4X8(ish) Benroy Build

[Wobbly Wheels]

Ok, so....a month since the last real update - guess I better put up some pics.

Got the hatch framing squared away:


And skinned:


Like most, I used the trailer as a jig to hold everything true until the glue set up (PL Premium). The sawn ribs should give me minimal spring back but I have room to fine tune the fit if need be.
The plan is unscrew it from the trailer Fri night and take it up to the shop to glass it on the weekend.
I also want to do the remaining door skin so I can get the doors assembled and hung. I'll try to get the tongue box carcass glassed but I don't know if I'll have time.

Speaking of the tongue box...
Most of the pieces cut:


No pic of it, but the box is assembled now (except for the lid) and almost ready for glass. I hope to get the lid framed up next week, then I'm off for a week on a certification course, then it's back to work.

I also scored some old cedar from a cabin that was probably a good 50 years old before it was demo-ed.

It is about 1 5/8" X 6" T&G that I think will look great ripped down into distressed planks to panel the galley. Being cedar, it weighs next to nothing and, once coated, will be hard enough for its intended use. Hopefully there will be enough left for the cabin as well...at least for the walls.

I've got the small tent trailer wheels back on the trailer so I can move it around and hope to get the 12" wheels in the next couple weeks so I can start on the wheels wells.

[KCStudly]

I would strongly urge you to consider glassing the hatch with it in place on the galley, if at all possible. You might be surprised how much you will be able to twist the assembly if you remove it, and it would be a shame to spend time and material locking it in to the wrong shape.

Great score on the cedar!

[Wobbly Wheels]

Thx KC, that's probably not a bad idea. I can at least get the first layer onto the outside before detaching it from the trailer if the weather cooperates this weekend.

Next time, I'll hold off on putting in the galley counter and instead put in a temporary spar at the counter top nosing just to lock in the sidewalls halfway down the hatch curve. That way, I can fit the hatch with its bracing still installed and not remove it till everything is locked in with the glass. I might have to thread it in through the bracing, but everything will stay true for the glue up.

[Vedette]

Way to go Brian
I envy your progress!
You are ahead of me!
I did nothing on Kermit today except get one rear fender and the International truck roof (that I plan to use for the lower front belly pan) sandblasted.
Also tried to buy door skins for the interior panels but Rona was out of them
Tomorrow is Friday and you know how much we get done here on Fridays????

[Wobbly Wheels]

It's all good Brian - we're both moving forward.
Besides, if Miss Piggy is any indication, Kermit will be much more a work of art than my 'git 'er done' build. Kermit's big reveal will be well worth the wait - no pressure there

[Vedette]

Thanks
Now get back to work!

[Wobbly Wheels]

Too funny: just figured I'd check the board real quick before I head downstairs to start framing the tongue box lid....

How are YOU spending your Friday night when there's a trailer to build ?!?

[Vedette]

On the couch resting up for Saturday!
You know always put off till tomorrow, what you could have done today!
But, good on you for getting on it on a Friday night!
I am just going to dream about my tongue box lid (it will be made of the 38 Dodge lid and a 73 VW vanagon lid)welded together) but I am not there yet??

[Wobbly Wheels]

...38 Dodge lid and a 73 VW vanagon lid)welded together...

See, that's your niche ?...I can't even picture that in my head but you already have and I'm sure it'll come out absolutely stellar.
It occurs to me that this is exactly the reason why this board is my #1 online haunt: everything we are doing here is how WE want to do it. It's an entirely frivolous pursuit.

Anyway, here's what I got done tonight while Brian was slacking off (need that "poke" smiley here)


The frames are 1/2" ply (12mm) and the upper and lower runners are clear fir since I will be running hinge screws into them (well, the upper one anyway). I picked up a couple more door skins today and I have another tube of PL Premium so I'm ready to glue the skins onto the lid sometime this weekend.

I don't know if I'll get the time & weather to actually get any glassing done this weekend but I have everything I need and, short of skinning the tongue box lid (tomorrow), everything is ready for the next round of glassing...

[Vedette]

Okay.....I am well rested and inspired by your pictures.
The wind is blowing and we might get rain today, so I have the perfect excuse not to be outside pruning.
So I am off to the shop to see if I too can get something done this weekend.
Going to work at the other end mounting the fenders.
Back to metal work! Did I mention how frustrated I was while trying to buy the only wood I will need for Kermit?
Went to Rona to buy a couple of door skins for the upholstery panels.....they had one real ugly piece of crap on the shelf, but showed 39 in stock "Somewhere"????? After 45 minutes of looking we gave up Came home with my sandblasted 49 International KB5 roof (that I plan to use for the lower front portion under the 38 dodge rear section) and gave up on the wood for now!

[Wobbly Wheels]

Yeah, the rain blew through here starting yesterday afternoon - the forecast was for 50mm by this aft and it looks like it was pretty accurate. I'm glad I spent the time to make a frame for the trailer's tarp. It's been raining off and on all day so no glassing today but it looks like it should blow out and be sunny tomorrow. Can't complain about the temps - been around 15-16 degrees in the sunshine. I've put my Carhartts away for the season and it's back into shorts - didn't know it would be T-shirt weather as well though !

