The Poet Creek Express - Foamie Hybrid

[Wolffarmer]

I read that Susan Sarandon was on a build crew, and that she somehow included some of Timothy Leary's ashes in the Temple she helped build. Yes The Timothy Leary

All true.

She is about the only celebrity there I have much respect for. Most of the others just showed up ( many fly in ) at a Pay n Play camp then went out a bit to show they had been there.

[KCStudly]

Another "gas" appliance followed me home today - Don't Be A Hater.

I did some touch up sanding on the front roof tonight and a little more "detail" filler work there; more like spotting in... should be the last of it there... I hope.

On the hatch top I had a lot more work to do knocking down the curb side and can see that I still have more work to do there. Probably another two sessions of sanding/filling before it catches up to the front.

I have also decided to finish up these areas before tackling the license plate area again. That way I can lift the cabin back up... maybe even up on horses again... so that the work is at a more convenient level.

Interesting tidbit about Sarandon, thanks for sharing.

[lfhoward]

Love the lantern. I am a big fan of old, well built things. It should serve you well.

[KCStudly]

Thanks. It has that vintage character, made of steel. The only plastic is the knob, and that is probably bakelite.

No updates. Yesterday afternoon we had torrential downpours with some trouble areas at work, so was asked to stay later than usual to do damage control. When I got to the shop Karl asked for help processing some steel sheets thru the shear and break. He's building some large hydraulic sump tanks for a customer and the 4x10 x 3/16 sheets are a lot easier for two people to handle.

Tonight Chris and Karl took us out for a belated B-day dinner date. Bravo Bravo: Gnocchi app - arugula pesto, dried figs, minced pancetta with freshly grated Parmesan; arugula salad special with candied walnuts, crumbled blue cheese, shaved fennel, sliced plum and a light oil dressing; grilled culotte top sirloin steak (the most tender sirloin steak that I have ever had, almost like tenderloin), hand-cut French fries (kind of like a cross between boardwalk fires and potato sticks, straight and crisp on the outside but creamy smooth on the inside and salted just right), blue cheese, and a little bourbon sauce on the plate; Affogato - malted ice cream, florentines (pecan lace brittle cookies), cocoa nibs & espresso cream.

Zowie that was good, and how! We had a great time with friends enjoying a grand meal.

[KCStudly]

Today I made another long board, a flat one this time. Since I’m doing so much bodywork here lately, I thought I’d do a recap of my sanding tools.

On the right is my “right hand”, the small oak block with 1/4 sheet wrap. The larger board is my second “medium” sized board; just a 3 inch wide piece of 1/2 inch ply sized to take a std belt sander belt. The ends of the board were just sanded over a little so that the belt wraps around a little easier. The foam block takes up slack and gives me a little something more to hold onto, while the 1x2 piece with radius corners locks the tension into the belt by sliding toward the end.


Here’s the long arched board again. Just a piece of ply with a pine strong back that had been cut on the band saw to mimic the shallow curve of the roof. You can see how it doesn’t touch the table in the middle. The abrasive is a fabric backed belt cut from one of Karl’s big commercial belt sander belts and glued on.


The new flat board is 3 inches wide x 38 inches long ripped from a piece of 1x4 poplar that I found already chopped short in the bin at the big orange box. The strong back is 1x2, also poplar, held short 1 inch at either end so that the belt can be wrapped around the end and stapled down. The ends and top edges, as well as the strong back, are all rounded over 3/16 inch. The long edges along the bottom were just broken slightly with the small oak block, just to take the sharp edge off. Finish trim screws up thru the face of the board into the rib, TB2 to glue the belt on, then clamped to the edge of the table to make sure there aren’t any bubbles or ripples.



These, along with the little corner block for rounding the roof edge over and the Bondo spreader, have been my main tools lately.


After another round of sanding and filling on the front roof I am more and more confident that it is finally about as good as I can get it. Which is to say that I am pretty happy with it and glad that I spent the extra time to get the shape the way I had intended it to be; no swale and no big lumpy junk. The lighter areas show where the last very thin skim coats went on today.


The long flat board really helped get the hatch top to where I could do what I hope is the last major skimming of spackle, with only minor touch-ups left. At least I think and hope so. GPW… and Angib’s advice to others elsewhere… was right, the longer board gets it on larger surfaces. I did have it pretty close, but just a few strokes with the new longer board made it all come together in short order.


Next I made a quick trammel from some thin scrap to mark the new profile for the top of the license plate recess. Just used a short drywall screw as a pivot point down in the lower hatch foam.


Carved a little, sanded a little and got it halfway decent, sort of. It was still going to need some spackle so, on the outside corner of the little scrapper I had made to drag the roof edges, I cut an ogee shape, thinking that it would help keep things uniform.


