Getting there . . .

After laying down the deck, worked slowed down a bit as Ryan was recovering from surgery to repair an injury to his hand. Seems like we've had a fair amount of orthopedic surgery in the Airstream community lately. Our buddy Steve, who is restoring a 1957 Caravaner up in Blaine, Washington (right near the Canadian border), recently broke his ankle much like I did this summer and also required some hardware.

While Ryan was laid up, I continued plugging away at one of the more tedious parts of the project - window repairs. All of the rubber in every one of my windows was completely dried up and cracked when we bought the Captain. In addition, three windows, including the front were nasty, dried up, and cracked Plexiglass. The rear window frame was also broken and needed to be re-welded.

Finally, when we pulled the interior skins I found the drip caps for two of the street side windows had been replaced at some point. Whoever did the replacement added new rivet holes and plugged the original holes with silicone. That repair had not worked well and was a major leak source. I've been taking one window at a time, cleaning the frames, replacing the bulb seals in the inner frame, the butyl tape, glass and outer seals on the outer frames, and reinstalling them. With each of the frames, I've spent several hours with a die grinder and a 3M 80 grit bristle brush cleaning off piles of oxidation.

The window pictured below is the kitchen window that I replaced last weekend. I've got four windows out now and just finished cleaning the frames and installing the bulb seal. Hopefully I'll have the glass by next Friday and can get those back in the trailer. Since the shell is off and just sitting on the ground, at least I don't have to worry about covering the open windows.

I read on Frank's Trailer Works blog a while back that in Eight Well Spent Hours he had completely rebuilt several Herh Clearview windows (a very different and less difficult job than rebuilding older Herh windows I hear, but significant work nonetheless) on a 1959 Caravaner. Man, I wish Frank was closer to Seattle, because with that kind of efficiency it would be well worth the money spent on his skilled labor. Although I'm getting faster with each window, I'm well over 20 hours into this project and I still have a fair amount of work left. If you are on the east coast and need Airstream work, give Frank a call. For that matter, even if you are not on the east coast, the guy is very nice and willing to help with your questions, so give him a call anyway.

Fortunately for me, I've got one of the most talented and hard working guys on the west coast helping me and Ryan wasn't out of commission for very long. The two of us worked on insulation last week and Ryan returned this week to install the c-channel. We had all the c-channel fabricated at Ballard Sheet Metal Works near Fisherman's Terminal here in Seattle, for about a hundred and thirty bucks. Not bad. I picked it up Wednesday morning and Ryan had all but the back curved sections installed by last night. The rear curved section is cut and ready to screw down.

This afternoon, I went to Alaskan Copper and Brass, a huge facility down on Sixth Avenue South in the SODO district of Seattle and picked up 6 (actually seven with the mathematically challenged dockworker's error) sheets of 5052 H-32 aluminum in .025 thickness. That set me back about another two hundred and fifty bucks as the receipts pile up. I picked the .025 based on the comments of several people who said the thicker aluminum was pretty hard to manipulate especially around the corners. Compared to the original belly-pan aluminum, this stuff seems much stronger. I was surprised to read in some forum threads about people using the same Alclad aluminum on the belly that is used on the rest of the trailer. The Alclad polishes up very nice, but it's much more expensive. And, frankly, there is no way I'm crawling around under the trailer to polish the belly-pan.