We parked the Airstream back in the carport last Tuesday night, spent the night in it (because it was too late to start unpacking), and it has been go-go-go ever since. There’s just so much to do …
I think one of the problems with coming back to home base is that suddenly I have no excuse to avoid the projects waiting for me here. I thought last winter season was busy, but already this one is looking like a record-breaker.
The Airstream Safari came back from its summer trip with many little things on the Squawk List, including:
- belt line trim replacement needed
- bathroom fan with broken handle
- MaxxFan with loose motor/fan assembly
- cabinet trim by refrigerator needing tweaks
- loose attachment of the galley countertop
- loose section above bathroom door
- … and a few other things
As you can see, most of these items have to do with things working loose over time. A rolling house tends to have such issues, and after six-figure mileage and eight years of heavy use I’m not surprised to have a few. But these are generally not hard repairs. Often it’s just a matter of a longer wood screw where an original one worked its way out, or a bit of glue or Loc-Tite. I see a few hardware store trips in my future, along with a few hours of weekend puttering.
I plan to make a few of the jobs harder than they have to be, in the interest of preventing future problems. For example, the loose galley countertop is just a matter of a few screws and brackets that could be fixed in a few minutes , but I want to remove the stove and thoroughly inspect the area under the counter to see if anything else is going on under there. Instead of just re-attaching the loose under-counter brackets, I plan to install some of my homemade aluminum L-brackets (leftover from the cabinetry job of last spring) which are much lighter and offer more area to spread out the stress. At the same time I will probably also install the countertop-mounted Nu-Tone Food Center that has been sitting in our storage room for a couple of years.
This is the way I’ve always done it. I see repairing things on the Airstream as a series of opportunities to improve the Airstream. Not only do I learn more about how it’s put together, the eventual result is far better in many ways than a factory-original model, since it’s customized to our needs. This builds confidence (assuming everything I’ve touched isn’t going to rattle apart again). Someday, when we tow over miles of washboard road at Chaco Culture National Monument, or take a long gravel road in Alaska, I’ll appreciate the extra effort.
That means the eight or ten repairs the Safari needs will likely take through October to complete. And there’s still the Caravel, waiting patiently in the carport to have its plumbing finalized. That project has been on hold since April, and it’s high time I got back to it. So already I’ve got Airstream work to keep me busy for a while.
But who needs an Airstream project when you’ve got an old Mercedes to fix? The 1984 300D has been sitting here waiting for its share of attention. Everything was working on it when we headed out in May, so I think over the summer it started to feel neglected. Not seriously neglected —it still started up promptly even after sitting a month—but just the car apparently felt the need for some TLC because three things failed on it: a climate control actuator, the trip odometer, and the clock. All of those problems are at least tangentially related to the heat.
You can’t have an old car like this if you can’t fix most of the things yourself. It would have killed me in repairs already if I had to take it to the local Der Deutscher specialist for every little thing. So I got on the phone to Pierre, and read the Internet forums, and figured out how to fix the climate control actuator and the clock this week. That took a few hours, while the Airstreams both looked sullenly on (I swear, you can tell that they are jealous, it’s like having three young children all vying for your attention). The odometer fix will have to be done later because I’m just about out of time for repairs at the moment.
This week has to be mostly dedicated to “real” work, by which I mean the stuff that pays the bills. (Isn’t it ironic that the “real” work generates money and the “fun” work costs money? If only it were the other way around.) Right now the Winter magazine is in layout and I’m collecting articles for Spring 2014. At the same time, the R&B Events team (which includes me) is busy trying to get tentative programs for Alumaflamingo (Sarasota FL) and Alumafiesta (Tucson AZ) put together, and that’s a big effort.
And we’re working on a new iPad Newsstand app for Airstream Life, which I hope to have released sometime in the first quarter of next year. When it comes out, you’ll be able to get most of the back issues (at least back to 2008) on your iPad and read them or refer to them anytime. That way you can carry all the knowledge around in your Airstream without also carrying fifty pounds of paper. I’ve been testing demo versions and it’s very cool, so this is an exciting project.
Finally, I’ll be presenting a slideshow at Tucson Modernism Week next Saturday, October 5, at 2:00 pm, about my favorite over-the-top vintage trailer customizations. It’s basically the best of the interiors we’ve featured in the magazine over the past several years. The pictures are beautiful and inspirational. I had forgotten about how incredible they are, until I went through the old magazines and re-read the articles. My talk is free and open to the public, if you happen to be in the Tucson area right now. If you aren’t, I might present the slideshow again at Alumafiesta in February.