Turns out that my thumb worked just about as well, if not better. It is still not especially symmetrical, but I think it won’t stand out so much with the more rounded shape.


Tomorrow we are going back up to Nashua to celebrate Yvette’s aunt’s 100th B-day!!! So probably won’t get a chance to work on the camper, but I am getting plenty of bodywork experience.

[dales133]

By the time youve perfected creating and using all those ingenious sanders youll be done!
Typical isnt it,i always seem to get the hang of things 5 mins before completion...
Looking good mate

[KCStudly]

You nailed it. I spent more time making the long board than I did using it, but it did make a difference, so was worth the time.

Doing good bodywork is kind of like looking for something; when you find it you stop looking. The other side benefit is that I have learned how to make more functional sanding blocks, too.

[Atomic77]

Between races we fly some of the west coast crew to the Indiana shop to help put the boat back together for the next race. I always get a kick out of the guys who think bodywork is so easy and anyone can do it. Because as you know, that's just not the case! Not if you're going to do it right! In fact, I go to a lot of work to make sure no one can see my work! I watch guys put filler on, then sand it off. Put it on, sand it off... The trick is, put on more than you think you need the first time, then level that down. I can usually get things straight in one pass. But that takes years of practice. Looking good my friend... but you're right... you have to know when to stop!

[KCStudly]

Sorry to take so long to respond there, Atomic. I appreciate your advice. I have been reluctant to just put a bunch of spackle on all at once for a couple of reasons. First, I am sanding by hand and the middle is still kind of hard to reach, so I figured if I just add a little at a time I would have less chance of going completely "off the rails". You know, trying to maintain my references as I go. Power tools would allow me to mess up faster... this is still a relatively soft medium, unlike Bondo or thickened epoxy.

The other thing is that I still have not mastered the art of spreading this stuff. It does okay up to a point, but with some combinations of volume, angle of the spreader and pressure it is just as likely to peel up a big layer of the wet, as it is to put it down. Though I'm getting better.

I have been using my extra 2x2 cedar spar as a (kind of sort of mostly) straight edge, just laying it across to check for high spots in between guide coats, and that tells me that, for the most part the hatch is about as flat at any given point across as most areas of the roof (+/- 1/32 undulations, maybe 1/16 inch here and there, but in broad terms... so the wave like effect we talked about, not chop or ugly bulges).

The way that I set the hinge spars is really turning into a hindrance, tho. By not being able to just sand right over the spars and continue the line of the profile in long strokes it's making it harder to get the area immediately behind the hatch hinge spar good. Basically I sanded the roof foam down to meet the front edge of the cabin hinge spar (which was low), and the hatch foam down to meet the back edge of the hatch hinge spar (which was also low), then I built up the flat part of the hatch top (to make it less flat); and ended up with a dip, a dip, and a hump.

Well tonight I decided to get more aggressive and sanded away at the hump. From my experience on the front roof I knew that it really wasn't that hard to "deck" the flatter area into the tighter radius and still have a nice smooth transition, but there was no way that I could carry the line from the first dip all the way thru and still have foam left at the transition into the tighter hatch radius. Thankfully, the stack up of hinge, rubber and trim will breakup the line enough that your eye won't notice the disruption. At least that is my hope. Then it was just a matter of getting the hump just right, so I knocked it back down again, found the remaining lows, and gave it another coat, just trying to bring the still low areas in the curb side up enough. Still trying to learn how to float more thickness where I want it and less where I don't, all the while following the arc of the profile in a gliding fashion. If you don't get it right (i.e. just the right amount of too much) on the first couple of drags of the spreader
you are better off just walking away and saving "the fix" for the next round. Unfortunately, this is not a chemical cure, so it's not like you can just wait 15 minutes and strike another load. Nope, it's knock it back, sweep off the dust, lay down some spackle, and call it a night. Then come back and see where we go next.

Still, after tonight's session I think I can finally see the end of the hatch bodywork. It has the right amount of positive arc; 90/ct of the surface is level; when I look up from the back it has a nice smooth transition into the roof line; when I look back from the front the transition is the best I can make it without being stupid and upsetting the spars (… again, pretty confident that the hinge and seal will bust that up anyway); and this last round of spackle seemed to go down as even as I could have hoped for. Sure, I probably still need to work it a little more, but the smaller the problems get, the quicker they seem to resolve (i.e. once the low spots fit under the span of the spreader the application goes much easier and there is very little sanding needed after the fact).

Now I realize that it must sound like I have slathered a ton of spackle on the hatch, but let me tell you, most of it hits the floor in little snaky rolls and dust. When I leave for the night I have to peel the globs off from the soles of my flip flops before I get in the car. It’s weird; even after curing it stays flexible, pliable, and a little gummy. The sanding debris packs onto the bottoms of your shoes kind of like when you mow wet grass. When you scrape it off you really get a feel for how much the fillers/fibers/micro-spheres add to the structure. It gets almost flaky; and it is definitely not the same as regular plaster.