I hear your frustration on the doorskins, Brian. They are a bit flukey in quality: sometimes they're decent, sometimes they're just awful. We've got some good 4X8 ones right now that have an almost walnut-like surface veneer. Both of our (unaffiliated) building stores here have them so they must buy them from the same mill in China. I just got a couple 3X7s for the curved lid on the tongue box and they were had normal mahogany look but the veneer looks better. Looks like one of them could be a finish piece if I was going for that look. It seems that the 1/8 are usually a little nicer than the 1/4" - not sure why. On top of that, I can just imagine also dealing with the "customer service" one gets at the chain stores.

Got a bunch of errands done today, including a trip to the mailbox. The eBay 5W LED panel I ordered Jan31 finally arrived. Being intended as a replacement for automotive bulbs, it comes with a festoon (dome light) adapter and a 194 (wedge) adapter. I was thinking that what they called a "bayonet base" adapter was for 1156/1157 bulbs, but it's for the mini-bayonet. It's not a problem though...especially not with how cheap it was.



I did a quick test using a fixture salvaged from a decommissioned ambulance. It uses a single 1157 bulb. The camera automatically compensated for the lower light level from the 1157 so it doesn't show up in the pics, but the LED is quite a bit brighter. The pics do show how much whiter the LED light is.

This is the LED on its own:


And mounted in place of the bulb in the fixture:


And the same fixture with the 1157 bulb:


This panel will make it a snap to turn just about anything into a light fixture, so the plan now is to figure out what...
The aluminum back on the panel does heat up so it will definitely need a heat sink, especially for more than one panel in a fixture. I have some heat paste (MX-4) that's really sticky and should do the trick to fasten them. I have some fixtures that I can just convert....but where's the fun in that ?


At any rate, that can go on the back burner now that I know I've got the lighting sorted while I get back to making sawdust. Well, fiberglass dust......
By tonight (24hrs) the framing on the tongue box lid should have set up enough to stick the skins on so I'm still on track to glass it tomorrow.

Edit: A few posts back, I mentioned a TTT I built from steel stud a while back. I finally got around to scanning the pictures and posting them in a thread.

[Wobbly Wheels]

Well, even into the warmest part of the day and even with the solar gain from the black tarp, it only got up to 8 degrees so glassing was a no go for today. Earlier in the week, the forecast called for 12-14 and sunny...but it's the weather.
I need about 12 for my heater to make up the difference enough to glass. It's especially important with the hatch because if you over-catalyze the resin into a hot batch to get it to kick off in cooler temps, it tends to shrink a bit. It's not a big deal if the structure is rigid but it could conceivably distort the hatch just enough to affect the fit, especially since I'm just doing one side of it right now.

I did get the skins on the tongue box lid - 2 plies of 1/8" doorskin. One would have been lots even without the glass it will get, but I made the allowances to match the 1/4" ply on the rest of the box.

I also saved myself a bit of frustration down the road...
I built the frame right on the box to keep it true, using some scraps of 1/4" as shims along the hinge line. I used clear fir for the spars at the top (hinge) and bottom (latch), which I screwed right into the framing of the box. However, once the skins are on, I won't have access inside the box to pull those screws.


I took some scraps of 1/8" and used the to attach the spars to the framing instead. after the glass is on, I'll run a pull saw down the split line to cut the scrap and separate the pieces. Hopefully the glue squeeze out doesn't made a mess because I didn't lay packing tape along the framing before gluing it up (gap is big enough it shouldn't need it - famous last words, lol)


And the box all closed up:




I got the cedar milled into planks for paneling - the whole shop smells like red cedar now and I wanted to stay down there and wallow in it.
Because my little saw has a 2-1/4" max cut depth, I ripped the boards 2-1/8" wide after ripping off the tongue and the groove. That scrap will get bucked up and go into the camping box for dry kindling. From each of those blanks (2 per board), I ripped three planks a heavy 7/16" thick. After a couple trips through the thickness sander, they'll be down to 3/8". I think I'll just rip a chamfer along each edge so I wind up with a V bead when they're installed. The finished width will be 2" and I've got 450 lin ft to play with. That ought to be lots for the galley and the paneling above the foot of the bed on the back side of the upper galley cabinet. I still have some odd sized stock that I'll cut into matching blocking and trim as needed.


I'm not really keeping track but....did I make more progress than Brian this weekend ?

[Vedette]

Box looks Great!
Show Off!

[KCStudly]

The trick is in the pics. More pics = more progress... maybe?

[Wobbly Wheels]

Hehe, yep - that's my story and I'm sticking to it
It's all about quantity over quality !
Nevermind that my new phone's camera is way better than the last one: it doesn't hide anything.
I'm going to have to figure out how to blur the pictures or something so they're more lipstick than pig.

I won't be getting anything done the next couple weeks because I'll be away from home taking a course for work so I had to make lots of sawdust this weekend. Maybe I got a little giddy after taking a couple decent steps forward for a change

Hopefully by the time I get back it'll be warm enough to glass outside. Even if not, I can glass the doors and the box indoors at the shop and actually get the doors put together and hung. The pieces are all cut out and ready to go, they're just waiting for glass. It figures that it got up to 14 degrees and 18 under the tarp today...while I was at work.
Still, I spent the last half hour of the day sea trialing a boat on dead flat water in bright sunshine so I'm certainly not complaining - especially since spring seems to have forgotten about the rest of the continent.

Of course, all the progress I make now only brings me closer to sanding and fairing (blech), though I might tackle that as a project of its own after summer's over. The pigmented resin I'm putting on it will be fine for at least that long. Does it show that's not my favorite part of the process ?