Ways to Avoid Insulating

One of the features of the older Airstreams that I really admire are the drip caps over the entrance door. When they are in good shape, these "eyebrows" are a nice example of Airstream's early craftsmanship. Often, however, after 50 years or so, they are pretty beat up. Ours was no exception.

You can see in this photo of the original that someone had even tried to straighten it out by pop riveting a strip of bar stock to the front edge. It didn't work.

In fact, I think the Captain suffered a pretty strong blow to the forehead at some point in his past as not only was the eyebrow beat to hell, but there is actually about a four inch crack in the skin right at the door frame. The half moon of rivet holes are for a patch I cut out today to cover the cracked area which is actually underneath the eyebrow.

Before we even bought our trailer, I had been looking at various blogs and noticed that Frank, of Frank's Trailer Works had rebuilt the eyebrow for his 1962 Overlander last year and posted a nice write up describing the process. I've been bugging Frank for the last couple months asking if he would mind building a replacement for me, but fortunately for him, his shop is getting pretty busy and he encouraged me to try my hand at some metal forming.

Although I was concerned I was just going to waste an expensive sheet of aluminum, Frank was right. It really is not all that difficult if you are just patient and slowly work the aluminum. The right aluminum is also essential. Based on Frank's write up, I bought 2024 T0 aluminum. The "T0" specifies the softest of the 2024 aluminum. Anything harder and it will just crack as you try to make the curves. Frank didn't list the thickness that he bought, but I just went with .032. I think this is thicker than the original as my finished replacement seems much sturdier than the original. The original appears to be (based on my completely uneducated guess) more like .025.

I started just as Frank had, by flattening out the original eyebrow with a dead blow hammer (and some extra smacks from a ball pean hammer).

After I had it all flattened out, I clamped the original to my new sheet of aluminum and traced it out for cutting.

As you can see from this shot, I grossly overestimated the amount of aluminum I needed. I could probably make four or five more of these. I still suck with the air nibblers, so I just cut it out with tin snips. Those of you that do this for a living must have damn strong hands as mine are sore as hell today.

Once I had it cut out, I followed Frank's receipe and began by working the bend on the straight edge (1/4" on my original) with the hand brake and then moved onto the curved bend (which was 1/2" on mine). Unlike Frank's description, my eyebrown did not develop much of a curve at all after putting the two bends into the edges. In fact, it was pretty much dead flat still, so I just slowly began working it back and forth over my knee while occasionally heating it up a bit with a MAP gas plumbing torch. The heat really seemed to help with forming the curve.

I actually ended up putting too much of a curve into my eyebrow while working it on the bench and my knee out in the backyard. When I took it back to the trailer I realized it needed less curve in one direction (going down towards the ground) and more curve in another (heading back against the trailer). In the photo below, the replacement is closest to the edge of the table.

To get the final shape, I started by drilling the center most rivet hole and placing a cleco. I then marked the two holes to either side of that, took the eyebrow down, drilled those, and clecoed it up again. I followed this process all the way to the ends, slowly bending it to the outline of the original placement with each pair of rivet holes. [On edit: You should be able to see the outline of the original placement in the aluminum because Airstream used razors to cut off the excess butyl tape after attaching drip caps and other exterior accessories.]

I didn't have a bucking partner this weekend, so I'm going to wait to finish the installation until Ryan has some time. These are too visible and important to risk a one man rivet job (at which I'm not very good). I'm incredibly happy with how this looks so far. It was a fun project that I will always look at with pride. Thanks for pushing me to do this myself Frank.