Putting it back together...

Ahhh, spring. Time to go camping. Oh, wait.......the camper is still in pieces! Hey, kids..........here's our two, scraping the old caulk from around the roof vents.


They're being good camper repair persons, using sheets of plywood to distribute their weight and avoid dents.


The DS was of ENORMOUS help, fetching, carrying, getting out and putting away tools, slave labor....*G* A reminder - if you want to see the pictures BIG, just click on them, you'll get lots of detail.


Ok, time to do the street side wall. First we took the load off of the arms. With shells in upright position, we removed the clamps from the arms underneath the camper (see diagram above, courtesy of Happytrails and Ed at Trailmanor), removed and set aside the shims and clamps, and pulled the end of the spring out of the tube, then gently let the shell back down with people on each side to keep it level. Then we removed the bolts on the lift arms at the pocket stops and removed the wall. I know TM changed the lift arms to a different style around 1994, I'm not sure how you'd go about taking those apart. My husband took out a couple of screws and look what happened! The whole wall just dropped about three inches. I still can't believe this thing held together for the 90 mile trip home from the sellers, let alone to Canada and back!


Oh my. There were only three or four screws in solid wood. The rest were in mulch. We used hydraulic floor jacks and 2x4's to lower the wall while one of us steadied it. The wall itself is not that heavy, easily carried by two adults. I do recommend sturdy gloves as the edge of the aluminum is sharp.


Ok, the whole thing is ready to just fall off, but something is holding it at the front.


Aha! A couple of hidden screws behind the rock guard. We used hydraulic floor jacks and 2x4's to lower the wall while one of us steadied it.


Now it's off all the way, and we've also removed the trim and bag seal across the roof, and cleaned out the old rotten wood, screws, and staples. In the second picture, you can see the curb side wall where we've already replaced the framing. The wood strip is on the outside so that we would have a good surface to staple the bag seal. It is cedar wood and has been treated with Thompsons. All materials we've used in the repairs have been waterproofed or are water resistant, and the adhesive is Liquid Nails Ultra polyurethane - rated for use with wood, metal and foam, and is for outdoor use.


Here we've set up the wall in the shady backyard. Working in the driveway was too hot. This wall will go MUCH faster now that we know how it all goes together and what we need to do. Remove metal trim strip, set aside, remove nasty bag seal and flaps, remove any staples/screws, scrape out old wood, clean up with a wire brush on the drill.


We like to recycle and reuse whenever possible (duh, or we wouldn't be recycling the TM in the first place!) so we cleaned up and reused the old aluminum where possible.


We ran low on clamps, so my husband devised this one out of what he had laying around. Have I mentioned how wonderful he is at fixing things? *G* Glueing in that loooong strip of aluminum on the top of the wall took a lot of clamps.


Here's the street side of the camper with the wall removed. Again, all the old wood and so on was cleaned out of the edges of the walls.

Next post, putting it all back together, new bag seal and flaps, woohoo!

Demolition and Reconstruction

While we had the top half of the door off for repair, we used a tarp to cover the hole. I thought it would be a short project. Ha.


We then removed the metal strip that was screwed to the bottom edge of the upper shell. We knew we were in trouble when most of the screws broke off, rusted through. DS removed the rotten wood from the space between the aluminum skins, and cleaned up the area with scrapers, pliers to remove staples and broken screw heads, and finally with a wire wheel on the drill.



This is the flap system from inside the Trailmanor - what connects the top shell to the bottom shell with velcro when the camper is in use. All the wood used was rotten, the vinyl nasty and it smelled of rot. It was a definite replacement item. As a matter of fact, what we removed looked as if it had been homemade, and I don't think it was original. We ended up purchasing a new set from Trailmanor.



This pic shows the rear edge of the upper shell, with the trim strip and bag seal removed, opened and the rotten wood scraped out.


Here's the wood, or rather, what's left of it. It was basically mulch, we found only a few chunks of semi-solid wood. I think mostly what was holding the camper together was just habit, and maybe a half dozen screws that were still in somewhat solid wood. The white piece of "lumber" you see is what we bought to replace the pieces that held on the flaps, and it's not wood, it's solid vinyl. Never going to rot.


Ok, I promised you scary. Here's scary. DH decided that it would be much easier to work on the wall, if it was on sawhorses. So he took it off the camper. EEEEEK! First we took the load off of the arms. With shells in upright position, we removed the clamps from the arms underneath the camper (see diagram above, courtesy of Happytrails and Ed at Trailmanor), removed and set aside the shims and clamps, and pulled the end of the spring out of the tube, then gently let the shell back down with people on each side to keep it level. Then we removed the bolts on the lift arms at the pocket stops and removed the wall. I know TM changed the lift arms to a different style around 1994, I'm not sure how you'd go about taking those apart.


