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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
