A Visit from "The Little Trailer Project" 's Electrical Engineer

    During the planning and layout phases of the camper's electrical system, I turned to my brother-in-law, Sam to lend a much needed hand.  As I have mentioned before, my understanding of such things is limited (generous description).  Early in the planning process, I visited Sam and family and we put together a wiring plan and parts list for much of the system.  Later when I was ready to close up the deck, they all came out to oversee the installation of the wires that would be covered by the camper floor.  While it may not rank among the most noteworthy achievements on Sam's resume, it is clear that he has become, whether he likes it or not, the chief electrical engineer for "The Little Trailer Project".  So, naturally, when the time came to take the next step in installing the electrical system,  I once again called on Sam to supervise.  This past weekend, he and his boys came out,  we spent the day in the garage, had a few tasty beers, and made some good progress.

     The diagram above shows the wiring plan for all of the electrics forward of the rear bulkhead which houses the inverter/ charger/ fuse box.  There will be a second part to the wiring scheme that will feed the galley and exterior lights.  The reason for breaking it up this way is that everything to the front of the rear bulkhead needs to be fed by wires that are buried in the floor.  The wires for the rear half will be routed through the galley cabinets.  The picture below shows the interior of the forward bulkhead all wired up.  The top section is the junction box that is depicted by the large center box in the diagram.  The cables coming up on the right come from the battery that will be mounted on the trailer tongue.  The wires coming up the left side run under the floor and back to the main box.

These circuits will supply power to a pair of 12v outlets, a reading light, a dome light, a ventilation fan, and a 120v outlet.

     In the picture above you can see the back of the forward overhead cabinet.  The picture below shows the front of the center panel of the same cabinet.  The wires that you can see going through and into the roof section will feed the roof vent fan and overhead dome light.

The picture above shows the front of the magical electricity box that changes the currents into the right kind and keeps them organized and separated so they do not argue.  It also keeps an eye on the battery charging so that it stays sort of Goldilocks.  I apologize if I am being too technical for some readers here, but it can be difficult to discuss matters of electrical circuitry in lay terms.  Below is the back of said magic box where all of the connections are made.  It is pretty difficult to see in the photo, but coming through the side wall is the 120 AC inlet and coming up through the floor, just behind the rear bulkhead, are the DC bundle and the AC line that run under the floor to the front of the camper.  The front opens into the sleeping compartment at the sleeper's feet, and the back is accessible inside the lower galley cabinet.

     After all the connections were made it was time to see if it works.  The picture above shows the 120 AC power inlet.  We plugged it in, Sam did a few checky-type things with his volty-meter on the main breakers, we flipped the switch, and, as you can see in the picture below, the light came on.  WooHoo!  I played it of cool, but I was pretty psyched.  We tested the 120 and 12 volt outlets and all were good.  Next we pulled the battery out of my truck, hooked it up to the leads with jumper cables, and repeated the test; everything worked perfectly.

     Now that everything that can be installed to this point is in, tested, and working, there are just a couple more things to do to bring this step to a close.  

Foam insulation is cut to fit into the voids in the front bulkhead and glued in place.

Next, 1/4" maple plywood finishes off the cabin interior.

     I've had these electrical components kicking around in my shop for so long now that it is a bit surprising to see them take their rightful places.  I think part of the surprise is due to the fact that all of this is still, albeit a bit less, something of a mystery to me.  I cannot thank Sam enough for taking the time to walk me through this particular aspect of the build.  We have been talking a bit about some solar panels, maybe an inverter for the truck, so future episodes of "The Electrical Engineer" may be in the cards.

Baby Steps

      Some updates on the trailer project will be more dramatic and show more progress than others.  This one is going to be more incremental in nature.  My last post showed the culmination of a backlog of work finally coming together, and had a satisfying "Tadaaa" effect.  Since then I have done a fair amount of head scratching and standing around in the shop staring or squinting at various unresolved parts of the camper.  These musings have yielded the start of some work on components that will require significant lead time before they are ready to install.  That said I have managed to make a bit of visual progress that I can go ahead and share.

  

     The above picture shows various spars (frame members that bridge side to side), the roof frame that will house the ventilation fan, and the protective aluminum strips that will line the door openings.  You may notice that the two spars laying on top of the fan frame are cut at angles.  These are the spars that will be attached to the tops of the cabinets in the sleeping compartment, and the angles correspond to the curvature of the roofline.  The aluminum strips have been cut to length, had holes drilled and countersunk for #4 screws 4" on center, and scrubbed clean with scotch brite.

This picture shows the exposed and vulnerable edge of the plywood.  Though it has been sufficiently coated with polyurethane, I thought it best to go ahead and protect those fragile corners from accidental dings before doing too much crawling in and out.

