I woke up super early this morning because Jason had to go into work. After sleeping in for another hour I woke up and got to work on the camper. I really really really want to get this thing painted someday soon, so I decided to suck it up and spend the day sanding.
I’m not sure if paint will stick to the bedliner, so to mitigate any possible issues with paint adhesion, I went ahead and started sanding the excess liner that bled through the painters tape. Note to self: buy nice ass, expensive painter’s tape to save time in the end.
I did that pretty much to kill some time until it was socially acceptable to use power tools. Apparently normal people don’t wake up that early in the morning. Meh.
The overlap of the fiberglass sheets is really obvious, as is the texture left behind by the fiberglass itself. This annoyed me out of principle, so I mixed up some epoxy with filler and made my own version of really expensive Bondo putty…and then coated the camper with it.
Ended up running out of epoxy but had enough to finish. So that’s simultaneously irritating and convenient. This stuff takes a few hours to dry, so I moved on to the roof. We put fiberglass over the stiffener pieces yesterday, so they were ready to go this morning.
That still didn’t take enough time to let the filler dry on the shell, so I flipped the roof over and sanded the top part.
I feel like now is the time to mention that I’m wearing a Tyvek suit, rubber gloves, hood, respirator, safety glasses, and earmuffs. It’s HOT and uncomfortable. It beats being covered in fiberglass dust, but I keep having to take it off and put it all back on in between bouts of sanding when I get too hot or need a break. I will be VERY glad to be done with fiberglass!
Sanding the filler on the shell took way more time than I thought it would. Even with Jason helping it took a few hours. It took away a lot of the surface texture and softened the fiberglass seams, but the surface is still pretty wavy. This isn’t going to be a show camper. I considered doing a run of actual Bondo filler and high build primer to make it prettier, but I think we’re at the point of diminishing returns. It would be easier and quicker for me to do a really fancy hand-painted finish on the camper with some crazy pattern than it would to actually get the bodywork straight. This is also why I built a rat rod truck and not classic hot rod. I hate bodywork.
After we finished the sanding (I want to touch up the cabover section in the above photo, but that’s not a big deal) we decided to test fit the windows and drill the holes for them.
At this point it started to sprinkle outside. We weren’t getting the camper back in the shed, so we covered it with everything we could find. Making an actual cover for it is on my list…
Since we had the roof in the shed we started putting some of the epoxy fairing compound on it. We didn’t get very far since the roof has a lot of overlapping seams and is pretty rough. Jason made the executive decision that since epoxy is about $100 a gallon it was stupid to use it as filler and we went to Lowe’s and got regular Bondo. That will be tomorrow’s adventure…
Oh joy.. more sanding… but at least it won’t be fiberglass this time. I’m totally ok with body filler! My goal is to be able to paint the camper this weekend! I feel like that will make it feel more like a camper instead of a fiberglass hulk. Hopefully that works out!