Repairing the door openings

The door openings were in really bad shape. Every piece of wood in both door openings was rotted and some of the aluminum in the rear door opening was corroded and falling apart.

I started on the rear door. Not sure why but the rear part of this door frame is built differently than the rest. Their is an added curved piece of 3/4" wood that makes up the part of the frame instead of just an aluminum piece of framing like the rest are.

Here is the curved piece of wood. You can see how rotted it was, I'm using it as a template.

The new piece of 3/4" is pressure treated. Here is the piece installed.

With the framing installed I turned my attention to the 1" plywood strips that make up the door stop. Here is one of them after I cut it to fit.

The next thing I had to do was repair the corroded aluminum at the bottom of the door frame.

You can see the new pressure treated framing piece and the 1" strip of 1/2" plywood behind it.

First I cut the old piece just above where the corrosion ended.

I was able to make somewhat of a template out of the corroded piece I cut away. Then I bent the new piece into shape. This took quite a while. I had to go back and refit it into place then take it out to make adjustments.

Once I had the piece shaped properly I riveted it into place.

Once it's cleaned and polished it shouldn't be noticeable.

 Then I nailed the aluminum skin to the plywood strip. The plywood strip is nailed to the piece of 3/4" wood.

Next I worked on the front door. I replaced all of the plywood strips and secured the aluminum skin to them like on the back door but I didn't get any pictures of this.

The next thing I did was install the new door handle on the front door.

First I used my template to trace out where the hole will be cut.

Then I cut the hole and installed the new lock.

It's supposed to rain some this afternoon. I hope it rains a lot because this should be my final test for leaks (I hope).

If all goes well I should be able to start installing the floor soon!

Fixing Leaks

It's been a while since I've been able to work on the Spartan but I finally got a chance the other day.

It's been raining a lot so I really needed to finish sealing all the leaks. I went around the inside of the camper and caulked all the seams that I had marked when it was raining with Dicor.

The next thing I did was to install some foam weatherstripping all around the back window, it was leaking through the window really bad.

I also needed to make the patch for the roof where the heater vent was.

A few months back I removed the homemade vent stack. They sure weren't stingy with the roofing tar. My original plan was to just put a small circular cap over the round hole but then I realized two things, one, the hole has a lip, and two, the plate is metal, not aluminum.

I decided to go ahead and remove the plate and make a new one out of aluminum.

I cut the new piece out, drilled all of the holes and then riveted it into place. I used Butyl tape around the edges and lots of Dicor inside of that.

I then trimmed the excess butyl tape off.

I'm using Olympic rivets but I dont have a rivet head shaver. I'm going to try my hand with a dremel first. If that doesnt work I'll look at possibly getting one.

Here is the inside of the patch.

It rained three days straight after I installed this and no leaks!

The next thing I did was drill the holes for the window drain tubes.

I will be replacing the hoses soon.

The last thing to do with leaks are the two doors, I have a lot of work to do on the door frames to stop the leaks there. Hopefully I can do that this weekend.