Closin' In

...well, sort of.  Not closing in on anything in particular, but more to do with construction progress since the last post, and literally closing in the exterior of the trailer.  My last post reflected considerable progress building the cabinetry and skinning the front half of the trailer after almost a year hiatus working on the build.  With outdoor construction time running short for the second summer of the project, it was time to make a push to take advantage of the late season weather and get something done.

The next major construction challenge was to fabricate the rear galley door.  This would prove to be one of the most challenging and time consuming tasks of the project thus far.  I decided to frame the door using the glued and nailed 2"x2" stringers that were used to span side to side across the front of the trailer.  A critical difference this time though, is that the stingers need to be curved to follow the radius of the back of trailer.  Recalling back to the routing of the trailer walls, a jig was used to create a 48" radius curve on the back of the trailer.  This same radius (and jig) would be used to created the door stingers.  Working from a stack of 3/4" plywood spares from the earlier side wall construction, an afternoon of curved stringer routing lie ahead.

For each stinger, an inside and outside curve needed to be cut.  To ensure consistency, each plywood spare was screwed down temporarily to the saw table.  The outside of each stringer was cut using two router passes, one at half- and one at full depth.  The stringer inside cuts were accomplished by creating an inset pivot hole in the jig.  The jig was then unscrewed and reset set to the inset distance (about 1 3/4" shorter) before making the two inside passes.  Pretty simple, huh?  Scrub, rinse and repeat.

Not wanting to be guilty of building a wimpy trailer, I decided to err on the brick crap house side of things with construction.  Each side wall would be reinforced with a 1"x2" stringer, and then seven separate vertical 2"x2" stringers would span the width of the door.  Doing a little math on this, a total of 16 stringers would need to be cut (at four router passes each with a jig adjustment in the middle) for a total of 64 cuts, using about six total plywood spares.  [insert stupid joke here] If you act on this special TV offer, along with your Ginsu knives, we'll also throw in gluing, nailing, and chop sawing each stringer too.  But that's not all folks, in addition to all the curved stringers, straight header, footer, and mid-span stringers were needed as well.  [and second stupid joke here] By the time it was all said and done, we were ready to go into the hockey stick business.

Crappy infomercials/bad jokes aside, having trouble imagining what all this wood will be used for, or what it will look like when assembled?  OK, here's a sneak peek of it all put together, and following is how we got there:

My Dad made a good suggestion early in the fabrication of the galley door.  Rather than try to assemble and skin the door free from the trailer (and hope and pray that it fit when installed), we decided to build the door in place.  This would then allow us to skin it and cut it out after allowing the skin to bend and properly take the shape of the rear radius.  This approach seemed most likely to obtain the desire results in terms of build quality.

To accomplish this construction, we essentially needed to build the door from the outside-in.  After adding the side doubling 1"x2" stringer, we used scrap vinyl trim to create 1/4" door gap between the wall and the outside stringer.

 

To fix the door in place, a temporary 3" screw was then drilled from the exterior of the trailer through the side wall, the temporary spacer, and the outer stringer.

From there, straight headers and footers were added, and each vertical stringer was cut to precise length to fit between the header and footer, glued, and screwed at equal distances across the width of the door.

With all of the vertical stringers in place, three sets of horizontal mid-span spacers were cut to length, kreg'ed, glued, and screwed.

Voila!  A framed galley door!  Fast forward two months, borrow a neighbor's garage (more later), and the final tasks of closing in the trailer were at hand.  Remember the previous post on skinning the exterior?  Same applies here.  After cutting to length, starting at the bottom of the door (with a 1/4" spacer), a full sheet width of plywood was used to cover the door, bottom to top.  Add a box of screws, and some spar urethane, and here you are:

Gapping the top of the door at 3/8" to allow for the hurricane hinge to be installed later (coming soon), the final piece of exterior skin is cut to length and installed (without glue for now, to allow access to cabinetry:

The result...a completely skinned trailer.  Next steps?  Cut the door loose, install the door via a hurricane hinge (Santa brought some gifts, also to follow), and move construction back inside the trailer to finish the cabinets and possibly begin electrical wiring and insulation.

Until next time...