Oct 22 2012

One little problem …

When I saw the water leak inside the Caravel several weeks ago, I knew I was in for it. But I had no idea it was going to be this bad.

You might recall that back in early October we discovered that the fresh water tank in the 1968 Airstream Caravel was seeping water and had damaged part of the Marmoleum floor. This incident put me on Full Alert status, because the trailer had been extensively renovated. The Marmoleum floor covering and the plywood subfloor were pristine, and all the woodwork was made new from birch with my own hands. I had a lot invested in that trailer (both time and money) and the sight of a water leak was a dagger to my heart. Water is the #1 killer of Airstreams.

After freaking out for a few minutes, I removed the dinette to assess the damage. The birch was mostly OK thanks to multiple coats of polyurethane, the Marmoleum was lifted (the underlying adhesive had failed), and the water tank was irreparable. Those of you who have been following this saga know that I tossed the tank and ordered a new one, re-glued the floor and mashed it back down with a few hundred pounds of rocks, and fabricated an aluminum threshold to pin the flooring edge. I also sealed the perimeter of the floor covering with tan silicone caulk. That all went well, and now it’s hard to detect that anything ever happened.

The problem of the past week has been installing the new water tank. I ambitiously ordered a 12x12x48 polyethylene tank, which is slightly larger than the original. This by itself just meant I had to trim a little bit of wood here and there, and fabricate a new piece to hold the tank in place. No big deal. The problem came from my failure to request a vent on the tank.

See, the tank is standard-sized but you can have threaded fittings spin-welded anywhere into it. I requested two on the left side: one large fitting at the top for filling the tank, and one small fitting at the bottom for draining it. Logical, right? So I popped the tank in place, hooked up some hose, and we tried to fill it with water as a test.

With no air vent to release the pressure inside the tank, water wouldn’t go into the tank any faster than a weak dribble. Try to fill any faster and water would just burp out the fill opening all over you. I realized my mistake immediately, but what to do? I could have taken the tank around town and found someone locally with spin-welding capability to have a vent added in, but that seemed like a major hassle. Besides, there was no clearance above the tank to fit a vent on the top. The highest point I could fit a vent was equal to the fill point, which meant that when the tank was full, water would come out the vent. That meant I had to find a way to route the vent tube outside, which likely meant cutting a hole in the trailer somewhere. I wasn’t keen on that.

So thereby began a process of trying to outsmart the laws of nature. I dreamed up all kinds of clever ways to vent the tank at the fill hose where it met the tank. Unfortunately, my clever solutions inevitably resulted in a frothy water/air mixture bubbling up the ad hoc “vent” and plugging it, at which point the tank would have no functioning vent and we’d be back to the original problem. Worse, that plug of water would then be forced up the vent hose (by air pressure building inside the tank) and eventually spit out inside the trailer somewhere.

I literally went to bed at night thinking of ways to solve this problem, and woke up in the morning with fresh ideas—which also didn’t work. Every day I went to the hardware store to buy a handful of brass bits, hoses, PVC pipe, and various other plumbing supplies, which I would assemble in the trailer and test. I now have a small Museum of Failed Plumbing in the trash bin. I actually did design a water/air separator that would have worked, but there wasn’t sufficient clearance above, since the dinette seat covers the entire area.

After three frustrating tries, and about six trips to the hardware store, Eleanor suggested something much more clever. “Why don’t we just turn the tank so the drain is at the top?” I glared at the tank for a moment, and suddenly realized she was on to something. By rotating the tank 180 degrees, the large fill opening would be at the bottom, and the drain would be at the top, thus usable as a vent. There’s no problem filling a tank from the bottom as long as the top of the tank is below the entry point, and with a little plumbing I could also use that same bottom connection as the drain. You can see the solution in the photo.

This works beautifully. Now we can fill the tank as fast as we want. As a bonus I was able to route the vent into the existing floor drain, so I didn’t have to cut a fresh hole in the trailer. (The yellow knob is for draining the tank after a camping trip.)

After this I figured I was home free, but no. The next big surprise was that the new tank bulges when full. I hadn’t anticipated that either. The old tank had thick walls and was essentially rigid, but modern poly tanks are thin-walled and very flexible. When I dry-fitted the wood cover and filled the tank to check for leaks, the wood was forced off by the bulging of the tank.