The aluminum lining installed

The spars and frame have been glued and screwed in place.  One has been left out so it will not be in the way of wiring the outlets in the forward cabinet. 

     While these are not huge steps, each new part gives the camper an added measure of solidity and brings the overall shape just a bit more into focus.  For me, the way something reveals itself to you as you build it, may be the best part.  You have a picture in your mind of what you think you will make, but as you begin to coax it into existence, it tends to have it's own ideas.  In the vein of revelation, something occurred to me recently as I finished the evening bedtime story ritual and put the girls to bed.  I am reading "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" to my 6 year old and "Watership Down" to my 10 year old.  On this particular night Dorothy and her friends narrowly escaped being devoured by a pair of Kalidas and Bigwig was caught in a snare.  What occurred to me was this: both of these stories are about journeys and both are full of anxiety and peril.  Although I love both of these stories,  they may not be the best primer for a child's real life journey.  So, If any of you out there have a favorite journey or travel related story appropriate for a 6 or 10 year old, let me know and I'll put it on the list.

Getting Somewhere

   

     I have, as a possibly odd idiosyncrasy of my personality an innate reluctance to give voice to any plans  that are less than roughly 75% formed in my mind or that are unlikely to come to fruition.  I often avoid mentioning trips or events that I know my kids will be excited about until the arrangements are made and I know we can make it work.  I can't stand to have anyone reading something I'm writing over my shoulder, even if it's a silly comment on Facebook and the over-the-shoulder reader is my six year old daughter.  Given this bit of neuroses, it may seem strange that I have decided to write a blog about building something I have never built before with the ultimate goal using it to take my family to the far coast of the country and back.  I think it is strange, but it may not be.  I have talked to my wife and kids about this trip a lot.  We have a large USA map on or dining room wall which we reference during discussions of possible routes and people and places we may visit. One of  Zoe's most recent bedtime books was Steinbeck's "Travels With Charley", his account of driving cross country with his dog.  I've talked about the "plan" to many family and friends, and made a very public declaration of intent: "The Little Trailer Project".  All of this makes me somewhat uneasy, but I think I deviated so wildly from my usual M.O. simply because the thing felt too complicated a concept to see my way through to the end.  I think I may have allowed myself to talk about it as a way to make it seem more real, more achievable.  In some way it has amplified the consequences of failure.  Maybe all of this will help me to avoid getting bogged down in the details, and, in the  immortal words of Dory the fish, "Just keep swimming."  Pontification over.  Time to build.

     In my last post I discussed making parts, preparing the trailer for assembly, and dry fitting the basic camper.  The dry fit was done prior to the application of the wheel well seal seen in the picture above on the right  because positioning the sides requires standing them on the trailer deck next to the 2" insulated floor.  This is easy without the seal, but the tightness of the compressed seal makes the task much more difficult.  I only wanted to do it once.  While I would have Kat there to help me, it was this particular task, which needed to be performed twice within the open time of a fair amount of glue, that prompted me to call in reinforcements.

Longtime friend, amazing artist, and favorite weirdo, Joe.

   With my helpers in the shop and a few tubes of construction adhesive locked and loaded we were ready to go.  The next set of pictures will seem like a bit of a jump, but that is because quite a few things needed to happen at once during the side installation.  All hands were needed to get things in the right place as quickly as possible.  First we ran a bead of glue down the edges of the floor and on the deck of the trailer where the camper sides would sit.  The bottom of the wheel well seal was strapped tight with a strap clamp to prevent it from getting pushed down as we wedged the sides in.  Once both sides were in, they were held apart while the forward bulkhead was glued and clamped into position.  After a few final adjustments we screwed everything in place.

Sides up with forward bulkhead clamped in place

In one door and out the other

Inside of front bulkhead 

The screws are countersunk into the floor stringers roughly every 4", and will eventually be covered with a wood trim.

     The next pieces are the rear bulkhead and the galley countertop and cabinet back assembly.   The bulkhead will support the countertop and together with the galley cabinet back will insure the squareness of the camper sides.  A cleat is glued and screwed to the galley floor inside what will become the galley cabinet.  Next the sides are forced apart and the rear bulkhead, already outfitted with side cleats is glued and screwed in place.  The countertop is placed on top of the bulkhead and support cleats attached to the sides and secured with screws.  The top of the cabinet back is checked  for squareness to the countertop and clamped into position.

Here you can see the floor cleat to which the bulkhead will be attached and the countertop support cleats.

Kat holding the sides apart to make space for the bulkhead

Countertop and cabinet back assembly going in

      Last to go  in are the forward and aft sleeping cabin cabinets.  Surely you get the idea by now; glue and screws.  The cabinets are really no different.  The real challenge with the cabinets is getting them in to place without smearing glue all over the inside of the camper walls.

