Today was quite the adventure.  We made killer progress in some areas and completely regressed in others.

To start the day, we had to flip the camper over to fiberglass the underside.  It’s not really heavy at all, but it’s getting heavier every time we add something.  It’s an awkward large object to manhandle in the yard.

the first thing that needed to be done before glass could be applied was to sand down and shape the laminated beam that connects the shell to the cabover sleeping area. I took a lot of volume out of it yesterday with power tools, but that just left it super rough.  I had to use more power tools to smooth it out.  It still wasn’t real pretty.

so yeah, the beam wasn’t entirely square before we glued it in, so there was an unacceptably large gap between the beam and the shell.  We had some epoxy leftover from the boat, so I chopped up some fiberglass as filler so we could shove it into the gap.

It worked awesome actually, but took longer to dry than the polyester resin we’re using for everything else.  To stay busy, we went and cut the rest of the fiberglass we would need to finish the outside of the shell.

So at this point we have fiberglass and the camper where we want it.  The first piece we tackles was the largest.  It went over the beam that I just sanded and overlapped about a foot on each side.  Vertical edges are the hardest because it’s just difficult to get the resin up there without having it just drip off.  However, we greatly underestimated how rough the beam was.  It wasn’t smooth and was actually pretty wavy.  I wasn’t having any luck pushing the fiberglass into the low spots.  Every time I pulled one direction it pulled a different direction off of the shell.  Also, disaster struck!  We’ve laid up glass in the sun before, you just have to roll quickly and it wasn’t a big deal, but today it just wasn’t working.  I guess it was too hot because about halfway through I stopped being able to pull out bubbles or really move anything… The fiberglass had already set up after like 2 minutes of work time! So now the entire beam is a giant bubble of failure and the piece we just laid up was definitely going to have to be repaired.  There was nothing to be done about it except just let it dry and deal with it later.  So that was rather disheartening.

Unfortunately our shed gets baked by the afternoon sun anytime after 2.  After dinner there is enough shade by the house to move the camper over there and work on it in the shade! That made the resin much easier to work with and we could make more progress.

So that was a major annoyance.  I had hoped to get way more done today, but it just didn’t happen.  On a side note, we ordered some little round threaded hatches to install inside the camper so we can reach the forward bed tie down points in the truck.  Those arrived today!