The solution here was to add reinforcement to the tank cover to resist the weight of 225 pounds of water trying to push the walls out. I could have fabricated a new tank cover to accommodate the bulge, but that would meant a search for 1/4″ birch plywood (much harder to find here in Tucson than in wood-happy Vermont) and a few days of cutting, staining, and finishing. At this point I’d been working on the tank problems for a week and I was looking for a way to get this job done. So I added braces and extra screws and I think it will hold up. If not, I have a backup plan involving some aluminum L-channel.

At this point I think I have about 25 hours of work into this “little problem” caused by the original tank leaking. Admittedly, I didn’t just set out to fix the primary problem. I also wanted to improve a few things along the way, like the floor edge sealing, the threshold, and some woodwork details. But it was amazing how that stupid little leak in the tank ended up taking over my life for the past week.

The furniture is back in the trailer now, but the job’s not done. I want to reduce the weight of the dinette table by routing out some of the underside wood. The table was re-made by some well-meaning friends who used 3/4″ plywood, and as a result the table is so heavy it takes two people to lift it out (to convert to a bed). I also need to sanitize the fresh water system with bleach, and I think I may go find the spot where the plumbing makes a loud vibrating noise when the water pump is running, and find some way to silence it.

Whether I get to those jobs this week or not, the trailer needs to get out of the carport and back into off-site storage soon. The Safari’s floor makeover is languishing until I have more carport space, and the Mercedes 300D wants some love too. I’ve got about another six weeks of really fine Fall weather in Tucson to get my projects done, so there’s no time to waste. I’m just hoping that the next few things go more smoothly than this “little problem” with the Caravel.

Oct 15 2012

Project Season

I did say this was “project season,” didn’t I? Between the house, the Caravel, the Safari, and the 300D the list of jobs seems endless, so I’ve resolved to just tackle one item every single day without fail. It’s like chipping away at a mountain, but chipping a little at a time is the only way the mountain will disappear.

The 300D project has gotten the most attention. On Tuesday we replaced the bumper rub strip. On Wednesday I replaced the rear sway bar links and inspected the rear brakes. On Thursday Eleanor and I installed a new hood pad. On Saturday I removed the instrument cluster and fixed the dim lighting, along with the inaccurate temperature gauge. I used two T-10 LED lights from LED4RV, which really helped to reduce heat in the cluster. (The plastic was beginning to melt from the hot old bulbs.) On Sunday I very carefully removed an old decal from the defroster glass, a tricky job without breaking the silkscreened defroster elements. In between 300D jobs I continued plotting the rest of the car’s resurrection, researching parts and repairs.

On Friday I got brave enough to remove the heaps of flagstone and slate that were pressing down the Caravel’s damaged Marmoleum floor. It had been baking in the heat for the last week or so. It appears that the silicone caulk is working well as floor adhesive. As I feared, the floor is not lying perfectly flat —there’s a small lifted spot— but it’s good enough.

Eleanor came up with the idea of fabricating a trim strip to hold the Marmoleum in place, and so I cut a piece of flat aluminum to size, cleaned it up with a Scotchbrite pad and orange cleaner, drilled three countersunk holes for stainless screws, and then sprayed it with clearcoat. Beneath the trim I sealed the edges of the Marmoleum with tan silicone caulk. The dimensions of the aluminum were chosen to match the trim already in the trailer, and I think it looks great. The three screws are pinning the floor in place.

The next job on the Caravel is to get the new water tank installed. I got a start on this Saturday, but decided to take a break in favor of other projects. I think, barring unforeseen problems, that we’ll have this wrapped up in the next couple of days. The tank is mostly plumbed in, and the rest of it is just reinstalling the furniture, testing for water-tightness, and sanitizing the system.

The Safari hasn’t gotten much love lately. I bought the rest of the flooring material but we really can’t get on that project until the Safari’s little sister gets out of the way. That should be an interesting one though, as we’ll be removing most of the bedroom, the dinette, and other stuff.

The house always gets the shortest stick. All it got this week was a repainted exterior light yesterday, and a new dryer vent on the roof this morning. The many other house projects are just going to have to wait. For some reason it’s more gratifying to work on the vehicles!

Tomorrow—who knows? Every day is different. I just know that something will get done. One chip at a time …

By the way, the new Alumafiesta site is up …

Oct 07 2012

Airstream floors

Since this is our “off season” for Airstream travel, we’re getting on to maintenance projects in the Airstreams. The 1968 Caravel has taken precedence, by virtue of springing a leak.

