I have gotten a lot done!
I decided it was time to replace my door panels with something else. I had seen some ABS door panels sold but figured I could save some money by making them myself.
I chose to go with 1/8" black ABS sheets from the local plastic company.
I removed the factory door panels and removed the fabric from them to use them as a template for my new ones. I traced onto the shiny side with a gold sharpie. The textured side is the side I wanted facing out. I used a jig saw to cut off the curved part.
I removed the plastic inserts from the doors and replaced them with some rubber insulated rivet nuts.
I'm pretty satisfied with the end result. I used some 10-32 Stainless steel button head screws.
I picked up a new larger cooler from Amazon since our Yeti Roadie wont cut it on longer trips. I went with the Pelican Elite 45qt cooler.
It takes up a sizable area on the roof rack.
All the gear packs around it well enough. Or so I thought during the test load.
We took an overnight trip to Mount Herman a couple of weeks ago and I wanted to see how the roof rack and our camping kit worked out.
My girlfriends family has a long history of river camping on rafts and her mom gave us some old dry bags to pack our gear in in case it rained and the stuff on the roof rack got wet. I finally got a Hi-Lift as well and removed my spare tire since it wasn't holding air and mounted the hi-lift.
I still want to get some gear that packs better. I took advantage of the Memorial day sale going on at REI and got the Thermarest Quadra camp chairs for us. These pack up really nicely and the legs become the case. The next piece of gear I want to downsize are my old REI 3.5 Camp Beds. I had originally purchased them for winter camping 8 years ago and they have been used every since but they are big and bulky. I took the Coleman 426b on this trip because of the two camp stoves I had acquired it was the newest. It didn't perform as I expected and I'm not sure if it was just my unfamiliarity with this type of stove or if there was a problem with the Stove. I'm going to give the 413G stove a try next since I have replaced the plunger and tank cap on it already. The trip was pretty fun despite our late start. The inside of the Samurai didn't seem at all as cramped as it had last summer on the few trips we took it on and it was extremely nice to have all the stuff up on the roof rack and out of the way. The new tent had a buckle break and I had to use a zip tie to hold the rainfly down on that corner of the tent.
Fathers Day Weekend I was determined to make some progress on the new rear bumper and I committed to figuring out what was going on with the LED tail lights and the trailer adapter. Some fiddling around confirmed that I had a poor connection through the parasite connectors that someone had used to wire up a trailer plug.
The tail lights worked! I began removing the old bumper and permanently wiring in the trailer adapter. I removed all the hardware and brackets for the bumper and the license plate brackets.
I made some wire labels at work using our shrink tubing label printer so that I could accurately identify the wires in the future should I choose to rewire them again. I used some adhesive filled shrink tubing and soldered the wires to the trailer adapter to make sure that I had good solid connections that wouldn't corrode over time.
Since I had already made all the brackets for the new bumper I simply had to clean them up with a sanding disk on a grinder and tack everything in place. I used some clamps and got the new bumper tacked to the brackets so that I could take the whole thing to a more qualified welder.
I asked one of the professional welders at work to weld the brackets on for me and he did a great job!
When I installed the bumper the next day everything lined up perfectly! I did have the bend the top brackets up a little more as they warped just a tiny bit from the welding but everything looked great!
Now I just need to get the tire carrier portion done so that I can mount a spare tire, the hi-lift jack, jerry can, license plate.
That's it for now.