Frame Trouble

Once the shell was off it took another two weekends to pull the flooring, belly pan, water tanks and other stuff off of the frame. I parked the frame down next to the shell to try to keep all the mess confined to one area of the yard. This has worked with mixed success. There are many parts and pieces laying around.

The frame was pretty beat up. It is nearly 40 years old so I’m not sure what I expected. It was bent in a couple of areas and rotten through in a few more. My original plan was to repair what I had with new steel.

I borrowed a flux core wire feed welder from a friend and purchased some new steel from a local steel yard. I cut away what I thought was bad and started patching in new.

I took off the axles (they are shot) and flipped the trailer using the gantry and my three kids. I ordered new Dexter axles. I was getting pretty close to completing my repairs when I had a friend drop by. I had put an ad in the local Craigslist to sell an extra RV toilet I had that came with the Airstream. Stefan came by to purchase the toilet for an Airstream he was rebuilding. He has done several of these and I was interested in his take on the condition of the trailer. He said I was trying to fix something that shouldn’t be fixed and suggested I just build a new trailer from scratch.

So I did. It will cost me more but the added insurance of having a new frame is worth the cost. I kept the tongue and rewelded it back onto the new frame, but other than that, it is all new.

I used the old frame and several measurements I took as a guide. I built the new one right on top of the old one. Then I lifted the new on up and cut the old one away into smaller pieces and dragged it out from under it.

Time to Crack the Shell

This part of the process took much longer than anticipated. There were so many rivets holding this thing together it was ridiculous. I lost count of the broken drill bits.

I made the decision to get the shell off mainly to be able to really check the frame. As I began removing the belly pan it became more evident that the frame was in worse shape than I originally thought.

I made a simple pair of gantries to lift the shell off of the frame. This was a good idea and worked well. I can’t take credit for it. I saw other Airstream rebuilders do the same thing and it seemed easier than bracing everything up and lifting the shell with jacks.

Once the shell was cleared from the frame I pulled the frame out from under it with my truck.

This whole process took three weekends to accomplish. I am glad that I did it.

 

Empty Shell

Well over the last few weeks I have been busy removing everything down to the bare shell. It has been a very messy job but I’m glad it’s done and now I can get a real sense of what kinds of previous repairs and damage have been done to this old travel trailer. My initial thought was to try to replace the floor with the shell on but after reading many of the Airstream forums I decided to do a complete shell-off restoration. This Sovereign trailer is nearly 40 years old and was not very well taken care of. It only made sense to tear it down and build it back up again instead of trying to do a patch job that I would regret later.

The remains of the interior cabinets, carpet, and trash on its way to the dump!

Everything out but the sewer piping! Now to inspect the floor!

I cut away a section of the floor up by the front and discovered that the frame was OK.  I will know more when I can get the belly pan off.

I took off all the remaining window trim and anything else that would prevent the interior skins from coming off then I began drilling rivets. I spent $50 on a rivet removal tool that goes into a drill chuck but had better success using my Dewalt impact screw gun with a drill bit to get the rivets out. I broke a couple bits but other than that it went fairly quick.

Nearly there! Lots of mouse debris and roaches fell from the ceiling as the panels came off. Yuk! I had my sons help me carry the long pieces of aluminum skin out the door as they were too unwieldy to handle myself.

By the end of the day I had it down to this. Quite a mess!

My wife and younger son surprised me by pulling out all the insulation and bagging it up for me! Thanks! My wife accidentally stepped onto the belly skin exposed by the open hole I made and snapped off a portion of it. It had to come off anyway.

Just a bunch of wire hanging everywhere.

I pulled the wiring out. I’ll save the 12V wire and try to see if any of it is salvageable. The 110V wires were burned in several places and went straight into the trash!

It took nine bags total to hold all the insulation!

All cleaned out and ready for the next step! The plan is to get the shell off between Christmas and New Years. I’ll have to take all the attaching bolts and rivets out and try to get the belly pan off.

