Camper Build – Procrastination and Determination

Today was a super productive day.

I started out by working on the nose cone piece a little bit with the big LED light, however I have too much cardboard and nothing will stay in place, so I quickly abandoned that project. I will deal with it later!

Next up was the roof that we glued the stiffener pieces on last night. It had ample time to dry and after I dug it out from under all of the random weights it was good to go!

Dad just parked his little red car across the street at the neighbor’s house. That’s one way to deal with it I guess.

The foam strips are all sanded and ready to go!

We decided to use the thinner 6oz fiberglass tape that I bought on Amazon a while ago for the stiffeners since it’s easier to wrap around curves than the super thick 1708 E-glass. Each beam is covered in 4 layers of fiberglass with extra strips in the middle. Should be strong enough!

All laid up! …now we wait for it to dry.

So while the roof is setting up, Jason and I dug the main camper body out of the shed to see how the Herculiner bed liner dried overnight. It was still pretty tacky, so we set it out to roast in the morning sun. A few hours later it was dry enough to flip back over so we could start on the interior.

Our blue painters tape is worthless. So I’ll get to clean that up later…

Exactly what I wanted. Someday soon I’ll get to paint the outside with real paint!

We needed to get the camper flipped back upright because I had a bunch of dimensions that I needed for the galley and other interior outfitting. We’re still buying parts for the camper but I need those in hand before I can really make a lot of progress on the inside… The next few weeks should be like Christmas for me with all the Amazon packages! 🙂

Either way, I started playing around with actual dimensions for the galley and dinette area.

the cooler goes in the middle there with a storage cabinet to the right and a seat to the left.

We had the thought that maybe we could just buy standard kitchen cabinets from Lowe’s since I made the galley dimensions as standard as I could. The countertop is 24″ deep and the height is a comfortable 36″ tall. However, they didn’t really have anything that would work for our custom camper. (not surprising) and I was still underwhelmed with all the countertop choices. I decided to go ahead with an idea that I already had for the counter and if it looks terrible, we can go ahead and do something else later.

I’m in LOVE with this tile pattern. Maybe I can shove it into the camper somewhere…

Even though we procrastinated away an hour or so at Lowe’s, when we got home we still had to suck it up and sand the inside of the camper shell. While Jason was inside doing something I decided I would grab the grinder and go ahead and sand the bottom edges that he would have to crouch down to get to. My back is sore now and I need a Tylenol. Also, we always manage to wait until the hottest part of the day before we start sanding. It was miserable and I kept having to stop and take my ear muffs, hood, sunglasses, and respirator off so i could wipe the sweat off my face. Meh.