Bertha's Wild Weekend
Bertha's back in the news after a wild weekend of stripping! It was Valentines Day on Friday, so love was in the air. Rivets were drilled, panels peeled, and pink stuff was everywhere. Yep, Bertha finally got some much needed love and it involved taking things off, but it was the type of stripping you do wearing extra clothes and a respirator too!
By the end of Saturday, approximately 1/2 of our vinyl-coated aluminum interior panels had been removed. In our 1972 Safari, that meant starting at the ceiling and working our way down each side. The ceiling piece is installed in two aluminum tracks. You have to drill the rivets out of one side (in our case the starboard side), and then carefully pull the other side out. It's locked in place with a grey material similar to that used to install window screens. There was a learning curve for sure, but thankfully Google and AirForums were just a click away when we needed them, and my husband is darn handy and not easily deterred.
As we already knew, the rear of our trailer has a lot of rot, but you can really see it with the bathroom gone (removed that last weekend) and the back panels gone. We're doing a skin off restoration because the trailer frame needs to be rebuilt in the rear and possibly on the sides too. We haven't removed the banana wrap yet so surprises are yet to come.
All totaled, we removed seven large trash bags of fiberglass mat and trash along with the panels (17 total panels, I think). It was a messy job, but not nearly as bad as expected. We didn't get bombarded by any mouse droppings and found no petrified rodent corpses, but the amount of junk the builders left in the walls for us was incredible. Wires galore that went nowhere and random pieces of hosing, tape, and cut electrical wire were just left in the walls as filler!
After removing the second half of the panels on Sunday morning, we spent the afternoon ridding the panels of fiberglass residue and rivet detritus. We still need to give them all a good wash, but it was definitely a successful weekend. All panels were marked as they were removed so we know where to put them back, so we'll need to be careful not to remove those notes during the cleaning phase!
At the end of the project my husband said, "I guess we made some good progress this weekend, huh?" and I responded, "Nope, we're just in really deep now!" And indeed we are. More soon.
By the end of Saturday, approximately 1/2 of our vinyl-coated aluminum interior panels had been removed. In our 1972 Safari, that meant starting at the ceiling and working our way down each side. The ceiling piece is installed in two aluminum tracks. You have to drill the rivets out of one side (in our case the starboard side), and then carefully pull the other side out. It's locked in place with a grey material similar to that used to install window screens. There was a learning curve for sure, but thankfully Google and AirForums were just a click away when we needed them, and my husband is darn handy and not easily deterred.
All totaled, we removed seven large trash bags of fiberglass mat and trash along with the panels (17 total panels, I think). It was a messy job, but not nearly as bad as expected. We didn't get bombarded by any mouse droppings and found no petrified rodent corpses, but the amount of junk the builders left in the walls for us was incredible. Wires galore that went nowhere and random pieces of hosing, tape, and cut electrical wire were just left in the walls as filler!
After removing the second half of the panels on Sunday morning, we spent the afternoon ridding the panels of fiberglass residue and rivet detritus. We still need to give them all a good wash, but it was definitely a successful weekend. All panels were marked as they were removed so we know where to put them back, so we'll need to be careful not to remove those notes during the cleaning phase!
At the end of the project my husband said, "I guess we made some good progress this weekend, huh?" and I responded, "Nope, we're just in really deep now!" And indeed we are. More soon.
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