Foamie hybrid with ribs and wheelchair accessibility...

[GPW]

Good advice , Here’s one we made from a block of teak to replace the 18 Year old plastic one that broke … Can’t do without it , agressive grits cut Foam FAST !!!

[Redneck Packrat]

Only had an hour or so to monkey around with it today. Turns out the corners aren't that big of a deal. Before I could get to them, I had to add the last 6" to the walls. Only did around the front because I was eager to do the corners and was running low on foam. Once I got those up there and glued in, I measured the angled part, and beveled both top and bottom 45* with skilsaw. As soon as the foamdust settled and I could see what I was doing, I set it up there and marked the top and bottom where they lined up with the sloped side part and cut that at 90* with the dustmaker. Makes beautiful cuts, but my goodness, the dust!

Then I took another piece 20" wide, with 45*'s on both top and bottom, and did the same thing for the other side. The drops from those worked on the opposite side from the front piece. Well, almost. But that's how I did it. Trimmed and shaved with the little rasp and wound up with a decent corner. Lost a piece to the 35+ mph wind, last I saw it, it was half a mile away and going like a jackrabbit. It was the front piece for the driver's side, so I didn't get the second front corner even started, but I know now how to actually do it better than this one. Things didn't line up/mesh up perfectly, but that's what Great Stuff is for, right?

Some self-explanatory pics...




Got them rasped down to roughly where I'm wanting the rounding on the edges...


The joint going up is fugly, but I'm figuring to fill it in with GS and smooth it back down. I'm thinking of getting a can of the door and window version of it... thinking is, because it's touted as expanding less, it might be denser than the original GS. Thoughts? Experiences? Bueller? Bueller?

[Redneck Packrat]

BTW, plain old 25 year white Alex caulk, not Plus or 'with silicone', stuck overnight tightly enough that it pulled foam off when I tried to take the two scraps apart. Same with the plain old cheap Liquid Nails. So there's two more. Or at least a confirmation of one and report on another I hadn't seen used yet, or at least hadn't read about it yet.

[GPW]

I must have missed it , but are you leaving those fender washers on , are they going under the canvas ? I was thinking about rust ...

[Redneck Packrat]

I must have missed it , but are you leaving those fender washers on , are they going under the canvas ? I was thinking about rust ...

No, I've only got one package of 30 of those 3/16 fender washers. I'm running them in overnight, then pulling them as needed and re-using them elsewhere. You can see in the first pic in my most-recent post where a few were taken out of the front wall and put back in on the sloped part.

There are half a dozen galvanized 16d headless nails embedded in the foam here and there where I used them as pegs to hold the front corners and the butt joints in line. Those are gonna have to stay. Time will tell if that turns out to be a mistake.

[Padilen]

Really nobody as mentioned liquid nails? I guess I'm the only one that uses it for "outside the box". I repair my lawnmower deck with it! I figured once liquid nails dries you can't clean it up right? Last for ever. So my lawn mowerdecks metal is to thin to weld. The pop rivet patches don't last. Mostly because they don't take the shape of the deck. So i patched then coated the area's with liquid nails. These patch are going to outlast the rest of the deck.
Moles mounds and trenches in the sandy soil = sandblasted mowing deck. I mowed yesterday and noticed the the "shoot" is in need a of liquid nails patch now too.

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[Redneck Packrat]

Padilen, re a mention of Liquid Nails: If I've seen it, I must've forgotten. I was in Walmart and saw it, looked at the label, and one of the uses is "foamboard". And at a buck six bits per tube, it's plenty thrifty.

Played with the bed today. Pictures are kinda lacking, apparently I got grease or something on the lens of my phone's camera about halfway through the day, so all the pics I took of completed stuff are just blurry blobs of various colors

Laid the metal frame back in and it still fit. Marked where the angle iron crossmember of the bed needs to have a notch in the 2x4 to settle down in.


Decided against notching the one up at the head, didn't want to weaken the 2x4 so close to the end with the screws in it. It's close enough to flat where it won't be noticeable.


