we're now into an infinite loop of filling and sanding. It's starting to look really nice though!
We've also been ordering a ton of stuff from Amazon so it's starting to feel like Christmas over here at the house!
We're planning on using a water bladder instead of a solid tank due to space...
Looks like we still have a lot of prep work to do before paint. That's what I get for being so hopeful! Still had a few corners to touch up that were missed yesterday and there were still a few fiberglass shards left. (We always find them when moving the camper around. ouch!) The interior...
Now that the camper shell is so close to being "done" I really really wanted to get it painted soon! If anything just for the motivation factor of seeing it in paint! There was still a lot of prep work to do though. I made sure to be extra careful where the bedliner bled up onto the fiberglass...
You're correct Leon! I'm the female half of the fabrication team! ;) Both of us are engineers. I usually get the tasks involving cramped spaces and small hands, whereas Jason gets the ones involving lots of torque.
If your wife sews she may end up being a valuable asset if you do a pop up...
At this point we're practically "done" with the shell. Not finished of course, but it's structurally done enough that we're pretty confident that we're going to at least end up with a usable thing instead of an abandoned disappointment! That means that I needed to really start thinking about the...
I started working on the nose cone piece again today using cardboard templates, but it was just an epic failure. I was originally going to just sculpt something out of the pink foam and then remove it to have a solid glass shell, but Jason wanted to make it structural to hold the lights. It...
We spent the morning running around getting paint and supplies, which always feels like a giant waste of time when we could be doing actual work. Eventually we made it back home and I started sanding the camper shell so the filler would be smooth and all of the rough edges would stop tearing up...
Well, as much as I've been dreading it, it's time to start sanding and prepping the fiberglass for paint. I hate fiberglass dust, so I made sure to wear all the protective equipment. Worth it, but it was so hot. Pretty miserable.
Pretty sure I have some form of heat stroke now.. but the...
Thanks for the tip! We haven't found the need for stronger tie down points on the truck (yet, I suppose), but we used those threaded rings for bolting through the camper floor!
One of the things we don't like about a lot of other campers is how much they extend over the bedrails and the various ways that people tie them to the trucks outside the bed. Our plan was to use the tie down points inside the truck, since we predict our camper is going to be lightweight enough...
Even though I had a full 3d model and autocad drawing of the camper at the beginning, things change during actual fabrication and I had forgotten some dimensions. We needed to put the camper in the truck to figure out where to reinforce with more fiberglass for the tie down points. I wish we...
I took today off of work and was up bright and early prepping last night's fiberglass so I could finish up the front and back edges.
The corners still need a little cleanup, but it's pretty much done!
While waiting for that to cure, I went to the garage to mess around with other stuff and had...
Since it's important for the roof to fit the shell and our garage floor is not super flat, we decided to lay up the top of the roof while it's still sitting on the camper. We started by putting a large sheet of plastic between the two pieces.
We had a few jacks inside the camper to make sure...
Turns out I was way too worried about gluing the roof to the garage floor as it just easily peeled up. That makes life easier. Here's the final product!
We couldn't NOT carry this thing out and test fit it on the camper! It looks awesome! Still doesn't fit perfect, but we're working on that...
Today we finished laying up the other side of the roof panels
...and started adding some more layers of to the lip around the shell.
At this point, something happened that I wouldn't have predicted.. we ran out of resin! :o I thought it was ridiculous when we bought the full 10 gallon resin...
The thread has mostly been about the camper shell so far, but it IS actually going to be a pop-top which means it's going to have some sort of roof. Jason said he had a plan for this, so I just stepped out of it and let him do what he wanted. Not only does the front of the cabover pinch...
We decided to start with the largest piece first, which is the forward vertical edge of the shell, over the beam, and the underside of the cabover. We started with the vertical edge because it's so hard to get the resin not only on the fiberglass, but to get it to soak in. We did manage it, but...
So today we wanted to get the beam between the cabover and the main shell finished. We flipped the camper over upside down in the yard. It's definitely starting to get a lot heavier now with all of the fiberglass, but it's mostly just obnoxiously large to manage. It takes both of us.
I tried...
If you're asking about dry thickness, I think RRUFF answered that pretty well above. I have a cut out chunk floating around in the garage still so I could measure actual laid up thickness if you're interested in that. I only used a single layer of 1708 on each side of the foam. More layers of...
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