Just one shade of grey.

If a job is worth doing it's worth doing twice. 

Or three times.

The old roof liners have seen better days and I made a new one out of some wondrous material called "caravan ply" which served faithfully in the interim, but was clearly here for a good time not a long one.    Fortunately I didn't throw the original panels away just in case I needed a template at some future time, such as for instance - now.

With a well practised squint, I assessed the damaged parts as "repairable with a bit of fibreglass and epoxy I have lying around somewhere" and the results were so pleasing I wondered why I hadn't squinted at it earlier.  

I then bought some terribly expensive sealer primer in a nice grey colour that matched the original dull grey so well that we had a near perfect finish after just one coat.  Then, we glued a sample of our intended fabric onto a test piece, and not to put too fine a point on it, it looked horrible with the grey showing through in rather dispiriting patches.

Subsequently I discovered that white primer of sufficient density to cover expensive grey primer is even more costly, and because the grey is all pervading, you have to buy twice as much to achieve what some in the trade call "cover".

Ahh well, onwards and upwards.   By tomorrow they'll both be pristine white and waiting for the fabric gluing error that's bound to be next, but in the meantime the van's interior is beginning to show more than a passing resemblance to the inside of an ugg boot.

We're only been at this twelve days although it feels like months.   By this time next week, notwithstanding that we haven't got to the fiddly bits yet, we might be getting close to the end of this chapter.  

Four-way stretch.

 

I'm pretty sure it's called four-way stretch fabric because that's what one has to do to install it. Contact adhesive used correctly is deadly stuff, when the two surfaces meet no man can put them asunder, so things have to be just so when they do.   

It's a case of having to be simultaneously underneath the entire show spraying the glue then keeping the glued surfaces apart while at the same time gently working the fabric from the top side into all the little nooks and around all those corners.  It's like a game of championship level "Twister".

I must confess had I an inkling that it was going to mould around that wheel in one piece I might have sold tickets to the performance.   Now that it worked so well I'm not game to tell anyone before I do the other side lest the inevitable should occur.

It's all looking quite trim we think, and we're pretty sure we've picked a colour that will hide the stains from the red bulldust beautifully!

I phoned a friend.

 If this had been a proper internet heading it would have read:

"I phoned a friend, and you won't believe what happened next!".

It's astonishing how little problems just seem to vanish with just one extra pair of hands on the job, to say nothing of an entire extra brain.

It really only did take one or two jiggles and joggles, and perhaps one "let's pull it out and fix it" before the job was done a very long time before lunch, and with Pat doing most of the donkey work and pretty much all of the thinking as well, by the end of the day (which was really in the middle of the day) almost nothing hurt.

Yes folks ten days in to the project, or one year and ten months if you want to be picky, the lining is complete and ready for the next terrifying step.

I am now going to take the rest of the afternoon off to contemplate how much easier it would be just to give it all a quick sand and a lick of varnish instead of trying to turn it into some sort of reverse fur ball.

Wood. Ducks. Row.

All our ply panels are shaped and ready to go, apart from that inevitable final fettling which always takes longer than one imagines it will.

An eighty kilometre round trip today was all that was needed to purchase the last tube of Sikaflex in existence so we can stick stuff with confidence, the batteries for the drills are on charge and there are felt pen marks all over the inside of the van to remind us what goes where.  

The Pineapple Princess Runner Up has lent me a chap for the morning (presumably conspiring with the other of us to have a bit of a lady's time, no doubt over strong coffee and well out of earshot of the muffled grunts and manly conversations which will surely emanate from within the dear little van in the course of installing the panels.

So there you have it.  Our ducks we think, are in a row.

In the absence of some sort of catastrophe, or a shortage of screws, we should have a lining by day's end, or even lunch-time if we're really lucky.

It's been a week, and all we have to show for it is an empty van.

 

Projects like this one do tend to go through  phases.  

We've been through that one where progress is rapid enough to document every day, and at the same time in those early stages there's sufficient adrenalin flowing through ones veins to ignore the creaking of bones unused to being twisted into positions  usually reserved for far younger and perhaps lesser dimensioned folk.

Today we seemed to be over all that.   

From the first staggering steps out of bed waiting for the coffee and paracetamol to work their magic on mind and aching joints,  it was hard to see what progress had been made in the course of the previous day, nor for that matter what might come of the next few.   It's all down to a bit of a grind where dozens of little thankless tasks need to be done in order to move forward.  It was all so un-enthusing that I even started to look forward to my dental appointment in the middle of the day.

Curiously even simple tasks were made extraordinarily complicated but with a little luck the value of the work done will be evident in a day or two when hand laminated plywood panels (because nothing resembling the correct thickness is available at the moment) pop into place with no sign that they weren't there from the beginning, and the phones plug in to the conveniently located charge ports and a satisfying little "ding" happens to let us know that all is working.

Now if only I could just plug in my shoulders and hear that "ding" of reassurance that the recharge was underway, the world would be an even better place tomorrow!  

Maybe it's time for a day off!

 

It seemed as though I spent most of the day in vain, trying to tidy up a bit while also trying to remember where I keep the collet for the under-bench router and when I did and set it up, I saved at least as much time making a few dozen little curved staves as I spent looking for the part.

Almost all of the panels are cut now, out of 3mm ply because 6mm can't be had, so I'm making the curved parts out of two layers of three just to increase the degree of difficulty a bit and add another day to the schedule.

The electrics are (re)done though, ready to tuck away out of sight when the rest catches up, even if I am a bit dismayed or perhaps downright disturbed by the orientation of the inverter.  Hopefully it's been calibrated and won't do as it's name suggests.

Have you ever wondered about how every space ship in every movie that's ever been made, is always travelling the same way up even though in the absence of gravity that doesn't make sense?  I did hear that the earliest pilots used a piece of heavily buttered toast as a visual gauge.  Whichever direction the butter faced was down, making it quite a simple matter for all to remain in sync.

Those were simpler times of course,  now when intergalactic travel awaits, we have our inverters to keep us on the straight and level.

Making new parts.

 

One of my very favourite parts of the boat building process is the lofting.    

That's the process where, in almost the reverse of the normal building sequence, a drawing in three dimensions is converted to a series of two dimensional profiles from which the three dimensional object can be built.  It's also how sail shapes are traditionally drafted, hence the "sailmakers loft", but the really satisfying part of that process for me and arguably the bit that requires the most practice if not actual skill to accomplish efficiently is when the boat hull has taken shape, and various parts need to be fitted to the odd shapes and around all the obstacles created within. 

Fitting out a van is a similar process to building a boat at that time, in that there are lots of little curves to be taken into account when making wall panelling, and since very few of the original parts could be used as templates, the afternoon was spent very pleasantly indeed.  Except perhaps for the bit about trial fitting each piece, returning to the garage to shave off half a millimetre and so on, eleventy-five thousand times,

The morning wasn't half bad either, given that we'd spent it sipping coffee with friends at the beach, but you know what they say about all work and no play!