The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[RandyG]

Happy Birthday wishes to my mom!!!

Cool, she shared a birthday with my son!

[KCStudly]

RandyG, small world, eh?

The weather here is starting to warm up... 44 deg F today.

On Wednesday after work I ran an errand, swung by the house to pick up my lanterns and kero heater, and hauled it all back out to Mecca. Checked out Karl's progress on the last of the three hot jobs. He was on the road delivering the first half load of garbage furnace chute weldments. I was late arriving and didn't do any actual work on the camper before turning around and heading home. Somehow all the running around and making three trips from the car up the stairs to the loft with gear in tow seemed like enough after the day I had at work.

Tonight I stopped at Ho-De-Po and got another piece of 1x4 pine to make up the wall blocking that I had not planned on initially. Used the gift card I got in trade for shipping some extra Jeep soft top door surrounds that I sent redveloce's way; thanks Red. (Pay it forward... thanks again Maureen for the deal on the stove.) Again arrived at Mecca later than usual, spent some time catching up with Karl, then up to the loft.

Refueled and lit up both lanterns (it is just so relaxing having them lit), fired off the heaters (kero and elec.) and fiddled with the small sanding block on some rough areas of the curb side wall where the GG was a bit chunky still.

Cut the needed wall blocking pieces and called it quits about 7:20pm in time to get home to dinner (Vette made some nice grilled chicken sammies on garlic Ciabatta with baby spinach, Swiss cheese and pesto.

Not much, but progress is progress. I plan on hitting it harder tomorrow. Weather forecast for tomorrow is good, high of 48.

Peace.

[Ned B]

way to go! Warmer weather always helps with unheated (or minimally heated) shop time...

on a side note, I was rooting around in the online version of netflix last night looking at what TV series are available... and there was Punkin Chunkin'!

[KCStudly]

Cool! Did you watch, and were you able to pick out Mr. B?

Because our machine is pretty unique we usually get a snippet or two shown on the broadcast.

Thanks for checking in on TPCE.

[Ned B]

I put it on my list, but honestly, I was beyond tired when I looked so I shut down the browser and went to bed. I'll run through them in the next few weeks though! And your build is one I check all the time, your level of craftsmanship is inspiring.

[KCStudly]

Ned B, thanks for the kind words. I am humbled.

Okay, I managed to put in about 4 hrs. of work today. Got the curb side inside wall blocking recesses all routed out (except the contingency hatch strut block).

The curb side wall up on the floor/work table.


Same technique as before, I clamped the steel tape to the sill and measured up using a framing square and/or the 3-4-5 triangle method to make sure they were square to the baseline.


Got all of the known locations laid out. This is a close up of the rear of the cabin (over the feet cabinets).


And here are the pillow light, key catcher and overhead cabinet locations.


Depending on which direction the router was traveling, the blue chips would sometimes shoot out the front side, despite having the shop-vac hose close to the back of the router, so I used blue tape to close off the front opening, helping some.


I had to be careful not to stuff the nozzle up too tightly or it would push the collet stop into the spinning arbor and grind away. Ouch.


The results were less than spectacular, but it did keep a bunch of the lighter stuff from launching up high and floating around.



As I routed out the square recesses I would occasionally lift the router out and check to make sure that I had gotten everywhere, while vacuuming out the chips. On the second from last square recess I must have kissed the template while lifting out the router and made an Eeyore donkey track in the side of the template.


That left an eyebrow in the recess, too.


But no big deal, the GG will fill the void, and if not, the paneling will cover it up. Minor detail and I am glad it only affected the last two recesses.

Here is the last of the 1x4x4 nominal square recesses with the eyebrow screaming out for attention (really, it is no big deal).


Here is a long shot of the wall after I went around and trimmed out the radius corners left by the router bit using the razor knife. You can see the plank for the bulkhead being test fit here and in close up in the next pic.


Note how it snuggles right up to the extra sill piece where the cooler slide would have screwed into.

With both the shop-vac and router running on the one 15 amp circuit I had to unplug the electric heater, but with the kerosene heater and both lanterns running it got up to 55 deg F in the loft. T-shirt weather for me while working away. Toward the end I even shut the kero heater off.

The 228 lantern cut out a couple of times. When I could smell the fuel I would look over and it was dead. It seemed like it was losing pressure. The first time there was a damp film of fuel all around the collar at the top of the font. After wiping up the fuel, pumping it up again, cycling the cleaner tip and relighting, I could not see any active leaks while shining my Fenix LED flashlight in, so I wondered if it was just vaporized fuel coming out of the vent after it had snuffed out. When relighting it seemed to want me to cycle the clean out needle a few times before burning bright, so I’m thinking I did not get the tank as clean as I should have. But the fact that it is losing pressure makes me think that something else is wrong, too. I’ll cross post this over on my “Belly Button 228” post in ‘Vintage Camping Equipment’ section and see what I get for suggestions.

Thanks for following along.

[GPW]

Looking Great KC !!! You should paint it Orange and call it the “Great Pumpkin” ...

[KCStudly]

Had a next door neighbor once that had a '63 split window Corvette show car; orange with black hood spear; Cragar SS's; N50's on the back; had "The Great Pumpkin" and a jack-o-lantern painted on the hood.

