A 16ft green monster was delivered today
Jun 19, 2016 17:16:46 GMT 10
cobber, Don Ricardo, and 2 more like this
Post by sarahlou on Jun 19, 2016 17:16:46 GMT 10
Thought I’d provide an update on progress on the 16 foot monster.
I managed to get in touch with the daughter of the man that used to build Applebee Caravans in northern Tassie – she provided me with some really interesting information about her dad’s building business and it turns out that in many respects the caravan building was a side project of his building business. She clearly remembers her dad building the caravans and she thought that perhaps my caravan might be a custom made van that her dad made for a family that travelled with the caravan to Darwin.
The little monster is now rolling. He got kitted out with a new undercarriage, got a new (old) step fitted, some legs, a water tank, brakes, new tow gear, completely new chassis underneath. The front and back of the chassis were shaped so that they would follow the curve of the van. We hit a snag when the trailer guys saw all the rot around the bottom edge of the inside. So then I had to get a chippy in to remove the rot and replace with new timber. Then we hit another snag when the guys fitted the springs and let the caravan down off the jack and the springs immediately collapsed – “how much does this thing weigh?!” they asked me – so they had to get some heavy duty springs for this little monster.
I had previously been floating around the idea of taking the caravan to get soda blasted. However, after some serious enquiries with real people it turned out this would have cost in the region of $6,000+. So over the Easter long weekend earlier this year we went to town with the paint stripper. We managed to get most of the paint off the front, back and sides. The roof however posed a problem as neither of us are 8 foot tall with 6 foot arms to reach the roof. We will need to think about building some type of scaffold in order to reach the height and width of the roof. Putting this off for a while until we figure out the way forward from here.
Even with most of the paint off, I can’t say that I am over the moon about how it’s looking at the moment. It’s not nearly as clean as I would have liked it to be after stripping the paint. There is a tone of old silicon on there and still a tone of really stubborn paint flecks in hard to get at places such as crevices and around mouldings that really make it feel like I made the wrong decision about stripping the paint. I can’t see those stubborn, awkward bits of paint coming off for anyone or for anything.
I’m now having second thoughts about my decision to strip it and now I think that I should have given serious thought to removing the aluminium completely and re-sheeting with ply. Looking forward, I would feel a lot more comfortable with working with the plywood (filling and sanding and painting) and I would feel relatively comfortable with sealing joins and corners. I feel like I would even be able to do that myself. That wasn’t in my master plan as I really wanted this van to look like it would have looked when it would have come out of Mr Applebee’s workshop with the top all polished up and the bottom portion painted. I look at what I’ve got in front of me now and working at getting all this metal clean and completely paint-free and re-sealing the seams and corners looks a little too difficult! I was thinking of removing all the moulding and replacing with new – there is a place near Hobart that makes the same profile – but just looking at the existing moulding on the caravan I wonder how on earth it’s going to come off without damaging the sheet panels. Oh dear … the trials and tribulations of doing up an old caravan ....
I managed to get in touch with the daughter of the man that used to build Applebee Caravans in northern Tassie – she provided me with some really interesting information about her dad’s building business and it turns out that in many respects the caravan building was a side project of his building business. She clearly remembers her dad building the caravans and she thought that perhaps my caravan might be a custom made van that her dad made for a family that travelled with the caravan to Darwin.
The little monster is now rolling. He got kitted out with a new undercarriage, got a new (old) step fitted, some legs, a water tank, brakes, new tow gear, completely new chassis underneath. The front and back of the chassis were shaped so that they would follow the curve of the van. We hit a snag when the trailer guys saw all the rot around the bottom edge of the inside. So then I had to get a chippy in to remove the rot and replace with new timber. Then we hit another snag when the guys fitted the springs and let the caravan down off the jack and the springs immediately collapsed – “how much does this thing weigh?!” they asked me – so they had to get some heavy duty springs for this little monster.
I had previously been floating around the idea of taking the caravan to get soda blasted. However, after some serious enquiries with real people it turned out this would have cost in the region of $6,000+. So over the Easter long weekend earlier this year we went to town with the paint stripper. We managed to get most of the paint off the front, back and sides. The roof however posed a problem as neither of us are 8 foot tall with 6 foot arms to reach the roof. We will need to think about building some type of scaffold in order to reach the height and width of the roof. Putting this off for a while until we figure out the way forward from here.
Even with most of the paint off, I can’t say that I am over the moon about how it’s looking at the moment. It’s not nearly as clean as I would have liked it to be after stripping the paint. There is a tone of old silicon on there and still a tone of really stubborn paint flecks in hard to get at places such as crevices and around mouldings that really make it feel like I made the wrong decision about stripping the paint. I can’t see those stubborn, awkward bits of paint coming off for anyone or for anything.
I’m now having second thoughts about my decision to strip it and now I think that I should have given serious thought to removing the aluminium completely and re-sheeting with ply. Looking forward, I would feel a lot more comfortable with working with the plywood (filling and sanding and painting) and I would feel relatively comfortable with sealing joins and corners. I feel like I would even be able to do that myself. That wasn’t in my master plan as I really wanted this van to look like it would have looked when it would have come out of Mr Applebee’s workshop with the top all polished up and the bottom portion painted. I look at what I’ve got in front of me now and working at getting all this metal clean and completely paint-free and re-sealing the seams and corners looks a little too difficult! I was thinking of removing all the moulding and replacing with new – there is a place near Hobart that makes the same profile – but just looking at the existing moulding on the caravan I wonder how on earth it’s going to come off without damaging the sheet panels. Oh dear … the trials and tribulations of doing up an old caravan ....