Anyway, tomorrow is the Fall Unimog Fest in Monson, and Larry was kind enough to invite me along again, so I will have to wait until Sunday to see how well I did this time.

Getting plenty of use out of that long board. I should have built it lighter.

[dales133]

Sounds like your winning mate.
How wide your spreader?
Ive got one about a foot wide I used the get my hatch right with spac and I usualy use it for dry wall .
Makes life alot easier as its spring steel with a super fine blade and for those all important feather coats it realy is the bisness.
Ill take a pic tomorrow if you want more detail

[GPW]

No cause for alarm , but consider this ... From what we’ve seen , exposure of the Foam trailer to the Sun or heat , causes the foam to expand further ,and rather forcefully too ...enough to stretch canvas seams and remove dents , and may cause all those carefully spackled and leveled surfaces to have waves like the Beach once heated ... Am hoping that’s not the case , but might be something to be aware of ... A foamie, unlike a metal skinned cargo trailer , doesn’t “oilcan” in the heat , just Grows a bit , stretching everything tight ... sometimes too tight ...

[bonnie]

Catching up here. A very late Happy Birthday, KC. I had a chuckle when I noticed on the first page you read the big thread at 175 pages. Your build is well beyond that and I've enjoyed every post. Your attention to detail is really a joy to watch.

[KCStudly]

DaleS, it feels like I am winning! I'm using the widest spreader that came in the three pack of Bondo brand spreaders; I think it is 6 inches. Earlier I also experimented with dragging a longer spline across the surfaces, but that was tricky and seemed to waste more product. I like the Bondo spreader because it conforms to the curves well, and because it is so flexible and has rounded corners I am far less likely to damage the foam or put a gouge in the uncured spackle. When I was using my stiffer/wider plastic putty knife, I had a heck of a time with incidental contact at the corners of the blade doing more damage than good.

GPW, I know what you are saying about later expansion, and I do have plenty of smaller dents that I have filled and am at least moderately concerned about bulging; but at least these larger areas on the front roof and hatch aren't trying to cover up dents, but are rather trying to reshape something that was never there. It is what it is and I am still a better craftsman for having gone thru this effort, regardless of how it actually turns out in the end.

Bonnie, thank you, and thank you. Such kind words are always appreciated. Pretty amazing really, over 120,000 views, and only about half of them are from me!

Feels like I have been doing this for such a long time that it is a way of life more than a project. Just this evening while we were sitting around the bonfire after rock crawling with the Unimogs all day, Larry and I decided that when I get the camper done, we will each tow our campers up there, set up in the field and stay the night over rather than drive home. He and wife have done that before with their motor home (flat towing the Jeep) and really liked being able to hang out longer around the fire; plus I think they go wheeling some more on Sunday.

Had a great time, great weather and they are a great group of people. Here's a link to an 11 min video from the spring event earlier this year.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWfvBFQLIxQ

[dales133]

uploadfromtaptalk1442728190844.jpg (53.64 KiB) Viewed 1317 times

There ya so mate that's the one I use for everything.
Makes life alot easier

[KCStudly]

In between creeping up on the hatch top bodywork (seems to be taking forever, despite everyone’s great suggestions… I’m stuck in a rut), I mixed up a small batch of thickened epoxy (too thick) to fill in the second round of dings in the side door sills. Seems like whenever I used the pipe clamps hooked into the door jambs to hold something to the front, I would inevitably drop one or both of them resulting in divots in the door sill area. I had filled the first go around, but put off filling the second go around until I was pretty confident I wouldn’t need to clamp anything substantial there anymore. There was also a pretty good prang in the top edge of the curb side door seal flange that bulged out the thickness of the plies, so I sanded the rough outside part off flush and used a screw clamp to flatten the finished inside surface back out again. I'll hit that again with the mix the next time around to seal it up. It will be covered by the trim seal, so no worries about appearance.

That was Sunday afternoon. Yesterday I got the door sill sanded back and finished touching up the license plate recess. It looks better now but pic’s don’t really show the difference that the eye sees.

By retracing my reference lines for the side wall to roof radius and comparing it to the old line I can see that I have only added about 1/8 to 3/16 inch of spackle to the hatch top at the thickest point, but it sure makes a difference to how it looks over all.

I will never be a professional body man. I just don’t have the patience for it, but I am getting this to the point where I think I can be happy with it… or at least not disappointed… except for that dip in the curb side wall. (Stop looking at that.)

I did one more pick-up round of spackle to fill in the last of the low spots (damn I hope so ) and to recontour the radius edges. Tomorrow I will knock that back down and see what I get.

Still thinking about flattening that curb side wall.