I think that, to secure it, I'm just gonna lag bolt it up near where it's setting on the head-end crossmember, about halfway to the waist with some sort of shim jammed up under it, and down at the end of the metal part where it's flat on the 2x4. That should keep it from being pushed through the wall by the actuator

I'm also gonna put a leg under the 2x4 that spans the open floor there. Just to minimize any flexing. I doubt it'll be in the way. I'm pleasantly surprised with how little room the actuator actually took up. So there is more room for squirrelling stuff away than I was counting on.

Now, where the end of the springy mesh is, there's hooks to attach it to the foot half of the bed. I went round and round how to attach these, thinking of maybe a piece of 1/4" hotroll run through lag eyes and the hooks hooked around the hotroll. Then I realized I was over-engineering it, and dug around in my hardware tub and found some lag hooks, kinda cup hooks on steroids. I took the assembled "after" pic when there was gunk on the lens, so I'll get a pic of that tomorrow.


I realized I didn't want to put a "dip" in the bed surface far enough to get to the 2x framing of the foot half of the bed, so I ripped a piece of 2x6 to 2 1/8" which is the 1 1/2 of the two-by plus 5/8 for the plywood surface. This is the supports laid out for the foot half of the bed.


This blurry, unfocused pic is the completed bed. Now to find an old cotton batting mattress that'll bend where it's needed. Innerspring ones won't work.... maybe one of those shrink-wrapped things that comes in a shoebox? How flexible are they when they're expanded?


Another sorta blurry pic of the actuator for the bed, installed. I bench-tested it so I know it works, but haven't wired it up yet in place. That'll be tomorrow. I hope it does work, because I already glued down all the plywood on the bed I can get it back out of there, but it'll be more of a pain working from underneath than it was working through the top too. But, I wanted to glue it all to help lend strength to the thing, figured the actuator would be pushing against the 2x6 it's bolted to, the plywood glued to it, and transfer some of that push to the 2x4 under the knees.


Have I ever mentioned that I have a propensity to over-build stuff?

I'll get some better pics of some of the things I wanted to show, and post them probably tomorrow.

[Padilen]

I wasn't implying that. I was just surprised more haven't used it. Oh I found there is another that works on ridged insulation. You do have to read the tubes to find it.

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[Redneck Packrat]

I wasn't implying that. I was just surprised more haven't used it. Oh I found there is another that works on ridged insulation. You do have to read the tubes to find it.

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I've found "foamboard" or "styrofoam" on a whole lot of the tube-type stuff. And I unintentionally did a test of the plain Alex today, 3 days after using it on the front corner piece I put up. I got tanglefooted in the air hose and sander cord and whammed my head pretty good into that piece, enough to worry that I might have cracked it, and only when I was looking at it did I remember that was the piece that was held on by nothing but the cheapo Alex 25 year caulk. (I took the screws and fender washers out of it when I got there today.)

[GPW]

Moving right along !!!
Those fender washers sure are a Good idea !!!…

[Redneck Packrat]

First off, I'll start with the pics that I didn't get good ones of yesterday. The bed, a little less blurry, and the up-close of the springy part screwed to the wood bottom half of the front bed:



This is about as high as I've seen her raise the bed at home, so plenty of headroom for her


Now, on to today's stuff. Cutting holes in perfectly-good walls....

Windows. Specifically the right hand side (bed along wall on left side, which folds up, so right is logical for the bigger window) with a 5'W x 2'H window out of that old donor motor home. Measured its height and width, and added 1/2" to each. The lips are almost an inch wide, so even resting hard on the bottom without any canvas or anything, it should have plenty of bite on the top. If I find that it doesn't when I dry fit the window, I'll add a few layers of canvas and TB2. Each layer is just under 1/8 inch. Actually 3 layers of this canvas seems to be about a quarter inch thick. Then I used a drywall square and laid it off using the top of the full width sheets as the reveal line. Gonna try to keep them all consistent, and that's the easiest way to do it. Besides, not having the top strip of foam in there gives me one less place I need to cut the ribs away from the foam when I make room for the headers and sills.

I made the marks on the foam with a sharpie, then began casting about for something suitable to mark the corners' radius turns. Found a worn out water pump pulley off a 50 year old Deere, so apparently these windows have a 3" radius on their corners.



