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...