The skin is all off. The new space is mighty cramped, but I'm grateful to have power, especially working through the winter- a little Pelonis disc furnace does a nice job of taking the chill off, before it gives its all as the future built-in trailer furnace. More to come on that, should be a fun side project.
I'd previously ripped a stack of fir (well, generic whitewood) 2x4s down for my 2x2 framing, but as usual I eventually overthought things. Cue a trip to Crosscut in Portland and a load of lovely poplar dimensional lumber, including a slab of 8/4 for the wheelwell sills. No mere 1x8s nailed together here, no sir. Should be considerably stiffer and sturdier than the whitewood (or the zero-grade, extra knotty stuff used at the factory), and ostensibly lighter, too. As it turns out, the whitewood 2x2s still came in handy, although I'd prefer if they hadn't.
I knew the bulk of my skirts needed replaced (basically the bottom 2x2 of the walls), and I started on the door side front corner, which has by far the most damage.
The skirt nails through the side to the sill, which is another 2x2 which sits between the steel frame and the floor. As I was digging out some of the front corner, I found that the corner of the floor was compromised, too. Not a huge surprise. Digging behind that, I found that the sill was rotten. Grr. OK, since the dinette bench needs to come out, and that's all that'll be holding the wall up once I remove the rest of the rotten skirt, and having no great desire to see the front half of the trailer collapse in a heap, I needed to figure out a way to support it. I didn't just want to crib it up from the floor, since any movement of the trailer on the suspension would be, umm, really bad. It needed to be from the frame, and couldn't get in the way of the work I needed to do. I ended up running one of my whitewood 2x2s through the bracket of the step, and screwing the cribbing from that directly into the wall framing- worked slick.
OK, so while the first order of business is to replace the damaged skirt, and thus support the wall, the sill had to come out too. Do I just patch the floor and try to slide a new piece of sill between it and the frame? The front curbside corner had a bit under a square foot of rot, the front streetside corner had a square foot or so broken by some PO's misplaced foot inside the dinette base, the door threshold was a bit compromised by flexing over the bad sill, and there was an inch or so of rot at the corner directly in front of the wheelwell, right at the base of the tall cabinet. The rest wasn't bad, except for a bit at the streetside rear.
Having scratched my head a bunch, I decided that it was all patchable (and pretty much all under cabinets, anyway), except- I wasn't thrilled with the prospects of a patch right at the doorway, and, in order to get at the inch or so under the corner of the tall cabinet, I'd need to remove it anyway. If I'm going through all of the work of removing the tall cabinet and the two dinette bases, I might as well pull the kitchen and the bed base and do the whole stinking thing, expose all of the sills, and do it right. Ah, sweet, sweet scope creep. Great.
The original floor is 1/2" ply over 1/4" masonite, with a bit of thin roll fiberglass between them where the sills and joists aren't. I'm a big guy, and while I hadn't noticed it much earlier, walking around with the dinette bases out I could definitely tell where the joists were as the floor flexed. Since new skin is on the menu anyway, a 3/4" floor would take up about the same space and be much more rigid. My understanding is that the masonite is there as a bit of a weather shield for the floor, and to protect the insulation a bit, but I question the R-value of fiberglass compressed to 1/8" or so. A more water-resistant floor and either a layer of tarpaper or a rubberized undercoating should do about as well, and I could ditch the masonite. My old Apache had a 3/4" plywood floor with nothing at all underneath it, and it seemed plenty cozy camping in our mild Pacific Northwest winters.
I originally assumed I'd use marine ply, because overkill, until I heard about MDO. MDO has a high resin-content face on each side, giving it at least the moisture resistance of marine ply, and is at least as stiff. It was developed originally for highway signs, and it's popular in boatbuilding and reusable concrete forms. As a bonus, it's cheaper and considerably lighter than marine ply. Because I'm a geek, I calculated the total weight of the floor as follows, in glorious old-school hand-coded HTML:
So, I get a much sturdier floor and save well over sixty pounds. Sign me up.
...which brings us to the horror of the Chinese puzzle box. Walls gotta stay up (since I'm cramped for space, and can't just detach them and lay them on the shop floor), I need to replace the skirts and sills that hold both the walls and floor up, and since I don't want to remove the structure-providing tall cabinet until the wall repairs are complete, the floor needs to be done last. Got it.
I finally ended up cutting the bolts and nails holding the sill in with a carbide blade in my multitool, and cut just enough of the floor out to liberate the offending sill, while the wall was held in place by my step-centric temporary supports. Worked slick
The original flashing under the skirt and sill is siding from another Cardinal, a green and white job- including the head badge under the front door! Since I can tell by overspray remains that these were painted after skin installation at the factory, I have no idea what chain of events led them to tear down a previously assembled and painted trailer and recycle the skin for flashing.
