Since the last post I’ve completed the frame-to-trailer-sidewall reassembly. All the rotten structural wood is gone. There’s a little bad wood on the ceiling still, but really it’s now all reassembly and appearance. No more demolition and repair.
First I made sure the frame was solidly strapped to the supports. Those look like this now.
Then I redid the left sidewall-to-frame-and-floor attachment. Now the frame attachment looks like this:
Nicely aligned. Before the sidewalls were too wide by a half inch.
I completed the framing on the right side. The hole about in the center of the picture is at the bottom of the refrigerator cabinet section. That hole will allow a dometic access/cooling hatch. The square hole just left of the front door is for the new furnace. I still need to make the holes through the skin for those. That will come later.
I’ve been using a lot of clips made from aluminum angle. I hate the original corrugated fasteners, but where they were holding well I’ve left them. Where needed I’ve added a clip. Like this.
In front of the right wheel well I didn’t like the wood. The bolt hole was enlarged at the top and the wood was soft. So I let in a new piece of douglas fir and backed up with an overlap.
There were some metal plates used on the main cabinet. This is on the right side of the trailer interior, between the two doors.
Originally the cabinet was put together with hundreds of nails and a bunch of those corrugated fasteners. Now I know the tiniest bit about real woodworking. I hate having metal plates to hold the cabinet together, but I don’t have skills and equipment to rebuild it efficiently, and I don’t have time to rebuild it inefficiently. So I just moved those to the inside. Here’s what the inside behind those plates looked like before.
Actually the whole cabinet was starting to come apart, since I pulled it away from the floor. So pulled the sides together
and I added more backing plates and corner reinforcement. Adds
I mentioned before that I had a local welder make me new wheel wells out of 1/8″ aluminum. A bit pricey, but strong and should last for the next millenium. They look like this:
I had to remove a little material from the corners where the axle attaches. There are three clips on the inside (long one in the middle and two small on the ends), and three on the outside.
There’s a clip at the top attaching the wheel well to the vertical 2×2, and another at the left side. At the right I trimmed the floor beams back about 3/4 inch farther than I should have, so I added a section of aluminum angle to support that side clip properly. This is all very solid now. After this I put the insulation on this section of the right side, but I forgot to take a picture. I’ll do that later. I put the skin panel back on temporarily. The cutout in the skin matches the cutout in the wheel well, and I can enlarge both if I feel it necessary.
This picture shows the cutouts around the axle attachment.
From the inside there’s space around the well. This picture is looking down from inside the cabinet.
Later I’ll close that up with a epoxy coated exterior plywood and caulk it so it’s water tight. Note that the aluminum of the wheel well, even at the cutouts, is below the floor. So no spray from the wheels can hit the floor directly.