october 04
Disassembly:
The day after I got home, I washed the caravan thoroughly, so I could
work with it in a pleasant way.
I've also started measuring the caravan, with the idea to put it in my
working place, so I can work at the caravan during the winter.
But we have one problem, the door in my working place is only 1,9m high
which is enough for a car, but is it enough for a caravan?
The caravan has a height of 1,83m between the bottom of the frame and
the top of the roof, if the pop roof is disassembled.
My idea is to disassemble the chassis, drawbar and the pop roof, and
put the caravan on smaller wheels. These wheels have to carry 880kg!!
To do this I built a special frame, with the wheels in it. The wheels
have a diameter of 20 cm from an old garbage-container, on every side I
put 2 wheels.
The axle and the drawbar were easy to disassemble, and the pop roof
also came loose easily.
Now it has got to work, the caravan has now 10cm ground clearence, and
yes it worked, he is going inside.
It all just fits, my working place is 6m long so it fits excactly.
Fortunately the width of my working place is 6m aswell so I still have
enough room to work.
Now that it's finally inside, I can start with the disassembly of the
interior, so that later I can also take the floor out. The disassembly
of the interior is an easy job, if you work discrete. A lot of screws
got stuck in the frame because of the rust, but with a hard punch they
eventually will get loose.
Al off the furniture is out in only one weekend, and it's nicely
stored. After that I've also removed the sail which was against the
walls, because I definately want to replace it, I could just cut it
out.
After that I saw a true disaster. The spaceframe is for 30% in worse
state because of the leakings. Because of these leakings the triplex
bars on the tubes got wet, and because of that, the tubes got so much
rust it was completly gone.
Around the windows as well, the tubes were in worse conditions. I
didn't expect that it would be this bad.
After this, all the isolation material and the floor is disassembled.
Now you can look from the inside right against the outer wall, and
because of
this I could see that some plates had little holes in it because the
outside plating were oxidated. The rainwater could just enter the
caravan through the perforated walls.
The frame underneath the floor is in it's state as I had expacted, a
worse state.
My first idea was to just leave the outer plates and replace the tubes
which had to be replaced from the inside, but because there were so
much
holes in the outer plates, I also had to take these out.
But before I was able to disassemble the outer plates, I first had to
disassemble all of the ornamental frames. This took me a weekend to
finish the job,
the screws that were attached to the ornamental frames were almost all
stuck because of the rust. The only way to remove the screws was to
grind off
the heads of the screws with an angle grinder, and then punch them a
bit inwards. The screws are made of hard metal, so that drilling them
is no
option.
When I was disassembling the roof frames, I could see where all the
leakings came from, these frames are sealed with a kind of glue which
harden too much in the coming years. Because of that there will be
cracks in de glue coting and then the water which stays on the roof can
slowly enter the caravan. It enters via de screwholes, and then
penetrates the isolationfoam, and it penetrates the plywood which are
attached to the frame. Once this area is wet, it will never dry again.
This can go on unseen for much years.
If all the frames and gutters are removed there still have to be some
rivets drilled, and the plating can be taken off the caravan.
The wheel bins have to be renewed.
The whole frame is built up by 3 different measures tubes : 20*20*1 ;
20*40*1,5 and 40*60*2
Tubes with a wall thickness of 1mm are hard to get, but after a few
phone calles, I found someone who had them. I bought 36m of the 20*20
and 6m of the 20*40 and 40*60. Hopefully it's enough.
I just left the roof loose on top of the caravan, because the roof
itself has an instable construction, it has almost no stiffness so when
moving it there is a big chance of breaking it.
In total the disassembly took a complete month of "hobby time"
