Been a long time/All together now!

Time has a way of getting away from you.  I didn't realize that I had not put a blog post together for almost 5 months. A lot has happened during that time and this will be a long post.

After getting Lucy boxed in, I spent some time finishing all the roof supports and insulating her roof.  I used 1" silver faced polystyrene foam insulation.  This ended up causing a little problem later since I only had 3/4" recesses to put it in.  To keep water off of her roof, I created a domed roof.  I don't have any pictures of this, but what I did was take 3/4" plywood strips and created a 1-1/2" tall arc that went from side to side on the roof supports.  The center of the dome is at the roof vent.  I ended up adding these extra dome strips to 4 of my roof supports.  I tried to make the outer two a little shorter to let the aluminum flatten out evenly.

I stained and poly'd the ceiling, but first I had to sand it.  I used a flexible plywood for easy installation, but this material had a horrible surface finish.  I sanded it for at least 8 hours and there are still some machine marks.  Staining over your head is difficult and tiring, thankfully she is only 10' long.  It took 2 coats of stain and 2 of poly before I was happy with it.  Pro Tip: make sure to sand between coats of poly.  I didn't because I was tired of sanding and I have a slightly rough finish when it could have been smooth.

Next up was paint.  Since I was building Lucy in my garage, I didn't have a lot of extra room.  Luckily I have a small workroom in my basement.  I bought a lot of plastic sheeting and created a paint booth.  I hung a box fan at the one window in the room and used a respirator as I painted.

I started out trying to strip the paint off of the aluminum but I found that it really didn't want to come off. Instead of stripping, I ended up using a wire brush to scrape the paint off.  It worked well on most of the panels. Where holes appeared, I used JB Weld to fill the small holes.  I painted for weeks.  Bringing one panel into my basement paint shop at a time.  Each panel was cleaned, primed and painted.  It took about 3 days per panel.  I used spray paint for all of the aluminum and it came out pretty nice.  One thing I didn't account for was how little a can of paint actually covered. I went through probably 30+ cans of primer and paint in the end.

As I completed panels, I installed them on Lucy.  Here is her road side. This side has all of my services.  I added a new 30 amp input, cable input and water inlet.  The old water inlet was too low for my new 15 gallon tank.  The old inlet is still there to cover a hole in the skin.

Work continued on the interior.  I built the back gaucho bed and also the dinette seats.  Since the camper is small, I tried to create as much storage as possible.  Under the gaucho bed, I have 2 large drawers.  The dinette had a big drawer and also under seat storage. 

 For my kitchen drawers I wanted to do something special. I have a CNC milling machine so I cut out some Scotty shapes for a nice detail on the drawers.

As I got closer to completion, we finished little jobs like wiring up the outlets, painting the furniture and touching up some damage I did to the paint.  I also completed a really big job. Lucy's original roof was a 3 piece one that caused many of her water problems.  I decided to put on a one piece roof.  This was a big job, but not too difficult.  I bought the metal from an RV outlet online.  The shipping was almost as much as the metal.  I bent the channel on each end of the roof myself using some wood strips and a hammer.  The hardest part was cutting the metal to size.

Painting the roof was interesting.  I masked off the entire camper and hung plastic.  Painting took 2 weekends and was difficult because I have poor lighting in my garage. It did come out nice in the end.

After paint, I installed the windows and the edge trim.  I used butyl tape on everything and the installation went smooth.  I did miss a bit on one aluminum panel install.  When I put the front side window in, it did not cover all of the holes.  I ended up adding a few eyebrows to fix that issue. I painted and repaired the rock guard on the front window.  The last project was repairing the door.  I was able to repair the original Bargman lock.  The door was a mess when I took it apart.  Thankfully there was enough left that I could get some good measurements from it.