Another angle......that hole at the curved area is the end of the cabinets that are above the front bed. We had to disconnect the wires to the front lights and the porch light.


Lower part of the front end......you can see where we opened up the aluminum skins and removed the rotten wood, as well as the nasty old bag seal and flaps that came off later.

Here's the wall on sawhorses.....the big hole in front of DH is the upper door opening. He's inserting square aluminum tubing into the space between the skins, replacing the rotten wood. We found a great price on the tubing - $1.16 a linear foot - from a place in our town that supplies to companies that make screen rooms and the like. Shop around - a metal supplier in the same town wanted nearly twice as much.

The tubing on the left came from Trailmanor, the tubing on the right is what we bought locally. Same thickness, the only difference we could see is the white paint and the corners were less rounded off.
And another shot of the wall with DH spacing out tubing to see how much we needed.


Here's the door opening with the new tubing inserted. Just dry fitting at this point.


This is the other side of the door opening. The area around the door was the in the worst shape of the entire camper. The aluminum had started to degrade.


This shows just how bad the deterioration was - the top of the door frame had NO support left at all. When we took it down, it was completely empty, the rotten wood had just crumbled away, and you could see right through it.


The pictures above show the "pocket" and "pocket stops", the rubber chunk with a strip of metal and a screw. The U shaped metal brackets are called "pocket stop repair kits". The first picture is the pocket located by the door frame, toward the rear of the upper shell. It was encased by two metal plates, and bolted together with a wooden frame. We used aluminum tubing with treated wooden plugs glued into the ends to replace this, shown in the next picture. Sorry it's so blurry. We used Liquid Nails Polyurethane adhesive to glue everything together, it was the only one we found that was rated for wood, metal and foam and also was weather proof. The third picture shows the old pocket stop, made of rubber, a piece of wood, and a screw, the rubber much flattened from years of use. Bottom is a picture of the inside of the pocket, before we put the metal bracket and new stop in. The lighter spot on the right is where the stop was located.


This picture shows the top of the wall with new aluminum tubing installed, glued on all sides and clamped with wood strips to ensure complete pressure and contact. I was starting to relax, we could do this. All we had to do was finish glueing the aluminum strips around the edges of everything, add strips of treated wood to have a surface to staple the bag seal and reinstall the trim strip with screws into, and we could put the wall back on. What I failed to take into account was 1. How long it would take us and 2. How cold the weather was getting. We'd started this project in late September, in Michigan, and the glue we were using wouldn't set up at less than about 50 degrees. And our garage was already full, no room in there for a new project. So I did what any self respecting Trailmanor owner would do. I gave up my kitchen to the cause:


We balanced the wall between the table and the rolling bar we have in the middle of our kitchen, and continued working. It wasn't so bad, it only took us another few days to finish, and it was definitely warmer.


This picture shows the ends of the aluminum tubing, and the wooden plugs DH cut to fit and glued into the ends. This gave a solid place to drill and screw everything together.


Here's that area at the bottom of the door frame area where the aluminum was so degraded. I wrapped it in plastic wrap before we clamped to avoid having the wood we used for pressure from becoming glued to the wall when the glue oozed out from the degraded areas. The second pic shows everything clamped, with some spare pieces of wood and aluminum in the pocket to avoid crushing it. Once everything was cured, we put away our tools for the winter, put the wall in the garage and wrapped the camper up tight in tarps for the season.

Next post: In the spring, putting it back together, taking off the street side wall, and installation of new bag seal and flaps.

The purchase...

