The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[Ratkity]

*blinkblink* Wow. That's all I can say! Very nice photos of each detail. Love it. Also liked the dancers!

Hugs,
Ratkity

[KCStudly]

GREAT PAINT JOB !!! Slats, tools , and dancing girls .... You’re too much Dude !!!!

Well I'll take that as a compliment. Thank you GPW. The dance show is a once a year thing I do to help out a friend. My boat restoration buddy Dale, on sound, and my Punkin Chunkin buddy Dave, on lights, were both on the Audio Visual team at their high school back in the day and started out helping Gale (the one with the dance studio) when she rented the auditorium. They had been helping her for years when I came along, so I pitched in too. When Dale was getting ready to move away he trained me in earnest to take over the sound board. Dave and I did the show for several more years, but he had moved up to Mass., got kids, etc., and I'm the only one left from our little group still doing it. Though it is my only 'gig'.

Wow, that's some very intricate work you are doing. So happy to see the sawdust flying.

Thank you Becky. I've been watching your progress, too, and you are doing first class work. You must be getting excited to go camping. I gather that you're a wind sailor ("Oldragbaggers" kind of leans that way, I'm guessing), but you may still enjoy checking out Dales boat restoration I linked to a few posts back. He too is a craftsman to be admired.

*blinkblink* Wow. That's all I can say! Very nice photos of each detail. Love it. Also liked the dancers!

Thanks Ratkity, glad you are enjoying it. I'm trying to keep the momentum rolling and the forum makes a nice dangling carrot for encouragement and support. Your kind compliments are very much appreciated.

[GPW]

KC, I Respect your work , and anything I say to you may be taken as a Compliment of the highest order...

[KCStudly]

KC, I Respect your work , and anything I say to you may be taken as a Compliment of the highest order...

Done, did, and thank you again.

[O'Shell]

Wow Kc you are one fine engineer and craftsman. The amount of time you spent on that frame, from mind to paper to metal
I want to come over and watch you work, maybe some osmosis of talent might seep out? A few too many miles to just drop by but we do have your thread here and yes I have learned quite a bit. Thank you.

[KCStudly]

Well thank you kindly for such a glowing complement, O'Shell. I surely do appreciate the vote of support.

Most of what I know or can do I have learned from someone else. I like to say if you can show me how, then I must be able to do it too.

The rest is just experience.

In my case, as far as the steel fabrication is concerned, I have the benefit of constant support and advice from my friend, expert fabricator Karl. Couldn't be doing this to this level without his help and support.

Thanks for checking out TPCE.

I'll be keeping an eye on your standy widget project, too.

[KCStudly]

Mon/Tue was a slog at work rebuilding the gear head on a mixer swing arm (confined space entry, safety harness, head/beard/arm hair netting, standing precariously on mixer auger, grease and sludge dripping on me, over exertion, etc.) so dead beat tired, got nothing done except a little support material/tool planning.

Wed I left work late, stopped by Wallie World for some spray paint, waxed paper and some plastic coated freezer/butchers paper (thought it might be more manageable than waxed paper and/or makes good masking paper. Used part of the $50 gift card I got for being employee of the month (did a good job designing, building, coordinating and installing a significant system change at work). Total tally is right at $2400.

Started by scuffing the bare areas of the axle with some emery and knocking down some of the rougher drips. The OEM paint was just terrible. Several bare spots, heavy drips, and total loss where the factory paint was applied over the still hot welds. Also had to cover the bare perches that I welded on. I made a conscious decision not to go too crazy prepping the axle for paint. The best way to prep it would have been to strip all of the factory paint off, take the time to haul the axle into work and blast it and the associated risk of getting sand into the spindle area (and subsequently into the bearings). After the quickie scuff I did a quickie wipe down with lacquer thinner and masked off the spindles.


Here are a few shots of the still wet paint. For some reason the camera flash made the wet paint look gray in the close ups, instead of the actual satin black.




When I laid out the wall cap rail on the plan I lofted it over a 6x6 inch grid and included ordinal dimensions to each point where the inside profile crossed any line on the grid, plus key tangent points and end details. This was before I had decided to build the jig to the outside profile (outside of the rail, inside of the hatch skin). Rather than spend another evening at the computer adding the outer profile dimensions I went ahead and laid out the lofting onto the jig board. Then I tacked finish nails just inside the points and wrapped one of the rejected slats around the nails as a spline. Tacked more nails on the outside to pin the spline up against the inner nails and traced the inside with a sharpie marker.


Inside detail.


Outside detail.