Used a jigsaw on fairly slow speed to cut, since I had curves to do, and was pleasantly surprised by the very small amount of foamdust created. I used a 6TPI wood blade, and ran the saw as slow as I could make it go. Did a beautiful job. I just pulled out to cross the ribs, letting the tip of the blade peck at the 2x2, and it cut cleanly.


I wanted the foam out in one piece, because that is enough foam to put the vertical walls' strips in on both sides, being 22" wide and just over 5' long. I need about 7 feet on one side and about 8 1/2 ft on the other side. It'll get me close. So I used one of these oscillating tool thingys with the wood blade on it, and slipped it in behind the rib, from inside, and it separated the foam and rib easily enough.

The Alex I used on the ribs was cured, and stuck well to both the foam and to the 2x2. It'll take some cleaning to get this stick ready to use again


Used a skilsaw to cut the ribs back 1 1/2 inches from the hole in the foam, for a header on top and sill on the bottom. One of the cut ribs was like 1/2" from the new "cripple stud" I put in under the header, so I used the cut-off rib as the cripple for that end of the sill, where it butted up. Still need to put a support under the other end of the sill.

[featherliteCT1]

Looks like things are working out nicely for you!

[Redneck Packrat]

So far, yes. Let's hope it continues to go that way. Rough guess, I'm at about 200-225 lb tongue weight right now, with a couple of group 24 batteries to go right inside the back wall. Plus the back wall, two 5ft aluminum ramps, and the 'landing' that goes between 'em that's made out of 2x12's. All that is going to ride on the floor right inside the back door. Chair is gonna ride right over the axle and my bed is mostly centered on the axle. Should seesaw it to about 175-200 lb. Rough guessing, it's gonna weigh between 1600 and a ton, and add 250 for the chair when it's in there.

And the beauty of a foamie is it's got a REALLY LOW center of mass!

[GPW]

Bill, … Before you cover it , you may want to park it outside in the HOT Texas Sun for a couple days so the foam has a chance to cure/ expand to it’s final size , perhaps getting rid of those waves we find in the new sheets … just a thought ...

[Redneck Packrat]

A couple short days and got a considerable amount of stuff done. Poked a couple more holes in the foam. Front and left side window holes are in, all with the same top height, to give it a consistent reveal all the way around.




I cut up the drops from making the holes for the windows to finish that little 6" strip at the top of the walls...


Getting to the point of running out of stuff to do until I make another trip to the filthy orange box store place with surly employees and get some more foam. Sanded the entire outside of the trailer, did a little more caulking of seams. I've been using Alex to fill the cracks where the foam joins, smoothing it with a putty knife. I think it's gonna be close enough to where the canvas will hide it. It's smooth enough where I can feel where it is, but don't feel any ridges, more of a difference in texture. No pics of that, they really don't show much.

I'm going to put a top vent of some sort in it. From what I've seen, they're standardized for the most part to fit into a 14.5x14.5 opening. Framed one of those into the ceiling and ran a "ridgeline" down the center. Really did firm up the whole rib system.

The roof workings kinda get lost in the barn rafters, but they're easy to pick out if you look closely:


On the way home, I went to the nice clean, friendly, nearby, well-stocked-except-for-2"-foam blue box store with friendly and helpful employees, and found they had a display of air conditioners. Decided against using that 8000BTU one I have simply because it won't fit between ribs and I've already cut enough ribs up. Their 6kBTU unit will fit, and is probably plenty enough to keep 60 sq ft cool, even in south Texas. I've always been a fan of slightly under-sizing an air conditioner because in our humidity, the fast cycling that an oversize unit does simply does not pass the air over the evaporator frequently enough to wring the water out of it sufficiently. To a point, smaller is better

The 6k Frigidaire that I found is the same style and uses the same remote as all our house a/c's so that's also a plus. Its dimensions, if anyone is interested, are 18.5w x 12h x 16d. It DOES have a little ...dip?... in the back, a 'gutter' is what it looks like, that makes the height of the outside-most two inches of it about 13 1/2". Might have to put it in and out from the outside. We'll see.