It was weird seeing the trailer like this. It did show where previous repairs were made and will give me the opportunity to make changes to the layout. The floor is shot and the shell sags in a few locations. So far the trailer does not smell much better. The stink must also be in the wood sub floor. I did locate some corrosion of the shell at the floor where the radio used to be next to the door.

Let the Gutting Begin!

So the plan for this weekend was to gut the trailer out and get rid of all the interior components that could not be salvaged. My friend John and I started drilling, unscrewing and beating out all the walls and cabinets to really open things up and get a better assessment of the condition. My hopes are that the frame and shell of the trailer are good or at least repairable and that I can start from scratch and build the trailer back up into something I would be happy to live in.

After working till we could not see this evening I called it quits then the next day I went back and finished taking everything else out down to the bathroom.

One funny thing that happened was that John was pulling out a tambour door and as he unrolled it cockroaches came pouring out! He freaked and dropped the housing, not realizing that the door itself was also covered until he turned it around and shrieked then I grabbed it and threw it outside. All the bits and pieces will be trashed or burned to get rid of it.

I’ll do another update when we start replacing the subfloor and removing the belly pan

Airstream Dream

How it Started

I have been following the tiny house movement for a couple of years now and am really motivated by the idea of having less stuff. You see, I currently live in a 2800 square foot two story home on five acres. I have little free time to do the things I want to do because I am constantly fixing, repairing, and maintaining all the stuff that goes into keeping up a 2800 square foot home on five acres.

I have been watching online as different people took flatbed trailers and constructed tiny homes on them. Most of them had a loft arrangement for the bed and my wife would remind me that as we got older we would find a loft impractical. Then I came across a person who remodeled an old Airstream travel trailer into a home and I said to myself, “That’s it!” I have always liked the style of the older Airstream trailers. It has that Art Deco look that I have always thought was the height of style.

I began searching Craigslist and Ebay and quickly discovered that there is a very wide range of sizes, condition, and prices for older Airstream trailers. I spent quite a bit of time researching vintage Airstream trailer websites and bought a couple of books about them. As I learned more and more I became convinced that this was what I wanted to do.

The first few I found on Craigslist were sold quickly and I thought that I may not be lucky enough to get one. I did discover however that I was drawn to the 1970’s style of trailer and that the 31′ Sovereign seemed to fit the bill of what I was looking for. A living area small enough that we could still be mobile but large enough that my wife and I could have some space and not feel too crowded.

After several weeks of patiently surfing listings I stumbled upon a 1974 Airstream Sovereign for sale or trade on Craigslist. It just so happened that I had an Chevrolet Astro Van that I had been unsuccessfully trying to sell so I contacted the seller and asked if he wanted to trade. After getting through a couple of hurdles that I may expound upon later, I towed the trailer home and began the process of cleaning it up.

 

 

The trailer as it turns out, was a 1975 model that was purchased from a person in LA after hurricane Katrina and was lived in by a man who was older and didn’t take very good care of himself.

I decided on the initial inspection that this was going to be a gut job. The trailer was crawling with cockroaches and needed to be bug bombed. I spent an afternoon filling the trash cans at my house with all the junk from the trailer and about gagged when I cleaned out the small refrigerator that still had food in it and was filled with maggots. I managed to get it cleaned up a bit but the trailer itself has a musty nasty kind of odor that won’t make it liveable.

I moved the trailer closer to my garage for quicker access to tools and took a power washer to the exterior to get some of the mold and dirt off of the outside. I jacked the trailer up and put it on jack stands. I took the very dry rotted tires off and put them in the garage. The next step will be to inspect the axles and brakes. Then I want to get all the interior taken out. I know I will have to replace the floor and probably rewire the whole thing, but before I get too far ahead of myself I need to address the condition of the trailer frame. The parts that are exposed are pretty rusty and the frame extending out the back to the rear bumper is partially rotted away. Once the belly pan is off I will be able to get a better look at the condition of it.