Then I took a divider with pencil taped to one leg (didn't have a compass handy) and spaced off the outside line 1-1/2 inch from the inside line.


About this time Rover Mike stopped by to take his cargo trailer. He had several recommendations for how to improve my jig and advice on the process (recall that he owns and operates a custom cabinet and home improvement business for high end architectural customers, so this was pertinent).

The jig board would have been big enough to handle the convex form, but when I switched to the concave form I had to leave a margin for the blocks on the top and backside. That meant that the profile now ran off the bottom edge of the board. Last night, Thursday, I cut a chunk out of the inner corner of the board, trimmed a little section straight at the bottom (the waste board had a slightly wavy existing cut) and biscuit joined the chunk onto the bottom to extend the jig. Not sure if you can see it against the steel table, but here I am demonstrating the biscuit cutter by pulling back the spring loaded fence (cutter is unplugged for pic). You can just make out the reference marks and slots cut into the big board (bottom) and patch chunk (top).



Here you can see the temporary cleats I screwed on to assist with clamping and the freezer paper underneath. Didn't have a brush or gloves, so got a little glue on my fingers.


The clamp up.


Then I threw a clamp on the table to make sure it stayed flat and didn't pull up from the top clamp.


Decided to turn the cleat blocks sideways. They're just tacked together with brads and nailed to the jig board. Made more progress this evening (Friday) but that will have to wait until I can download latest pics and get some supper.

[KCStudly]

On Friday I pulled the clamp and temporary clamp dog blocks off of the jig board and extended the layout to include the last couple of blocks. You can see the slat that I clamped in to confirm fairing.



Apparently Karl did quite well on the sale of the positioner and some other auction items, as there was enough funds to cover a new 8 ft x 14 ga sheet metal hand break. It's in really good condition and he got a very good deal on it.



(It has legs?)

The clamp blocks on the laminating jig were nailed down with the pneumatic finish nailer, but they were still a little flexible, so I wanted to screw them to the jig board from the back side. Rather than do the whole lay out again I just drilled a reference hole behind each block so that I could find them on the other side.


Here you can see the sharpie mark on the back where I went around and found each of the drilled holes. Used the quick change countersink drill/driver bit tool to pilot and drive two sheet rock screws into each block.


Then I made up a few of these dog down dogs that would hopefully help keep the slats in align if they were to want to slide up due to the slipperiness of the glue.



Here you can see that I have pre-fit a pile of clamps and staged all of the dogs and screws making ready for the big event; glue up.


I lined the jig with freezer paper, plastic side up, tacked in with a few staples from the staple tacker (the type of stapler with a handle like a hammer used by roofers to fasten tar paper). In hindsight I should have just waxed the jig and gone without the paper. It ended up getting messy in the end.


Here you can see how I have selected and oriented each of the slats. They were not all even in thickness and had a bit of taper side-to-side. Before flipping every other slat the stack was quite trapezoidal. I also made sure that any that had knots near the end were at the far end where they would be trimmed off later (slats with knots in the middle were rejected previously). The threaded rod was pre-fit and used to keep one end aligned during the glue up, per Rover Mike's recommendation.


First thing Saturday morning I laid out a long strip of waxed paper on the bench and started running glue down each face of all of the slats. Spread the glue evenly with a cheap brush to insure full coverage.


Once I had a few slats glued I started the threaded rod alignment pin and began stacking.


Here you can see that I picked up some efficiency by running a glue bead up one slat and down the other before switching to the brush. Also, it didn't take long to go thru the first pint of glue, so I was happy to have bought the gallon refill in advance.


Last piece. See the pin?


Starting to "get jiggy with it".


Just reigning it in loosely to start.


Karl was a big help taking pictures of all of this (I had glue on my gloved hands), and shortly started helping by pushing on the free end to help force it into the mold while I clamped. Started at the top end and worked my way around toward the bottom.


After the bar clamps were snugged up I went around with the big rubber dead blown hammer whacking the slats down against the jig board while Karl followed screwing the dogs down. Then I went back and added the spring clamps between each clamp block while also wrapping the paper over in an attempt to keep glue off of the clamps.


Here you can see the splay in the free end.


Got clamps?



Here's the top pinned end.


Next I went around with a drywall screw tearing away the extra paper and wiping up the excess glue so that the air could get to it better. Wish I had just waxed the jig well and not used the paper.