In this picture you can see the forward cabinet on it's back on the floor and the aft cabinet to the right.

Typically, glue does not make me this happy, but my wife was dorking it up behind the camera.

As you can see, the forward cabinet is really heavy.  Luckily, Joe is pretty beastly.

Drilling holes for wires to run behind the cabinet back

Front cabinet installed

Aft cabinet installed

     It was a fun day.  To this point I had been spending quite a lot of time putting things together and it didn't seem like I had all that much to show for it.  Now I have something that is beginning to like like an actual teardrop camper, and it's not coming apart.  It always seems to me that the toughest part of any building project is the beginning; the imagining something that doesn't yet exist, the speculative part.  Once I have a cabinet, or a piece of furniture, or a whatever begin to take shape in front of me, things get a little easier, the questions a bit more specific.  There's still a lot of head scratching to do, and tons of sawdust to make, but this feels like a bigger step than all those that came before it.

A Pile of Parts

     I'm going to let everyone in on a little secret.  The "Little Trailer Project" blog doesn't exactly coincide with the progress of the little trailer project.  The picture above is a fine illustration of why that is.  While this pile of parts isn't much fun to look at, it did take a fair amount of time and head scratching to produce.  If I had started the blog when I started to put all this stuff together, it would have been a long time before anyone got to see how they would go together, and that would be really boring.  In an attempt to make this pile a bit more interesting, I decided to wait until I could reveal the whole thing at once and maybe convey some idea of how the parts will become a whole.  You might ask, "What is this pile?".  These parts make up the structure of the camper, and are what is required to go ahead with the basic assembly.  In the picture above, in order of foreground to back ground the parts are as follows: roof/fan frame, rear bulkhead, front bulkhead, galley counter and cabinet back, forward cabin cabinet, and aft cabin cabinet.  I suppose it would be possible to begin assembly with just the sides and bulkheads, and build things in as you go.  I prefer to make all of the parts that will  contribute to the strength and squareness of the camper before I begin assembly.  That way I can compare them to each other and make adjustments if there are any discrepancies.    

    This picture shows a the forward (overhead) cabin cabinet parts ready for assembly.  I am using glue and biscuits to join the parts because they will tolerate the stresses of the road better than screws and nails would.  Like the camper sides, all parts must be finished before they are assembled.

    Here is the  assembled cabinet.  The cabinet back follows the curve of the front of the camper's roof.  Eventually there will be doors flanking the open cubby in the center.  The upper section of the cubby will have a reading light, two 12v outlets, and a 120v outlet.  This cabinet will sit on top of the front bulkhead.

     Spoiler alert!  Don't look at the background of this picture!  I had to dry fit the camper (assemble with no glue and few fasteners) in order to work out the exact dimensions of some parts, particularly the height and angle of this cabinet's profile.  I may have mentioned before how much I love the finishing process.  Because I love it so much and feel it is immoral to indulge in too much guilty pleasure, I use pre-finished maple plywood here and wherever possible.

     This is the aft (over foot) cabin cabinet.  It will share a back with the upper galley cabinet.  If you refer back to the first picture, you can see (hidden by the forward bulkhead, the galley countertop with a dark gray plastic laminate.  It's hard to see, but attached to it's back edge is a vertical piece of plywood.  That plywood will serve as the back for this cabinet, for the galley upper cabinet,  and as the pivot point for the galley hatch.   Now that my basic components are finished and assembled,  I am almost ready to start putting this thing together.  There are still a couple of things to do to get the trailer prepped.

This rubber seal will keep water out of the area of the camper side that will be covered by the wheel well

The cabin flooring has been installed prior to assembly.

     Now we are ready to build a camper!  I fully understand that the anticipation may be too much for some of you to handle, but you're going to have to wait 'til  next time for the big moment.  I promise, next time you'll get to see what this thing is going to look like.

    As we all are getting ready to stuff as much food as possible down our throats and lay around with friends and family in a tryptophan induced stupor watching one football game bleed into the next,  I'd like to briefly remember the Thanksgivings of my youth.  How could this possibly be relevant?  Bear with me and I'll try to explain what is, for me, more than a marginal relevance.   My earliest Thanksgiving memories are of Nanny and Papa's warm and happy home in Gainesville, FL.  My grandmother would cook an amazing quantity and variety of food in a kitchen that couldn't have been more than 10'x12'.  How she did it, I'll never know, but in my recollection, it was effortless and the food was always pure southern perfection.  

