and the aluminum (by starting it up between two rafters way back in the bedroom and bending it sharply to slide it forward), so I just ripped the sheet in half and slid it into place as two separate 2' X 8' sheets. It does wonders for giving the roof a proper crowned shape for water shedding, the rotten old lauan stuff sagged like a blanket. However, the aluminum has stretched or the rafters have sunk I guess, because when it's properly "taut", it rides a good inch above the rafter tops, helped by the raised shims around the roof vent. I glued more 1x2 shims between the rest of the rafters going aft and the plywood to take up the slack, but they're not in this pic, you can see the gap above the third rafter back. That also means there's a good 3 1/2" of space up there for insulation now, at least in the middle

I've been cutting and fitting the first layer of 1 1/2" Tuff-R foam into the roof, but not taping anything yet, it's more to cut down on my propane usage in the furnace (20s at night now). Still got more woodwork to do before I can start paneling anything, although I couldn't resist putting the first ceiling panel into the bedroom, because I needed to see at least one finished section somewhere, dammit.

I also cut off the most immediately threatening pieces of the damn tree that broke the vent.

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[cowcharge]

I tore out the bathroom walls and the tub to get at the ceiling, the rotten rafters and sill behind the fridge, and the bathroom floor where the bees nest is. Also tore out the upper kitchen cabinets to get at the rotten rafters and sill over there, lol. Gonna be tricky replacing the framing without taking the siding apart. And the rot goes on... and the rot goes on. The mold keeps pounding headaches, in my braaaiiiin... (any Sonny 'n Cher fans out there?)

[cowcharge]

They're everywhere!

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[cowcharge]

And the rot goes on... That's where the kitchen cabinets were. The ends of a couple of rafters are toast. The blue foam is covering the stove hood vent. This is turning into a complete interior gut, regardless of my plans or desires lol.

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[cowcharge]

...and the rot goes on. Curbside, looking forward behind the fridge. The rafters are cut off at the inside edge of the fridge vent in the roof, and "boxed", in order not to pass under the vent and block any of the hot fridge exhaust air. That entire structure is rotted and must be replaced.

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[cowcharge]

Where cheesy paneling goes to die.

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