All of my flashing appears to have come from the same donor. I'd planned on reusing it, but there's some nasty galvanic corrosion at the front frame outrigger, so that gets replaced before my replacement poplar skirt and sill go back in.
 | |||
| Factory wiring. I'm sure this is up to code, somewhere, maybe. |
I'd previously ripped a stack of fir (well, generic whitewood) 2x4s down for my 2x2 framing, but as usual I eventually overthought things. Cue a trip to Crosscut in Portland and a load of lovely poplar dimensional lumber, including a slab of 8/4 for the wheelwell sills. No mere 1x8s nailed together here, no sir. Should be considerably stiffer and sturdier than the whitewood (or the zero-grade, extra knotty stuff used at the factory), and ostensibly lighter, too. As it turns out, the whitewood 2x2s still came in handy, although I'd prefer if they hadn't.
I knew the bulk of my skirts needed replaced (basically the bottom 2x2 of the walls), and I started on the door side front corner, which has by far the most damage.
 |
| Rotten skirt, nothing to see here. |
The skirt nails through the side to the sill, which is another 2x2 which sits between the steel frame and the floor. As I was digging out some of the front corner, I found that the corner of the floor was compromised, too. Not a huge surprise. Digging behind that, I found that the sill was rotten. Grr. OK, since the dinette bench needs to come out, and that's all that'll be holding the wall up once I remove the rest of the rotten skirt, and having no great desire to see the front half of the trailer collapse in a heap, I needed to figure out a way to support it. I didn't just want to crib it up from the floor, since any movement of the trailer on the suspension would be, umm, really bad. It needed to be from the frame, and couldn't get in the way of the work I needed to do. I ended up running one of my whitewood 2x2s through the bracket of the step, and screwing the cribbing from that directly into the wall framing- worked slick.
 |
| Yep, that's rotten. |
OK, so while the first order of business is to replace the damaged skirt, and thus support the wall, the sill had to come out too. Do I just patch the floor and try to slide a new piece of sill between it and the frame? The front curbside corner had a bit under a square foot of rot, the front streetside corner had a square foot or so broken by some PO's misplaced foot inside the dinette base, the door threshold was a bit compromised by flexing over the bad sill, and there was an inch or so of rot at the corner directly in front of the wheelwell, right at the base of the tall cabinet. The rest wasn't bad, except for a bit at the streetside rear.
 |
| Remains of the PO's funky homemade automotive heater core/forced air furnace visible in the streetside dinette base. Adhesive holding the original Marmoleum down had failed, which made pulling up both it and the subsequent cheapie stick-on faux-parquet floor a snap. |
Having scratched my head a bunch, I decided that it was all patchable (and pretty much all under cabinets, anyway), except- I wasn't thrilled with the prospects of a patch right at the doorway, and, in order to get at the inch or so under the corner of the tall cabinet, I'd need to remove it anyway. If I'm going through all of the work of removing the tall cabinet and the two dinette bases, I might as well pull the kitchen and the bed base and do the whole stinking thing, expose all of the sills, and do it right. Ah, sweet, sweet scope creep. Great.
The original floor is 1/2" ply over 1/4" masonite, with a bit of thin roll fiberglass between them where the sills and joists aren't. I'm a big guy, and while I hadn't noticed it much earlier, walking around with the dinette bases out I could definitely tell where the joists were as the floor flexed. Since new skin is on the menu anyway, a 3/4" floor would take up about the same space and be much more rigid. My understanding is that the masonite is there as a bit of a weather shield for the floor, and to protect the insulation a bit, but I question the R-value of fiberglass compressed to 1/8" or so. A more water-resistant floor and either a layer of tarpaper or a rubberized undercoating should do about as well, and I could ditch the masonite. My old Apache had a 3/4" plywood floor with nothing at all underneath it, and it seemed plenty cozy camping in our mild Pacific Northwest winters.
I originally assumed I'd use marine ply, because overkill, until I heard about MDO. MDO has a high resin-content face on each side, giving it at least the moisture resistance of marine ply, and is at least as stiff. It was developed originally for highway signs, and it's popular in boatbuilding and reusable concrete forms. As a bonus, it's cheaper and considerably lighter than marine ply. Because I'm a geek, I calculated the total weight of the floor as follows, in glorious old-school hand-coded HTML:
| Material | Total Pounds | Difference |
| Original (1/2" softwood ply + 1/4" Masonite) | 176.15 | n/a |
| 3/4" marine ply | 152.34 | -23.8 |
| MDO | 114.26 | -61.9 |
So, I get a much sturdier floor and save well over sixty pounds. Sign me up.
...which brings us to the horror of the Chinese puzzle box. Walls gotta stay up (since I'm cramped for space, and can't just detach them and lay them on the shop floor), I need to replace the skirts and sills that hold both the walls and floor up, and since I don't want to remove the structure-providing tall cabinet until the wall repairs are complete, the floor needs to be done last. Got it.
 |
| Miracle diet. The longer I look at it, the more the pounds just fall off! |
I finally ended up cutting the bolts and nails holding the sill in with a carbide blade in my multitool, and cut just enough of the floor out to liberate the offending sill, while the wall was held in place by my step-centric temporary supports. Worked slick
All of my flashing appears to have come from the same donor. I'd planned on reusing it, but there's some nasty galvanic corrosion at the front frame outrigger, so that gets replaced before my replacement poplar skirt and sill go back in.
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