Upside-down...

Time to ignore the airborne distractions outside & deal with the unseen areas; the underfloor insulation & the bellywrap.  Look at the photo on the right closely.... No, its not a new low-rider Flying Cloud

... the chassis really is upside-down.

Thanks to Pete and his forklift @ Vintage American Trailer Co  I had the luxury of working on the underside of the chassis from the topside.

We'd decided to use rigid, foil-backed insulation board.

70mm sheets fill the gap between the floor and the bellywrap perfectly. It won't absorb or trap water, so hopefully the rust associated with the original rockwool insulation trapping moisture against the steel of the chassis won't be repeated. Edges are easily shaped to fit with the curve of the outriggers.

The sections were glued to the underside of the floor and the joins taped with trusty aluminium tape.

We also taped over the chassis steel too - it'll hopefully help, along with the paint, to cut down on the corrosion problems of aluminium meeting steel.

 

... the central box is for a flexible water tank. We'd decided where possible not to maintain her strength & not cut through the floor if there was another option; so the water tank will be slung under the main floor.

Outside Pete's workshop there's always the pleasant distraction of the Harrier pilots training...

... not a bad backdrop for the 54 FC.

Time to make a start on that bellywrap... We'd saved the corroded old sections to provide rough patterns.

Mark, cut, bend, clamp...

... and finally a pop-rivet.  In true Airstream style, we weren't too worried about neatness; the main concern was to get a nice neat curve on the sides.

The plan is to fit the whole wrap and then spin the chassis back to allow us to trim the edges and buck rivet them to the C channel. All of which will be hidden once the body-shell is dropped back on.

We used 4mm pop-rivets with a wide flange.

... and pretty soon she was starting to look like a worm's eye view of an Airstream.

At Pete's suggestion, I used some vintage car trim to protect the aluminium sheets from the abrasive edges of the outriggers. Our's came from Woolies in Market Deeping, Peterborough.

Its simple to cut, bend to shape and push on. It naturally grips and won't fall off, so should stop any chafing of steel against bellywrap.

To take the EU-legal tow hitch Pete has welded a sturdy box steel pole up the centre-line. We fitted right-angle aluminium to its sides to rivet the bellywrap to.

The bellywrap sheets fit up the sides of the water tank box, so should blend in nicely (if its noticeable at all).

A couple more days & she'll be ready to spin rightside-up again.

The Airmen and the Headhunters - on TV, Veterans Day, 11th November.

When I'm not being idle with all things aluminium, my day job is as a cameraman, shooting documentaries for TV.  We shot the true story of The Airmen and the Headhunters earlier this year in Borneo, Australia, the UK and Texas - where Dan Illerich, the only surviving airman lives.  


A WW2, US Liberator crew, shot up over Brunei Bay, eventually crashes in the wild central highlands of Borneo. Captured by the local tribesmen the airmen fear for their lives. But since the local tribe, the Lun Dayeh, had suffered torture & killings at the hands of the occupying Japanese, they decide to side with the Allies and surprisingly enough, prove kind, welcoming and very generous with what provisions they have; meanwhile, the Japanese plunder the island's oil resources and subject any opposition to torture and worse, proving the terms "savage" and "civilized" to be quite subjective. 


With the help of a local District Official and Lun Dayeh tribesmen, the airmen survived for over 6 months in uncharted interior jungles, avoiding capture by occupying Japanese forces. With the help of a maverick British anthropologist, Major Tom Harrisson, who was parrachuted in,  with a small team of Australian commandos, to find them, they ran a very successful campaign of terror against the Japanese, which allowed the Lun Dayeh to return to their old headhunting ways, taking Japanese trophies back to their longhouses.


Its a great story of the meeting of two worlds, bravery, the resulting bonds of friendship and eventual escape thanks to an ingenious airstrip made of bamboo...


Hope you enjoy it.


Chris

I do like to be beside the C...

Finally, I've got my arse in gear and blown the summer dust off the Flying Cloud. Time to fabricate & fit the all-important C channel.

I'm sure some of you have folding presses & guillotines but we went low-tech and got out the tin-snips.

Slightly thicker aluminium than the original - a 5" strip will give us a 2 1/2 x 1" channel with the all important inch and a half base.

Snip, snip, snip...

Now to bend...

Some plywood off-cuts from the floor with clamps at either end and a central bolt grip the strip along its length.

Then start bending. By hand to begin with...

... then with a little more force to tighten the corners.

Start with the inch...

... and finish with the two and a half.

Wally would be proud ! One down, ten to go.

Don't think my precision was completely spot on but then as we all know, nor was Airstream's !

More snipping on the corner sections. I was going to cut out triangles but overlapping the snipped sections worked perfectly well and saved more snipping & cut hands.

After a bit of trial and error - I ended up snipping about every 3/4 inch and putting in a bend on each.

This makes too tight a bend initially but it'll open out evenly to fit the corner line.

We used stainless steel coach bolts which pull in tight to the underside of the floor and make it easier to bend or lock the nuts on the topside.

And a dab of the dreaded silicone to seal the hole.

Starting to look the part again.

The shell slipped over fine, with enough breathing space for the belly-wrap between the channel and the outer sheets.

As we'll be flipping the chassis and fitting the bellywrap first we marked the position of each of the frames to bolt through the short sections of 1/4" right-angle alloy which Airstream used on key frames to anchor them to the floor or chassis members.

The beauty of having the shell on a chain hoist means its a doddle to lift it up and down to check the fit - thanks to Pete Ritchie @ VATCO - Vintage American Trailer Co, for that luxury. Can't recommend his company highly enough and I'm pleased to see that he may well be working on a newly imported 54 Flying Cloud too... Clouds rule !

