Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Managed to get a bit more done last night. After an embarrassingly long time trying to get the old wood blade off the miter saw, I was finally able to get it off with the help of a long wrench and a hammer. Got the aluminum extrusion framing cut for the doors! Might have done a little happy dance after the first cut. This is my first time working with anything metal, so it's pretty exciting. Also managed to actually cut everything to the right length, I'm pretty sure. Test assembled one of the doors without fasteners (both inner and outer frame) and it seemed to fit right anyway. Yay!



Also got the frame for the skylight all glued together and fully assembled, and got some paint on there. It fits snugly and beautifully in the opening for it, so that's exciting. Just need to pick which adhesive to use to get it properly glued in there today.



I've also started the process of finishing the countertop. Realized possibly too late that it might have been a mistake doing those big test swatches, since there isn't actually that much left in the cans. Doing the light grey as a base, and then I'll build up as much of the black on top of it as possible. It's time consuming because you have to do one thin coat at a time, let it dry, and then come back for more. So that'll be my afternoon, more or less, in between searching for angles and hardware as I figure out what works best with the aluminum framing that isn't their super expensive bulky hardware.




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Lots of good progress there!

How are you going to join the Aluminum frame …. welding ?

GPW wrote:How are you going to join the Aluminum frame …. welding ?

I think it bolts together. Never thought of using it for something like this. Put it in a wood frame and away we go. Great exicution

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GPW wrote:How are you going to join the Aluminum frame …. welding ?

You mean for my doors? Or for his project, or for my next one?

I have no experience or interest in welding, and I hear aluminum is tricky to weld anyway. But the t-slot profiles are designed to be bolted together with fasteners. They sell a bunch of proprietary ones, but they're expensive and bulky, so I spent a while figuring out what I would use instead.



There are these little nuts that slide into the side of the beam and auto-center, and you can just tighten them down with M6 10mm machine screws.



It's tricky getting brackets with big enough holes so that the screws don't stick out way far, but I've started manually widening the tops of them with a drill to help them have a lower profile in the places it matters.



Here's an overly artistic shot of my off-cuts/waste metal, just because I was super excited to cut it for the first time. :-)


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amandacreiglow wrote:

GPW wrote:How are you going to join the Aluminum frame …. welding ?

You mean for my doors? Or for his project, or for my next one?

I have no experience or interest in welding, and I hear aluminum is tricky to weld anyway. But the t-slot profiles are designed to be bolted together with fasteners. They sell a bunch of proprietary ones, but they're expensive and bulky, so I spent a while figuring out what I would use instead.



There are these little nuts that slide into the side of the beam and auto-center, and you can just tighten them down with M6 10mm machine screws.



It's tricky getting brackets with big enough holes so that the screws don't stick out way far, but I've started manually widening the tops of them with a drill to help them have a lower profile in the places it matters.



Here's an overly artistic shot of my off-cuts/waste metal, just because I was super excited to cut it for the first time. :-)


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Very impressive!

alchemist77 wrote:I think it bolts together. Never thought of using it for something like this. Put it in a wood frame and away we go. Great exicution

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Thanks! Though don't congratulate me yet... still have to fit it all and join it all together. I'm going to be setting it directly into the foam, and anchoring it in with some ply leaves (not sure how to explain; there'll be pictures when I get there) and boating it all the way through from the bottom of the sandwich floor. Here's hoping it'll be sturdy enough. :-) it would definitely work well/easily in a wooden tear, and if you were planning to go with this from the beginning there are a bunch of hinge, doors and panel options that could simplify things. Would be almost trivial to make the whole interior or the door just an acrylic window...

If I'd known then what I know now... :-)


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… and Apologies , but we’re still not sure about the aluminum frame … ( consider this a test … ) I could really see a welded Aluminum frame , made in a jig to stay square … Those little bolt on clips remind me of all the Aluminum picture frames that were made in a similar way … and then they didn’t get bounced down the road either … I dunno’

How did you cut, and miter?

When changing the blades, if there aren't any wrench flats on the arbor, and no locking feature, it can be useful to bind the teeth of the blade against a soft piece of pine (manually, cord unplugged) to keep it from rotating when you put the wrench to the arbor nut. Use care not to put sideways force on the blade so as to avoid causing runout.

For cutting, I just put an aluminum-specific saw blade on my dad's 7 1/4 miter saw. Super useful! I kind of hate saws, but this one is growing on me fast.

Cool tip about embedding the blade in wood, although the one I'm using does have a blade lock. The blade that was on there hadn't ever been changed so it was extremely tight. Figuring out how to get my weak arms to get enough torque to loosen it while holding down the blade lock with one hand.

I'm feeling pretty good about the frame so far... the bolt-on connectors are actually pretty substantial. And once they're embedded in foam and wrapped in canvas... well, we'll see. :-)



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Getting there... slowly but surely. I've finalized how many pieces I'll need for the doors, and got everything in order. Realized, though, that I don't have to have the doors entirely completed for assembly-day -- I just need the exterior frames put together and embedded in the walls... and I should definitely have all the fasteners I need for that tomorrow.