     When dinner was winding down and I'd had enough of sitting around the table, I would inevitably find my way to my favorite part of that house; the garage where Papa kept his shop.  He had this wall of tools and gadgets and fasteners and things that I had no idea what they were, and I would just stand there messing with his stuff, trying to figure out what the things did.  If ever I asked him, he would stop whatever he was doing to tell me.  When he was explaining things he used the word "kindly" to mean "sort of" or "like".  I've never heard anyone before or since use that word like that.  He always had a box of scraps and a can of nails that he would let me bang away at.  I spent a lot of time nailing random boards together on the garage floor.  

     This was the place and he was the man that sparked in me the desire to make things.  I always loved it when I saw him get his toolbox because I knew it meant that I would get to "help" him fix or build something.  I was very fortunate to have known his gentleness, patience, and creativity.  It is something that I give thanks for every Thanksgiving, and in fact, much more often than that.  If it weren't for Papa who knows if I'd have built a treehouse or if I'd be building a camper now?  Thank you Nanny and Papa, and Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

The Shape of Things to Come

     After my last post, one of my readers asked me if I had any "conceptual renderings of the dream".  The short answer was no, but his question did make an interesting point.  Some of you may  not have much of an idea of what it is I'm building, so it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to try to flesh out the vision a bit before going on too much more about building things.  I sat down and made a half-hearted attempt at a sketch of the trailer.  Said attempt was half-hearted because I was feeling lazy and I knew that if I whined about not being able to do it, that my wonderful wife would do it for me.  She did. Thanks, Baby.  Kat's sketch below shows the basic idea for the camper; wooden sides, aluminum top, two wheels, two doors (with a sliding window each), roof vent with fan, cooler and battery on the tongue, and a hatch in the rear that opens to the galley, simple right?  If you want to check out some more detailed pictures of the campers mine will be based on, you can do so  at http://www.bigwoodycampers.com/.  

    The teardrop camper gets its name from it's distinctive profile.  The rounded front and sloping tail make for an attractive and aerodynamic design that gained popularity as early as the 1930's, and that I would argue has yet to be trumped.  Certainly, the bulk of campers on the road today fall pretty short where style is concerned.  The first step toward achieving that retro styling is to draw out and cut my template for the camper sides.  This is where that long awaited sawdust comes in.

Starting with a 1/2" sheet of MDF,  I drew out the shape I wanted (very close to the one supplied by Big Woody Campers).  The biggest visual difference  between my camper and one of theirs will be the shape of the doors.  I wanted my doors to be bigger and rounder.  Theirs have the look of a rectangle with rounded corners.  I like the look of a  continuous curve that blends a bit more subtly into the flat of the bottom of the door.  Once satisfied with the drawing, I used a jigsaw to cut out the outside contour keeping as true to the line as possible.  Some aggressive sanding was required to fine tune the shape making sure to remove all the little wiggles.  It is worth spending some time to perfect the template as any defects will be duplicated exactly on the actual sides.   I used a router on a swing arm to cut the radii for the long curve of the door and for the shorter, tighter one at the bottom, aft corner.  Since the Aluminum trim and weatherstripping to be used on the door require a 1/4" crack, I was able to use a 1/4" bit to cut the door and its opening at the same time.  Now that my templates were made, I was ready to trace them off and cut the real thing.  

The sides will be cut from two sheets of 3/4", veneer core sapele  plywood.  Sapele is similar to mahogany in appearance and is a member of the same family.  I chose it for a couple of reasons; it has a quite beautiful warm color that deepens with the application of a finish.  This darker color will hide the yellow of the polyurethane better than a lighter wood, and it's open and somewhat textured grain should disguise road dirt a bit.

After tracing the templates onto the plywood, the shapes are cut out on the outsides of the lines.

Next, the templates are clamped to the pieces and trimmed using a flush trim router bit.

Ta da! a pair of camper sides.

Here you can see the grain of the wood a little better.

    This method insures that the shape and size of my parts will be identical and that their edges will be uniformly and reliably square.  The next step for these babies is the dreaded finishing process.  I really am not a fan of finishing.  I find it to be a boring, labor intensive, sort of mysterious process that is really easy to foul up.  It is this dislike of finishing that caused me to look for the simplest process possible.  Throughout that search, I ignored all kinds of perfectly good advice from very knowledgable people.  I didn't want to hear anything about 2 step marine finishes or products that take forever to dry.  I settled on Zar exterior polyurethane.  Hopefully it will perform well and I won't wind up kicking myself for not doing something more elaborate.  I did not document the finishing process because, well, there really isn't that much to see, but when I was done I had sprayed the

interior sides with 3 coats of satin and the exterior with 5 coats of gloss.  It is not a perfect finish, but it is pretty good, and it seems to look better to everyone else than it does to me.  The best part about it is that it was done.  Did I mention I'm not a huge fan of finishing?

This picture shows the exterior of the camper side with the finish applied.