A few years ago we replaced the subfloor in the Caravel and put a Marmoleum floor atop it, which I figured would last a long time. Marmoleum is great stuff, although hard to install in a trailer. Stored under cover, in the desert, it seemed unlikely that the floor would be water-damaged, but that’s what happened, right here in our carport. The original plastic water tank began seeping water at a brass fitting (a fitting which has no purpose that I could glean). The seepage was so minor that it was unnoticeable until it had leaked for a few weeks. I went into the Caravel for a quick inspection and stepped into a puddle of water right at the entry door.

By then the wood subfloor was saturated with water, which caused the floor adhesive to fail, and allowed the Marmoleum to lift off and warp. Most annoyingly, the water puddled entirely at the entry door where the damage would be most visible.

We had quickly disassemble the dinette, and lift the Marmoleum an inch at the edge in order to dry out the subfloor. Even in our dry season, with outdoor humidity running about 15-20% during the day, it took over two weeks to fully dry out the wood. In the meantime I consulted Colin Hyde and he warned me not to try to fix the water tank, as it was likely to fail again due to age. I didn’t need much convincing. The old tank was riddled with various plugged holes for tank monitors (unused), drains, and who-knows-what. In the photo you can see the the old brass fitting that was the cause of our problem. The white crusty stuff around the edges is probably dried minerals, and you can also see a split forming in the tank itself (barely visible at the 5 o’clock position).

So I bought a new tank from Vintage Trailer Supply with custom inlet and drain threads “spin welded” in place exactly where I wanted them. The new tank is a little larger than the original, with a 28 gallon capacity, but it fit into the same space with just a little modification to the wood dinette that surrounds it. I had to trim one edge of the lower storage compartment’s face frame, and fabricate a new wood piece to hold the tank in place.

Once installed, the new tank will be much easier to service because it can be positioned to avoid the outside water fill tube, and thus plumbing access will be straightforward. The other one partially blocked the water fill tube, so it was a real pain to connect. I’ve had to take that connection apart three or four times in the past because the water fill kept leaking, so I’m glad to see it go. The new tank will have much cleaner connections that are under less stress, and the tank itself is less likely to leak since it has only two openings (fill and drain) and I’m using all new plumbing. The threads will get Teflon tape, too.

I’m not so sure about the Marmoleum. It got pretty warped in the drying process, and a tear formed at one point. We have attempted to re-attach it to the floor using tan silicon caulk. To flatten it, we’ve stacked a few hundred pounds of leftover slate tiles and flagstone, with a base layer of corrugated cardboard. I’ll let it sit that way for a few days while the fall desert heat bakes it, and then see if we’ve had any luck. If not, we’ll have to scab in a patch.

We can’t do much else inside the Caravel until the floor is fixed, so our attention is turned to the Safari. A few weeks back I had announced an ambitious plan to face-lift the interior, but reality (meaning budget) has prevailed. So we’re going to stretch out the work, and just start with the flooring. John Irwin wrote an article about flooring replacement options, which will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Airstream Life. Inspired by this, I began to look at quality vinyl planks and discovered that there are some really nice options, and they are cheap, easy to install, and will go right over the existing vinyl floor. We’ll remove the dingy old carpet in the bedroom and put the vinyl planks there, too.

Eleanor and I bought some of the flooring today to do a test layout in the Safari, and it looks good. I expect we’ll take a few days to complete the job, including time to pull out the furniture, prep the existing floor, cut around obstacles, and reinstall the furniture. We will get on that job after the Caravel is done and back in its off-site storage spot. We need extra space in the carport for all the furniture that we’ll be removing from the Safari.

I really don’t have any particular love for flooring work but, like painting, it is gratifying when it’s done and everything looks great. And we’re entering the season of perfect daytime temperatures for outdoor work, so I’m looking forward to tackling the Safari floor soon.

Sep 26 2012

Classification: kittens for sale

A friend called Eleanor the other day and noted that the blog was quiet. When that happens, she said, either Rich is working on projects he can’t talk about (yet) or there’s not much happening. Turns out that it’s a little bit of both lately.

Home life has been quiet … so quiet in fact that our major form of entertainment has been the foster kittens. They have kept us entertained day and night, even at times when we’d prefer they were sleeping. They arrived here underweight and left today, three weeks later, each nearly a pound heavier and in peak form to be adopted.

It’s a shame to let them go back to the Humane Society when they are so darned adorable, but they need homes. We’ve done what we can to bring out their natural irresistible cuteness, and make them completely comfortable with people and typical household life. As I told them at today’s graduation ceremony, “Boys, the rest is up to you.” They seemed prepared for the task. We’ll get a new kitten or two shortly, and begin the process anew.

