We got so much done the first part of today that I already made a blog post about it! That more than makes up for not really being able to work on things during the week that much.

Jason made the mounting pads for the lift mechanism, so we decided to mix up some epoxy and filler and glue them to the shell directly.  The filler looks like liquid cotton candy to me.  It’s an odd texture (and baby pink color!). The mounts on the aft bulkhead are going to be through bolted since they’re on a vertical surface but everything else should be just fine with screws into the plywood. Someday soon the camper will have a functional (and permanent!) roof solution!

I also have a little confession… after I finished putting on the new fiberglass for the turnbuckle mounts, I left my paintbrush sitting in the camper… with epoxy on it.  So… I glued the paintbrush down.  Jason had to get the chisel to get it off. Whoops! #thisiswhywecanthavenicethings

After this is was mostly just a bunch of little things to finish up.  Since we’re going to be using a turnbuckle to hold the camper into the truck at all 4 corners of the bed, we need access to the front turnbuckles somehow.  I bought some marine hatches on Amazon and we pretty quickly had the holes cut out to mount them.

We also are planning on having a slide out to make the bed long enough to sleep in, so Jason cut that out of a full sheet of balsa plywood. We used balsa so it would be lightweight, even though it was a bit more expensive. That large of a piece of regular plywood would have been super heavy.

I sanded the bed slide rest that I made earlier in the day and added another coat of glossy epoxy to the mahogany strip. It looks gorgeous in the sunlight!

I think mom is getting annoyed that I keep stealing her wax paper from the kitchen.  Do you think she wants it back if it has epoxy on it? I think it’s mine now… 😉

I washed the old boat cover that we had rotting away under the patio and half of it covers the camper pretty well! It’s at least an upgrade from the plastic paint dropcloth we had.  I don’t think I like the blue since it looks too much like a shitty blue tarp.  I’ll probably make a custom fit cover out of different material later, but this will do until we have a permanent storage area for it.

We didn’t get as much done during the last half of today because Jason made some pulled pork BBQ.