Here's a close up of one of the dog down dogs. The slats had some curve to them so they did not all lay down perfectly even, but it shouldn't be too hard to plane the high spots down and the corresponding lows on the other side will either be filled or covered by the galley inside wall skins. After discussing the idea of offsetting some of the slats to act as built in trim for the galley side skins with Karl, I decided that that would add unnecessary complication and would throw off the template profile by an indeterminate amount, so I just did the lay up straight and will seal and paint the plywood edge black to "hide" the end grain. Karl's rationale, "It's just a camper."


After all of this, the sawing, jig construction, glue up, clamping, etc., I have decided that I am happy to have tried this technique. It is intriguing. But it is also fairly involved and a lot of work. I will do the other side this way as well, but am having second thoughts about the time that it will take to do all of the hatch ribs this way. Those will likely be done using the mitered method.

While that was setting up I moved my attention back to assembling the trailer. This is the fun part, installing all of the nice clean detailed parts. U-Bolt and axle install.



Before installing the shocks (to avoid over spray) I went around and hit the fasteners with a protective coat of spray paint.


Anti-seize on the lower shock mounting studs...


Before installing.


Painted the upper shock mounting studs.


And the washers and spacers.


And the installed lower studs.


And all of the spring mounting fasteners (a little added rust protection).


Took the masking off the spindles, removed the nuts and cleaned them up.


Put the brake backing plates on and painted the retaining nuts on the back side. Note that the shoe with the shorter lining goes toward the front (the plates are marked "R" and "L", but I checked anyway).


Here I have installed the shocks. Later I came back around using the brown paper sack from this morning's dough nuts to mask off the shocks and spray painted the retaining nuts.


I have been spending so much time on this project and we have had so much spring rain that my lawn is now waist high. Karl offered to bring his big mower over and mow it quick (easier to throw it on the trailer and take it to the pump for gas, than it is to fill with a big jug, so might as well).


Cleaned the hub/drums with brake cleaner and hand packed the wheel bearings using the palm slapping method. Kind of hard to take pictures when you have your (gloved) hands full of grease.


I used a flat piece of steel to protect the seal and tapped on that to drive the seal into place. Also note the grease applied into the lip of the seal. Don't hit the seal casing directly with the hammer as it will warp it and affect the seal profile.


Hub, outer bearing and spindle nut installed. Cotter pin came next.


I started to make a driver to install the bearing dust caps, but Karl jumped in producing a large socket and ended up driving them on that way (my piece of pipe would have needed something welded over the center to help it drive evenly).



Not a very good picture of overall progress.


Temporary wheel and tire on. Had to remove the plastic center cap to fit.


The tire clearance was a little bit more than what I had predicted, so the permanent wheels and tires, with less back spacing, should have great clearance.



Tongue jack installed. Will probably take this back off during coupler installation.



Dismounting the saw horses.


Wheelie.


The eagle has landed.



The springs immediately took a set and the shackle angle started looking much improved. Couldn't wait to wheel it out for some pictures in the wilds of Karl's driveway.




Ground is uneven, not the trailer.


With both Karl and me sitting on one side rail (about 1/3 of total weight) we could get the frame to sit on the bump stop, so longer shackles are definitely in my future, but all and all I am thoroughly pleased with how the trailer has turned out. Looks smaller outside.

(I fell asleep last night with the netpad in my lap while uploading these pics and woke up at about 4AM this morning to finish this post, so now off to bed for an hour or so before starting again.)

[GPW]

Your usual Primo work Studly !!! You really need to convince Karl that this is Not “just a camper” , but “THE “ Camper , and millions of people (?) are watching , drooling , and long awaiting the final outcome ...

[parnold]

That's a fine looking frame you got there KC. Do you have an estimate of the weight? It looks a lot lighter than I thought it would once it was out in the wild. I would go crazy making the hatch spars like that, I had all I could do from going postal just glueing all my spars, and there are only maybe 20 of them, and they are just two pieces glued. Your spars are 10(?) slats glued together!

Looking forward to another progress report!

[Wobbly Wheels]

That frame is great Studly !
Must have been a great moment to have it outside for the first time, that's the same feeling I get when I pull a boat out f the shop.

With those rails, are they over bent to allow for springback or does your back wall have a bit of a return on it ?

[KCStudly]

Thanks for the encouraging compliments GPW, but I think your estimated number of viewers might be a tad optimistic . Ticker says 4480 views, but who's counting? Besides, at least half of those counts are me.

Paul,
I did have an estimated weight from the computer model, but that didn't include accurate weights for the axle, brake assemblies, wheels and tires, chains, etc. If I get time today maybe we can hoist it up using Karl's dynomometer (a lifting scale) and weigh it proper. Thanks for the kind words, too.

