Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

• Your polycarbonate-heating oven surely worked better than what I used to bend and form a 3/4" sheet once. Clever and resourceful. I, on the other hand, may be regarded as a shade-tree mechanic, and my methods are often cruder.
• I once owned a '86 Chevy S-10 Extended-cab pickup (for 18+ years, before it got T-boned). I had very little room for tools in the small Delta box in the bed, and none inside the cab, so when I started carrying two 100+lb boxes of tools with me (I was always needing them when working on automotive projects at various locations, for friends and family), I had to leave them in the bed of the truck. I also found that the 200+ lbs of extra weight on the tail end of the truck enhanced traction, especially in wet or snow, so I made a locking cover for my boxes, that covered and secured them in place. The cover was made from polycarbonate sheet, because I liked the durability of it, since I had experience cutting, forming it into shapes, and drilling/bolting it to other materials (I used it for covers, guides, safety devices on the various machines I used at work, in a newspaper production facility).
• My polycarbonate supply at work was only 1/4" thick, seldom thicker, so I bought my 3/4" material at a supplier near home. It was expensive, even back in '92, when I built it I constructed a bending brake from 2x4's I had at my Dad's house (I lived in an apartment at the time, after a divorce, thus needing to secure my tools), and used a hand-held Bernzo-matic torch to bend it into the shape I wanted. I used the torch a bit too closely to the wooden brake and polycarbonate, charring the wood, and causing bubbles in the polycarbonate, but it looked pretty good. The material was formed into a sloped wing-shape, to cover the toolboxes, allow wind and water to flow under and over the wing (and waterproof Contico toolboxes), with holes drilled to use hood pins with polycarbonate spacers (from scrap pieces at work), to hold the cover to the bed floor, and on the bed sides. I cut additional angles so the cover would taper up from the narrow bed, to the wider bed sides, and rest on spacers there. I also drilled a hole on the left side of the tailgate so I could put a hood pin there.
• I used matching padlocks on the four pins holding down the cover, and a separate trailer coupler lock on the tailgate. I painted the inside surface with the same metallic charcoal grey as my truck body, as contrast with my black bed box (inside bed mount, not one visible over the rails), and the black bedliner. I also applied a large red Chevrolet decal on the underside of the cover, before painting it, so it was strikingly well-done, especially for a first attempt. Later on, I used the other half cover temporarily while repainting the first, and quit using them after I started driving larger pickups daily, with the old S-!0 being driven for a while by my second wife. The cover(s) were used from '92-'03, and got thrown away after the truck was totalled in '04.
• While it served me well, protecting my tools (with the added benefits of better traction and 1 mpg gas savings), it didn't have the seamless look a properly formed (with a forming oven) plastic should have, and despite that, it drew many favorable comments as a great idea, but mediocre execution. Polycarbonate is so pricey now, that I would use steel or aluminum as my medium, instead, but I used what I had been using weekly/daily to repair items at work. Perhaps, now that I've built a TTT entirely from plywood, I might use it to do the same thing...now to find a good S-10 ....

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  similar S-10, but mine was dark grey.jpg (79.4 KiB) Viewed 2957 times

  my S-10 was grey, and I wish I still had it

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  S-10 polycarbonate tool box cover.jpg (99.91 KiB) Viewed 2957 times

  crude shadetree mechanic-made polycarbonate toolbox cover

UK-Corlett wrote:Thanks for your support aggie. A lot had to go write so it was a bit stressful.

Hi 'Working on it'
The material was not cheap a single sheet of Polycarbonate Clear 3050 x 2050 x 3mm Cut into 6 strips 2030mm x 445mm was including Tax £147.96p But free delivery.
Manufactured by http://www.nudec.com A dutch company I think "NUDEC-PC" They had a good how-to technical guide.
I could have bought less but it would have been more per sq meter so a full sheet was the way to go and gave me enough for test material ans well as the making spare windows.
The spare windows will of coarse be wrapped up and put in the loft for the day a brick hits the TD.

Clive