Meanwhile I have fulfilled my pledge to do something about the spare tire issue. This turned out to be fairly easy. I ordered a fifth tire from Discount Tire to match the four new Bridgestones that are on the car, and they mounted it up last week. The only catch was that the tires for the Mercedes are a lot bigger than the ones for the Airstream, so it wouldn’t fit in the spare carrier on the Airstream without some modification. The Merc tire is about two inches wider and 2-3 inches larger in diameter.

So the first step was to do some careful measuring to confirm that the larger tire would fit in the Airstream’s belly recess. It seemed like there was plenty of room in there, almost as if Airstream had foreseen this situation.

The spare carrier comes off easily, with just two bolts toward the rear holding it in place. A 3/4″ socket and a short extension on a ratchet wrench are all you need. Well, that plus a little elbow grease. Once it was off, I loaded it up along with both the Airstream and Mercedes wheels, and took the whole pile to my favorite welding shop.

The modification was fairly simple. The two bolt attachments needed to be extended by about two inches so that the entire carrier would hang lower. This would allow the bigger spare to fit and yet still be pressed tightly up against the belly of the Airstream so it wouldn’t move.

I also asked the welding shop to figure a way that I could go back to carrying the smaller Airstream spare if I wanted to. You can see their solution above. They simply bolted on a pair of height extensions, welded on new outboard “arms” to accommodate the larger diameter, and fabricated a new latch with two holes.

If I wanted to go back to the Airstream spare, it would be just a matter of unbolting the two extensions, and using the lower hole on the latch for the locking pin. The tension of the tire pressed up against the belly of the trailer will keep the tire from shifting much.

The new spare was a tighter fit than I had expected. While there was plenty of room in the recess, I had failed to consider the process of getting the tire under the Airstream. The struts of the Hensley partially block the path, and there’s not quite enough clearance to slide the tire atop the carrier and beneath the battery box. To get it in, I have to wind the Hensley strut jacks up into towing position (not a problem since that’s where they’d be anyway), and I have to use the trailer’s power hitch to lift the nose about 2-3 inches. It’s also a much heavier wheel to deal with, so pulling this thing out on a rainy day by the side of a muddy highway will not be much fun.

Once it’s in place, there’s plenty of ground clearance. The tire still hangs above the height of the hitch weight transfer bars.

This amounts to a very expensive spare tire. I bought the Mercedes 20″ rim from a guy in California for $300 (new ones cost about $900!), the tire was about $250, and the fabrication work ended up at $125, for a grand total of $675. But it will get used, because we need to do a five-wheel tire rotation every 10,000 miles (to keep all five tires evenly worn), so I’ll get my value out of the tire at least.

And it’s nice to know we have it. Now if we have a tire failure on the tow vehicle, we can still drive. If we have a tire failure on the Airstream, we can tow on three wheels or unhitch to go get a replacement Airstream tire. We have better options. If we ever decide to go to Alaska or Newfoundland, we can still throw the (smaller) Airstream spare into the back of the car for added insurance.

OK, enough about that. I hope to not need to write about tires again for quite a long time. I want to talk about another project, the new Airstream Life Classifieds section.

Places to list your Airstream for sale are everywhere on the Internet. I used to maintain a list of them that ran to about thirty different sites, all free. But once in a while I get a call from someone who has a special, rare, or high-value trailer, and they want to see that ad in print, in Airstream Life. We’ve never been able to accommodate this, but I’ve finally set up a site where you can post your ad online and have it appear in the next issue of the magazine.

So it’s in a trial mode right now. (I’m sorry, that’s not cool enough for the Internet. I’d better say it’s “in beta” instead.) You can try it out right now at classified.airstreamlife.com. Online-only ads are free, and print ads cost $75. But here’s the sweetener: since this is the first run, you can actually get a print ad for free. When you fill out the ad form, at the bottom of the page will be an option box that says “Ad Package”. Choose the “Print ad in Airstream Life magazine” option and just below that, enter the coupon code FREE_ASL_AD and your ad will appear in the Winter 2012 issue for free!

Now, I do have to put in a few limitations. Only one free ad per customer, and all ads must be submitted no later than October 5 to receive this deal. If I don’t get enough ads to launch the section, this offer will be void (but your ad will still run online for free).

