Sunday, March 3, 2024

Corners

Doesn't feel like a lot was achieved this week. Other stuff happening, meant less time for the caravan build. A few stuff ups also sent me backwards.  

Lots of cutting foam when mistakes where made. The door was glued up. I cut and glued up the wheel well sections. I cut a lot of triangle sections to frame the corners as in the image below.  They'll be glued in today and then given a light sanding in preparation for the fabric coating.



Sunday, February 25, 2024

Squaring Off

An exciting week. I gave up bashing my head trying to square off the panels. The 1200x600 XPS panels when I started weren't very square. I should have squared them all before joining them together. But it seemed a good idea to leave that until later. Now, being later, I wish I hadn't. Trying to square up the full panels was a lot harder than I thought it would be. After countless tries, with string, straight edges and not so straight edges, I gave up and asked for help.

Tom arrived with his van. We loaded it all up and took it to the Men's Shed. The plan was to use the table saw to trim off the edges. No edge being straight stopped that idea. We ended up clamping a foam panel to an MDF panel set up on a table. Line up two edges of the foam at a corner of the MDF. They had to be some overlap, as the edges weren't straight or square. Check that too much foam was not going to be removed. Then I then sanded the two sides to match the MDF panel edges. I used a right angle to check the edges as I sanded. Done! Two edges (more or less) straight and at 90 degrees to each other. Undo the clamps, move the foam, line up one of the now straight edges with an edge of the MDF. Use the a tape measure to check the dimensions. (The walls needed to be the same height. The roof needed to be 960mm wide). Clamp. Sand the edge that isn't straight to match the MDF. Unclamp, move and get the last edge lined up. Clamp. Sand. Quicker to describe than to do. Several hours of sanding to get it all done. Tom then dropped me and the foam back home again. Thank you Tom!

I did another epoxy test this week. A small test piece. I used a paint brush rather than a scraper to spread the epoxy about. This test went a lot better. For one side of a 1 sqm piece of foam, the added fabric and epoxy  weight would be 280g. I also did a test with PVA glue, that was right on 200g. Both are acceptable. Using a roller or scraper might get the epoxy weight lower. 

PVA glue is so much easier to use.