^^ NICE !!
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A verbose story, and a caveat since a project of this sort would likely start with an old donor rig...
Feel free to skip to the last couple paragraphs.
I had a 24' 1977 Dodge C that I had bought sight unseen (i know, I know) off of a guy who had been a good friend up to that point. I was working out of town for a few months and had seen the RV in his yard but never seriously checked it out - always kept it clean and claimed it got used pretty regularly...good rubber, good windshield, no algae, the 360 ran like a champ, etc.
Anyway, the first clue was when I picked it up and the drums were seized. Not a problem and to be expected from storage...but he said it got used 'regularly'.
Something smelled rotten in Denmark but I had already bought the corsage so this is the girl I had to take to the dance...
I called a tow to get it home so I could go over what turned out to be an un-"sure thing" before taking it on the road. When the tow driver picked up the nose, the tin on the back end caught a hummock in the grass.
It was a bit drizzly so he had the tow's windows rolled up and, over the noise of the truck's diesel and whatever he had on the radio, couldn't hear three of us yelling at him to stop until he had torn the back corner open.
The back wall had stayed put as the rest of the moho was being towed off the lawn...
Long story short (longer ?...), I got it to the lot where I could work on it and in the cold light of day (that shouldn't have been streaming through the back corner into the closet) I could see that my good friend had hornswaggled me...good.
I carefully extricated the tin sheets from their perch so that I could repair/replace the damage and still salvage the rest of the camping season in it.
Next I started tearing out the rotten 2X2 framing, shoring up the walls and roof to keep the box square as I went. I kept digging until I got to solid wood: halfway up the back wall to about where the leak was in the back window and 3' up both side walls to about where the last seam was in the roof tin.
Well, at this point I had some figurin' to do. I had the front 2/3 of what was probably an ok rig and just needed new tail feathers...or I had to completely strip the body and rebuild it from scratch.
According to the sticker, this rig had been built in Georgia. Being a country boy from a small town in Canada, I knew they had peaches and southern accents in Georgia, but I had no idea they used chimpanzees to build motorhomes !
The body had been framed from 2X2s which, as I'm sure you know, measures 1 1/2" X 1 1/2". No, the aforementioned chimps apparently had a tendency to lose or eat all drill bits, because the only one they used here was a 1" bit. That includes drill holes in the roof framing in a straight line from front to back to run a speaker cable...which is two wires, each about the size of the tines on a fork. Thanks to their single-minded (and single drill bit) approach to running wire, they created a full length sag in the roof on each side from front to back. That was done in 1976 and it was all downhill from there...
Anyway...the straw that broke this particular dromedary's vertebrae came as I was crawling around underneath looking at how to attach a new floor on which to build an entirely new, lightweight body. Lo and behold, what do I see but a vertical line of fine rust in the frame channel. This "ready to go" moho had turned into a project that was NOT feasible any more.
Did I mentioned the rear diff had leaked (despite being "used regularly") and was bone dry during the 30km wheels-down tow home ?...
Anyway, it turned out to be a lesson into how to turn a few grand into a shockingly small cube of metal...but at least the engine ran.
Lemme tell ya about the trailers next...
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Sorry, yeah...foamy mohos...
Forget about MPG, rot resistance, lighter weight, foam squeaking while you drive, etc...most commercially built rigs run so close to their gross that, by the time you throw in a change of clothes, a case of beer, and a pack of hotdogs, you're over the GVWR. Mine was 10,200 GVW and the weight when I scrapped it was 9850. Yes it was a soggy old rig, but the water weight was offset by other places where the wood framing was rotted away to nothing but a memory (like the cabover).
Ever since my 'adventure', I have been thinking about how to get more out of a smaller, economical platform. My foamie trailer was a natural progression from the foam-cored fiberglass that I couldn't afford to build after my previous experiment with steel stud showed its own flaws. I think a foamie moho is DEFINITELY a doable project.
Seems to me the big difference between it and what's already been shown to work in 'foamie-tech' is in the mounting of the shell. From what I've seen, a moho floor is a few stringers on body mounts and the single ply floor is laid on top of that. A few stringers of aluminum box channel to bridge the mounts would be a start, and one could build a SIP floor onto that. That would take out the flex in a coach body that a trailer's frame normally sucks up.
Had I built the floor in mine stronger (with that in mind), I would have no worries about taking my shell off the trailer and plunking it onto a cab-and-chassis - the whole 'sock' thing.
by redveloce » Tue Nov 27, 2012 11:31 am 
... a view not shared by the RV Industry which makes BIG Profits on repairing rotted structures on relatively new vehicles ... 
Chimps and Liars !!! 