I was hoping to share pictures of our first floor down but unfortunately that didn’t come to fruition. This was disappointing, particularly to me, but Fred, being Fred just took it in his stride. It didn’t mean tools down though, instead we worked away on bits of this and bits of that.
Fred continued his construction and built the subfloor that sits over the gearbox and will be the base layer under the shower/toilet area. The first floor will sit up to the edge of the gearbox but as the gearbox is higher than the rest of the chassis, we needed to construct the floors to accomodate this and to allow access for maintenance if required.
As such, this also marks the spot that the false floor will begin. With this in mind, another job Fred could tackle was to start constructing the false floor dividers. Once we install the 3 water tanks we will still have some empty space in the false floor. Having such a small total area, nothing can be wasted so we decided the utilise this spare space as extra storage. It will be 210mm high, and being keen, I have already purchased tubs that will fit in this space to house extra supplies. To ensure that these tubs don’t slip and slide, Fred has built partitioning to keep them in place. In my small mind, this is what I assumed these were for, Fred enlightens me that they are also the integral part to hold the actual (2nd) floor in position. Of course they are, I knew that lol!
Next were brackets that attach to the back of the truck which will be used to attach poles vertically on the back wall panel. These will be used to attach the spare wheel, max tracks, clothes line anchor points and our awning. All of these things need to be on the back of the truck, we don’t want to attach anything to the sides of the truck due to the potential of them been damaged when driving on narrow tracks.
Another small job was to attach the water filters. The pump is on its way and will be installed close by, pictures will follow when it arrives.
In between jobs, Fred built our roof rack and while Fred was busy mucking about with brackets and all the other stuff, I donned the paint brush and painted the subframe (final coat), roof rack and the false floor supports. It’s a job that needed to be done, but I’m not giving up my day job anytime soon to become a professional painter.
Finally, Fred measured, cut and attached the wall brackets. A bracket was attached to each of the 4 sides of the subframe. These are the important bits that will hold our walls in place. We attached them with glue and rivets and they are now ready for when we put the walls up.
So that’s it for this week, hopefully next week we will be showing you the first floor down. Stay tuned………..