But no, I think I will stick to 'The Poet Creek Express' theme.

Train kept a rollin'

or if you prefer a more traditional Tiny Bradshaw jazzy 1951 version

[KCStudly]

Didn't get much done today. Did a lot of staring and pondering.

I did get the curb side wall bulkhead blocking GG'd in and weighed down, and I clamped one of the laminated galley wall edgings back into the jig to see if it will cooperate. Karl and I both think that I could just clamp and glue it into position w/o inducing too much stress (it has a bit of spring to it), but there is still a bunch of work to do to get them to a usable state. Same issue as before, by the time I mill them to an even thickness they will be too thin. Only took a minute to clamp it in the jig and didn't cost anything, so I'm still deciding.

Pic's with the next dump.

The 228 ran pretty good today. Update on the Belly Button thread.

[KCStudly]

Progress is progress.

Here is a pic from before where I glued the curbside wall blocking in for the bulkhead to attach to. It’s under the welding wire spools (weights), the long 1x4 spreader, the bins of screws (weights), the 1x4 blocks (focusing the weight into the blocking), and pieces of plastic coated freezer paper.


Also note the freezer paper underneath between the wall and floor assembly/worktable to keep the two from accidentally becoming glued together.

The 228E big hat ran pretty well, but is still leaking down. Just need to do a leak test to figure out what needs some attention.


I suppose I could have found some more weights and continued gluing in the blocking, but instead I set up a tourniquet to pull the ends of the wall edge laminations together (no pic). When I checked progress against the hatch rib template I realized I was going the wrong way (Doh!).

Backpedaling, I threw the laminating jig up on the workbench and clamped one of the laminations back into the jig. Here it is with the top clamped in and the bottom run out shown.



And clamped in.


That was Sunday. Tonight I got all the way out to Mecca before I realized that I had forgotten my glues at home. (Doh! … again.)

Still, progress is progress.

Pulled the weights and papers off of the bulkhead block.


Note the GG squeeze out; not too bad.

Then I used the cheap steak knife to rough trim the excess. Note how I used the wood as a guide and flexed the blade so that the handle would clear.


It doesn’t get super close because the edge is double beveled; need to look at Goodwill for an even cheaper one (though this one was free).

Here it is after knocking the “high” stuff down with the small Surform planer. I found if I put my index finger down in the chip well of the planer and pressed on the back of the grater blade, flexing it outward slightly, I had better control knocking down the GG w/o gouging into the blue foam.


I guess I got the glue, water and weight application ratio down pretty good because the board didn’t rise up at all. May also have been temperature/humidity related. The result was that the board is sitting down a touch from the surface of the foam.

This was after stroking the surrounding areas of foam a few times with the small 100 grit block.

Without glue on hand I turned to other things. The wall edging had sat in the jig for a few days but didn’t show any improvement (not that I really expected it to, just hoping… ), so I unclamped it and moved it to the outside of the jig where I could clamp some overextension into it.



This probably won’t work either, but it doesn’t hurt any to try. Thought about dumping boiling water or towels over it, but I don’t know what that might do to the TB2 glue.

Looking ahead to wire routing, and light fixture positioning, I pulled all of the lighting components out to consider the screw hole placement vs. wire recess cuts, and switch mounting. I drilled a couple of holes in a scrap of 5 mm ply using Karl’s 3/4 and 7/8 Forstner bits, but neither was right for the switches. I will probably have to make some stainless steel sheet metal wall plates. To keep them clean and streamlined, I am considering using the double backed carpet tape to attach them to the walls w/o screws.

And that about did it.

Oh yeah, I picked up a couple of small roller bearings for the throwing arm axle on the mini Mad Hatra (MMH? Chunker stuff).

[GPW]

KC , try heat bending those laminated ribs ... Heat gun !!! That works , proceed SLOWLY , keep the gun moving to heat up a large area , and it doesn’t hurt heating it from the top and bottom equally ... That does work ... a trick we’ve used with laminated ELBs ...

[KCStudly]

It would probably be fine if I were to just make my cut in the foam where it should be and just clamp the part in until the glue sets. I'm just a little leery about the induced stress causing problems down the road. It doesn't take much to get it to go where I want it to, just saying.

I may have just had an epiphany! Some one previously (I think maybe Aggie Tom) suggested that I plane the rough sides down smooth and then add back with my 5 mm ply to get back to the full 1-1/2 thick.

I wonder if I can run them through the planner to clean the sides up; set the thickness to 1-1/2 inch minus 2 times the 5 mm; then with it fixed in the jig somehow I could scab on some scrap strips of my marine ply to either side, miter butt joint the strips staggered on either side; then once they are locked back into shape just zip those added skins to match with the router.


So many ways to do a thing.

[GPW]

... and usually many ways to make it more difficult ...

[Wolffarmer]

I see no reason you can't run them through a planer. I will not tell you how I smoothed mine up and cut down to size. But next time I will use my planer. WE can do any fool damn thing we want.

When nobody is looking

Randy

[KCStudly]

Message received. K.I.S.S.

(Keep It Simple, Stupid)