Check the link to his site - http://vatco.eu/

I also got the chance to blow the dust off my second-hand Ingersol Rand rivet gun and bucked my first rivet. Hurrah !

... worked beautifully, even if I'd overcooked the first couple.

An Aluminium-free summer !

Very sorry to report but this has been an aluminium-free summer ! We'd made great progress on the Flying Cloud in the spring with the chassis and fixing the new floor BUT my work piled in at the wrong time.

So the trusty yurt came out for the Larmer Tree music festival and for two weeks camping in deepest Cornwall in August.

Great time, great food (shore crabs, samphire & kofte kebabs...), sailing, canoeing and, of course, good old English summer weather - torrential rain.

With the odd sunny day...

I'm sure its of little interest to you alumanuts but our (homemade) yurt has done great service for the past 5 years. Its based on the traditional Mongolian yurt with a few helpful twists:

The door is much the same but has a tough, unstretchable rope of fixed (15ft) diameter attatched to it.

This rope sits on top of the lattice walls (khanas - which concertina down to 3, 2ft wide sections) and the roof poles have a slot cut in them which hooks over the rope, making it very fast to erect (20mins - yes really!). Everything is tied together with nylon cord and webbing - in Mongolia they use rawhide - which means everything is fixable with a knife, drill & more cord.

The whole structure is incredibly lightweight and strong. We then have canvas walls and roof. And over the hexagonal hole in the centre some clear, plastic stitched into canvas for those inclement summer days ! And it all fits in and on our trusty Volvo.

Hopefully the next post will be some much-needed progress on the Flying Cloud.

Measure twice... cut once !

Sorry for the lack of posting. This work was done a month ago but other work has taken me off to Borneo to shoot a interesting documentary about the US crew of a 'Liberator' bomber, shot down towards the end of WW2, over central Borneo and captured by the Dayak headhunters. The Dayaks sided with the airmen and over the next 7 months looked after them and ran a successful guerilla campaign against the occupying Japanese army.  The only survivor now lives in Houston, Texas. It should air both in the UK on Ch 4 & US on PBS.  

But now back to more important work...

With £800 of Marine Ply secured to the chassis I rather nervously got out the jigsaw...

I started with the step. The old maxim; measure twice, cut once, was ringing in my head. At this stage a cock-up would be costly.

A good steel edge & a heavily scored line to cut up against is the best way to get a nice clean edge in plywood.

The chassis was pretty true but it made good sense to always work off and check measurements back to the centre-line.

I first cut a generous inch wider than the template. 

And the beauty of having the body-shell balanced on a chain-hoist meant it was easy to wheel the floor in and out. Checking, measuring and trimming. Little by little.

I used the off-cuts from the best preserved curve to shape the exact same shape for the others.

Until finally the body dropped snugly onto the new floor.

The outer sheets overlapping the plywood and the rivet holes lining up ready to be re-rivetted to the C-channel which will be the next thing to fit.

Time for a new floor...

Pete Ritchie (of Vintage American Trailer Co) had been busy prepping the chassis for the new EU tow-hitch. We'd decided to add a square-section steel running up the centre-line from the axle which will take the new hitch and add a little stiffness to the chassis.

5 Sheets of 3/4", 8 x 4ft Marine Grade Ply - pretty pricey at £130 per sheet - should last another 50yrs. 

Using the hardboard templates taken off the old floor as a guide to the corner curves, laying the new sheets was pretty straightforward.

The chassis had been painted with rust-inhibiting paint & rather than use rubber strips we used a generous bead of silicone to provide a barrier between the wood & the steel. I know that just about anywhere else using silicone is seen as the devil incarnate but here its perfect.

The 8 x 4 sheets butted-up perfectly on each 4ft chassis cross-member. Sikaflex was used to bond the sheets together. The beauty of Sikaflex is that its a powerful bond that always remains flexible but once cured is sandable.

Sheets were fixed at regular intervals to the chassis cross-members.

We used large countersunk, stainless-steel bolts. Their heads have a hex key fitting and they pull in flush with the floor surface as they're tightened.

Now to begin the trimming off the excess for a perfect fit...

End-caps & dings...

Sorry to have been off-message for so long - work (a lot of it Stateside, which has allowed a few orders from Vintage Trailer Supplies to be brought home in my luggage)  has just got in the way.

Before we re-fit the floor, time to remove the front end-cap and look at that DING.

Mainly pop-rivets to drill out. But where the end-cap joins the front window they've used self-tapping screws.

Maybe to pull the end-cap tight into the window frame. Once those screws are released it pops back against the outer skin.

A bit of a fiddle to get the end-cap out as its riveted in place before the ceiling panels are put in. But with a bit of devious drilling those rivets can be popped & the end-cap will drop down leaving the ceiling panels in place.

Lots of tar and rockwool...

... and the inner bulge of the outer end-cap DING (not sure if DING is a word you use Stateside but here in Blighty it means a bit of an error parking up !).

Luckily, Pete Ritchie (Vintage American Trailer Co - see link) is skilled in the art of teasing out those blemishes.

Gentle work with a rubber hammer and the very occasional use of a metal hammer & dolly. The risk always is to use too much force & stretch the aluminium - as in SO much of life; less is more !

A few curbside scrapes are also teased out.  Its a lot easier to get your arms to both sides while the body is in thin air !

The end-cap is in good shape, though interestingly there is one panel with the ALCLAD print lettering on the inside. 

The end-cap removed is both naturally strong in one axis, though the curves of aluminium but also fragile in the other, so I think we'll brace her to stop any accidents while she's out.