So, with that in mind, in the morning I'm planning on texting my family and setting a time this weekend for a good old fashioned trailer raising. :-) then, god willing and the creek don't rise, we'll have a good old fashioned trailer covering next weekend, which puts me something like on track for finishing the first week of October. Not the early September finish I'd originally envisioned, but when you consider I got sick for a month or and couldn't work at all early on in the build, the total build time should be about right. So if this all shakes out, I think I'll be happy with that.

Cut and bent the aluminum angles for the rim of the exterior frame of the doors last night. Don't have a shot of it all lad out in the frame, but here's one of the corners.



I at first through I would get it all in two pieces for each of the doors, just bent in the right place. But after attempting the second corner I realized I wouldn't be able to pull that off. Getting the measurements and bends exactly right is a bit beyond my attention-to-detail skills. So there's five pieces for each frame, bent at the corners in the hope it will help keep them stiff.

If I did it again, I think I'd work out the math and the cut to get the bends in without any interference from the overlapping bottom half, if that makes sense. As it is, I'm afraid it's going to end up a little wonky. We'll see. Tonight I'm hoping to get the holes for the screws that will hold the angle on, so that tomorrow I can get the exterior frames all bolted together and ready to integrate into the walls.

Got the final coats of the black stone-imitation spray on the countertop. It's sitting on the kitchen table now, hopefully drying enough to get its pour-over epoxy coating Friday. There ended up being hardly any grey coming through, because I couldn't get it to work in a way that wasn't overly patchy. Oh well.



Got the skylight installed today, too. And then flipped it over and caulked around the frame and got a second coat of white on the ceiling as a whole. A professional painter I am not, for sure, but it's getting there.



I used the Alex plus stuff to fix the skylight in place, with the thought that I'll overlap the roof canvas over the edges by a good inch and change. I thought that would be enough, but now I'm doubting myself. Do you guys think I need some screw in there? Any risks/tips for drilling/screwing into acrylic, if so?


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Wow Amanda! I haven't logged on in a few days. You are certainly doing an amazing job from my view point. I've had mixed results with the stone paint in the past. My problem with it doesn't have any bearing in the capacity that you're using it. I used it on a couple of night stands. It held up ok, but stains in the wood bled through and I had to cover those with kilz paint and then repaint with the stone paint. It was a PITA, but made the wife happy in the end. That was about 3 or 4 years ago and they are still holding up.

Thanks for the encouragement HMK. :-)

I've got family planning on helping me Tuesday for the great assembly day, and it looks like I may actually be ready for it. I got the door outer frames gorilla glued into the wall pieces yesterday. I had all these fancy plans about using the outer channel to anchor a plywood spline to help the doors be further fixed in place, but that didn't quite happen. Was glad they actually vaguely fit at least!



They've now got gorilla glue excess dripping out of them, but you get the idea. :-)

I got the tin tile that I'm using for the headboard and the kitchen backsplash in on the headboard piece. Could have done it after, but it seemed easier to do beforehand. Hopefully I've measured everything all right and it'll actually fit... used the Alex plus stuff to attach it.



Starting to actually look like a thing! Though I managed to break the drill somehow, and I've got some battle scars on my thumb from poor metal-drilling practices. So now I've got blood and sweat on this project... I just need tears. I guess Tuesday has to go badly. ;-)



Have decided, in the spirit of this being a test build for me to try out the materials and techniques I want to use for the next one, I'm going to use the fiberglass screen/HVAC mastic method that was brought up recently for the custom cooler and tongue box outsides, but actual fiberglass for the inside of the cooler, with some bathtub refinishing epoxy stuff that I've used in the past as a finishing layer to help it look clean and finished and resist water.

I've got a bunch of the cooking gear that should hopefully fit in my tiny galley amassed. I'm hoping, theoretically, to head out on the road on or around Columbus Day, so the end is (hopefully) in sight! At which point, let's be honest, I'll probably already start my build thread for number two... ;-)


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Oook. Took was long than I was expecting, but got the removeable wallpaper on the sidewalls and the pour-over epoxy on the countertop.



I actually ended up barely having enough of the wallpaper to cover the walls. Even ended up having to use some scraps from doing my room a few months ago, and there are some pretty awkward patchworking pieces. Luckily, those are mostly hidden places that will be not obvious or will be obscured entirely by the mattress.



It's pretty easy to pull up from the edges, but I left a gap around all the edges. I'm hoping the moulding and caulking will be enough to keep it from going anywhere, since the only thing it's at risk of doing, really, is peeling.



The epoxy is so shiny! ... and full of air bubbles. The package says blowing on them helps, and I did that some, but there were a ton I just couldn't do anything about. Apparently a heat gun will take care of it, but I don't have one of those, so we're just going with it. It's pretty dark, now... wishing I'd just gone with the grey, or at least saved some aluminum shavings from my metal-cutting adventures to give it some pizzaz as I'd considered. But too late now. Onward!


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