I hadn't actually counted the slats. I just used the right number to get the 1-1/2 inch thickness I wanted (TLAR Engineering). Since they are not uniform thickness, I suppose the number could vary depending on which ones I select; they varied from my target of 0.125 thk to about 0.200 thk, with some variation along their length as well. When I did my test bending before cutting all of the slats the thicker ones made cracking sounds, but with the glue, and I suppose the support of the neighboring slats, I heard nary a crack during forming.

Just to clarify these are the curved end cap rails that will be glued recessed flush to the rear edges of my walls in the galley area, stiffening the free standing edge of the wall, adding impact resistance and giving me a hard surface to router my hatch seal detail into. I was kind of wondering why you chose to use plywood for your spars, but assumed it was because you had plenty left over. Remind me, are you screwing down thru the face and into the edge of your walls, or into the edge grain of the spars thru the side of your walls?

Wobbly,
It did feel great! In fact we left it out behind the shop for the evening. Wheeled around easily by hand and even easier with Karl sitting on the rear xmbr. After cleaning up the shop I had to excuse myself to go stare at it some more! Then went home and celebrated a tad .

After asking around a few carpenters that I know (Rover Mike and Larry at work) the word I got was that the spring back should be minimal, maybe 1/16 or so. I just made the jig as close to my dimensions as I could and will make any adjustment to the profile either by sanding to my side templates, or letting these parts dictate the profile. Kind of one of the reasons I started the cabin work here instead of somewhere else. Thanks for the kind words.

Thanks to everyone who is watching. Your encouragement is welcome, I might even say necessary.

[loaderman]

You got patience. Wow

[KCStudly]

Thanks Loaderman. Your compliments mean a lot to me.

Success!!! The first edge rail is out of the mold and has been declared to be a useable part!

I was a little nervous at first because of all the wet glue still trapped in the freezer paper, was still having second thoughts about that and thought about leaving it in the form another day, but then when I read the instructions on the bottle of glue (maybe I should have done that before?) it said to clamp for 24 hrs and then wipe excess glue with a damp rag, so out she comes.

Here I have pulled off the spring clamps and started to strip back the paper, wiping and scraping as I went.



Here it is all stripped down. I was a little worried because the tag end had run off of the paper and there was quite a bit of glue showing. Thought it might have stuck pretty hard to the jig board at that end, but the board is supposedly a water proof underlayment so the glue had not soaked in much if at all.


A couple modest whumps here and there with the dead blow hammer and she popped right out. After spending some time peeling off paper, wiping with a damp rag and scraping excess glue I laid it back in the mold to see if it had sprung any. Not really much at all. Maybe a 32nd in the tightest section, but not that I could be sure to attribute to spring back.




With it back in the jig I was able to transfer the cut off lines onto the part using a machinist square. I'll wait and cut it down when I am laying out the whole wall, just in case I need to make any minor adjustments.

Then it came back out of the jig for some pics.


Had to try it on for size.


So in the end the freezer paper did fine. It was easy enough to pull or scrape off and did keep the glue from going everywhere. Rather than risk a different result, I think I will stick with it (pun not intended) for the next one. Karl and I discussed the option of sending the archs thru the Time Saver to sand them even and remove some more of the hardened glue, but I am thinking a hand held power plane might do just as well. The concerns being to not remove too much material, and trying to keep metal dust off of the parts so that furture glue ups stay strong.


Jeff P., a buddy of Karl's and mine (freelance photographer, mason and concrete artist) and his brother stopped by. They have both built campers before. Jeff did a slide in with aluminum tube frame and thin ply, and his brother did an ambulance conversion, I think military vehicle. They both liked how the trailer turned out. Jeff gave me a hand wheeling it in and jockeying the bathroom scale around to weigh it. (I was mistaking, the dyno was on loan to Karl and he had given it back.) We put some 2x under the tongue jack and opposite tire to simulate the approximate height of the scale and got 200 lbs at each tire. Blocked up both tires and got 70 lbs at the toungue jack, so 470 lbs total trailer weight. I don't recall what my original estimate was, but that sounds about dead on it to me. Remember this thing has a 3500 lb axle w/ brakes and HD suspension components with shocks. The larger wheels and tires may change it a tad, but they are aluminum wheels in lieu of these temporary steel ones so maybe not so much. The enclosed polished lug nuts that will go on with the aluminum wheels will weigh a tad more than these std Dexter supplied wheel lugs.

[RandyG]

Really nice work so far! I wish I had the tools and friends to do it myself. I could make a trailer that nice if it were made of aluminum and riveted together... uh oh... IDEA!