We'd been tent camping for a few years and my husband had decided sleeping on the ground was no longer for him. We'd been looking at various pop up tent campers and small travel trailers, but hadn't found anything that would work for us, especially in our low, low price range. We knew we had to stay under 3000 pounds as our mini-van couldn't tow anything heavier and buying a new tow vehicle was out of the question. Most travel trailers were too heavy, pop up tent campers too cramped and we really wanted to get away from the tent atmosphere. I'd been cruising dozens of camper dealership sites and RV search sites daily for months when I came across an ad on Craigslist that sounded interesting: TrailManor Travel Trailer - perfect for camping or hunting.  It was located just two hours away. The ad went on to list all the great things a Trailmanor has - three beds, bathroom, lots of space, and very cool engineering that makes it fold up like a tackle box. If you go to http://trailmanor.com/ you can see how it all works. I researched a bit and found that the construction of a Trailmanor is a sort of styrofoam sandwiched between aluminum inside and out, which makes it very light and strong. NEW Trailmanors use all aluminum in the framing. Older ones used some wood, and another site http://members.aol.com/br768 I'd found online described how to repair it. The owner of the site, Happytrails, was VERY helpful, and I exchanged emails with him. Unfortunately, his site disappeared when AOL shut down their "AOL Hometown" feature, and I don't know if he got a chance to move it before hand. The camper we looked at had been parked for some years, outside. Needless to say, there was some wood rot. Optimists that we are, DH (Dear Husband, or on a bad day....erm, I'll let you fill in the blanks *G*) and I thought we could fix it. So we bought it and towed it home. Looks pretty good, doesn't it? Needs a little paint, maybe. Suuurrrrre. What you can't see is that every edge on the top half - the roofline, edges of the walls, along the bottom edge of the top half, is all rotted. Knowing what I know now, I can't believe it didn't fall apart towing it home. If you want to see lots of detail, clicking on the pictures will enlarge them, and they'll be HUGE.

Here's a "curb side" view". The top half of the dutch door was all rotted too. We found that out when my sister and I towed it 350 miles to Canada (before we knew the extent of the rot, of course) and the bottom trim fell off. Duct tape is a wonderful thing. You can sort of see the little "porch" DH made for me, as I didn't like the tiny step that came with the camper. The blue is part of a thick plastic barrel he cut up to do the wheel well conversion. Early TM's (TrailManor's) like ours have squared off wheel wells, which in the event of a blow out are dangerous as the bits of tire can go through the well into the camper and cause a lot of damage. Rounded ones deflect the bits down. Inside facing the rear. Notice way up in the corners there are eye bolts and turn screws? Those were what kept the walls together when it was set up. The wooden shelf in the corner I believe was made by the previous owner, I'm pretty sure it wasn't factory. It attaches to slides bolted to the walls. The 1980's decor is pretty dated, but once we get the structural stuff fixed, I'll be doing some painting. I already replaced the dark, dark brown curtains, except the ones in the back bed. Our 15 yr. old DS (Dear Son) likes to sleep in cave-like darkness, so that's his bed. This is the all-in-one bathroom. The floor IS the shower pan. There's a shower curtain rod (you can see it in the rear facing pic above) attached to the ceiling. There's an electrical outlet inside the cabinet, a mirror and a light. What more do you need? *G* I was very apprehensive about the toilet, which is a recirculating toilet. It has a filter that traps solids and recirculates liquids to rinse the bowl. It uses very little fresh water. I was happily surprised that it was odor free with the camping toilet chemicals and we had no trouble with it. We've yet to use the shower, usually when we camp we use the campground shower house as much as possible. Sheesh, I really should have cleaned up a little! I plan on some upgrades to the interior. The bottom half of the walls (which are all aluminum except the bathroom which is I believe fiberglass) are printed to look like wood grain paneling, in dark, dark brown. The carpet is brown also. I'd like to paint the lower walls a lighter color and eventually replace the carpet with vinyl or laminate. Someday. Next post, I'll start showing you the nitty gritty nuts and bolts. There will be lots of gritty, we'll be going nuts, and yes there will be bolts. Not so sure about the nitty, though. I'm pretty sure we were fresh out of nitty. Here's a little preview, the first thing we took apart: The top half of the door. DH cut and bent to fit some aluminum tubing to replace the rotted wood we removed. Trailmanor shipped us, free of charge, what they called a repair kit. It consisted of some square aluminum tubing and some wood strips. We ended up using about four or five times what they sent, along with new bag seal, new flaps, eight or nine tubes of Liquid Nails Ultra Heavy Duty Polyurethane adhesive, several tubes of silicone caulk, a lot of stainless steel screws, clamps, more wood (cedar that we coated in sealer), some solid vinyl "wood", staples galore, and a LOT of DH's handy man know how. If it wasn't for him and his ingenuity in figuring out ways to fix things, I think I would have tossed a match on it early on. *G* DS was an invaluable help, gophering, doing demo and generally helping out. I don't know what I'd do without him. 11 yr. old DD (Dear Daughter) did some gophering and clean up also, but the bulk of the work fell to the "boys". Next post, taking it apart. REALLY apart. It gets scary, peeps.