I’m interested in your feedback. If you’ve tried it out and have some comments that might help improve it, let me know with a comment on this blog post. If it works and people find it valuable, I’ll make it a formal part of the magazine going forward. It’s up to the community. Personally, I think that even in an era of Internet everywhere, there’s a certain credibility that you can only get from print, so I’m hoping that we get some interesting Airstreams in this section.

Sep 07 2012

Switching to project mode

We are back at home base. And this time, it’s going to stick, because there’s much to do over the next few months.

The first job is resolving our tire situation. We got back on the road after two days of waiting, and while it was pleasant in Camp Verde and swim in the RV parks’ pool, this isn’t a situation I want to find myself in again. We might have been on a schedule to get somewhere, or in some lonely place where tires aren’t easily located. We need a better solution.

The Discount Tire store in Prescott AZ worked with the Discount Tire store in Tucson to work out our immediate problem. The Prescott store gave us four new Nitto tires (not run-flats) to get us home, and that worked out fine. I’m not wild about them, as the handling is poor and they are noisy, but it was what they had in stock. The Tucson store will take them off tomorrow and exchange them for four new Bridgestone run-flats that I ordered a few days ago.

The really nice part is that they’ll give me 100% credit for the returned Nitto tires, even though I’ve used them for 200 miles. Kudos to Discount for going out of their way to take care of a customer. This is the kind of service that has caused me to buy tires from them exclusively for the past few years.

Since we got the Merc we’ve always had two plugging kits and a tire inflator in the car at all times to handle typical punctures. That’s not good enough for our needs. This episode demonstrates that other things can happen to a tire that you can’t fix by the roadside. We’re hard on our tires, towing many miles in southwestern heat with a heavy trailer, and so I’ve concluded that we need to get back to a full-size spare when we are towing.

The solution I outlined in the previous blog is still the plan. We’ll remove the Airstream’s spare and put a Mercedes spare in the carrier instead. The Michelin tires we put on the Airstream have proved their durability, and the Airstream can be towed on three wheels in a pinch, so I feel pretty confident about going without a spare on the trailer. The car, on the other hand, would be “interesting” to drive with only three wheels.

The challenge is that the car tires are much larger than the Airstream tires. The Airstream tires (with Michelin 235/75 R15) are 28.9″ diameter and 9.3″ wide. The Mercedes tires are about 33″ diameter and 11″ wide, so the spare carrier will have to be modified to allow one to fit. That means I’ve got to find a welder who can either come to the house to work on the Airstream, or has a large lot where I can park the Airstream. I’ll post pics once that job is done.

We’ll also have to do a five-tire rotation pattern from here on, because it’s important to keep all the tires worn evenly (this is an AWD car). It’s a small price to pay for the convenience of a full-size spare. When the car is being driven without the Airstream (and hence no spare tire nearby), it will still have the backup capability provided by the run-flat tires, just like millions of other cars.

We finally pulled into Tucson late Wednesday night. We’re still in that phase where we are living off the remainders of our Airstream supplies, until Eleanor gets a chance to replenish the house food. But we have landed lightly, without too much fuss or inconvenience, and are settling into our home-based life for the next few months. I did a calculation and found that so far this year we have towed the Airstream Safari 7,582 miles, which is about average. The image above shows our approximate route in 2012 (but not every stop).

Since we are going to be at home base for at least a couple of months, this is a good time to take on projects. We still need to get on the Airstream interior renovation, although budget is a challenge. I plan to kick that project into gear fairly soon. I’m also working on Alumafiesta in Tucson. We’ve confirmed that Stevyn Guinnip will be joining us at Alumafiesta to lead morning exercise sessions, and Bert Gildart is likely to lead some photo safaris in the great southwestern outdoors. I’m working on lots of other good things for that event, which will be announced as they get solidified.

E&E have taken on a new project too. To abate Emma’s lust for a pet, they have taken training at the nearby Humane Society and are now official foster parents to a pair of kitten brothers, one orange tabby and one solid black. For the next three or four weeks, their job is to convert these malnourished, underweight, frightened and slightly feral kittens into adoptable, people-loving cuties. The kittens are living in Emma’s bathtub with all sorts of comforting things to assuage their mental anguish, and several times a day they are held and fed. Although already this project has meant lots of cleanup and midnight attention, Emma and Eleanor are having a great time of it and I’m sure that when the time comes it will be hard to say goodbye to these little beasts.

Our next planned Airstream travel is not until after Christmas, although you never really know for sure. A trip opportunity may present itself in the near future, and the spare Airstream (the ’68 Caravel) could yet be outfitted for some adventure in southern Arizona this fall…