June was flying along, between our Ohana and our home we were pushing long days but getting to see exciting results. We wanted to get the cab finished on our rig in time for our yearly get together, and Laura’s birthday celebration next month.
Even though we were burning the candle at both ends, we were still trying to make time for the other things in our lives we felt were important. Here is a pic after we finished donating blood the when the Blood Bank came to town. It only happens about once a year (if that), so we try to make a point to give when we can.
So into finishing the cab we began. It was time to start working on pulling the seats and trim so we could get to the carpet!
Yeah- minus giving her a quick initial vacuum, we hadn’t deeply gone through the cab and cleaned the carpet knowing we were going to pull it and bed line it. That’s how nasty it all was!
Another problem I was working on fixing was the cam locks for the new solar generator door.
They had no plate to hold them in place, so when you put anything on that could slightly grip the lock you could just spin the whole thing around and unlock the door anyway. So I decided to build my own plates…
I don’t usually include photos from the failed portions of my engineering experiments, but I had a lot of them so I decided to share them. 😂
Ultimately my custom plates didn’t hold up, so I used 2 flat bars and they were holding up for the time being.
After the locks were back in place and operational we were back onto the cab. We finished pulling trim and got down to ripping out the carpet. (Whew- so fun!) 🙄
And of course in the process ran into an unexpected hiccup… (See photo 5 in the slide show below)
That night, after deciding I wasn’t going to tackle grinding down the rust that evening, we moved to swapping out the truck battery with a matching new marine one. When I say matching, we discovered from the helpful guys at Midnight Sun Solar that your truck battery should match your camper batter. So we scooped one up on our Anchorage run. We ended up screwing a few boards together to make up for the height difference of the new battery and it shimmed up just fine. Yet, of course, we ran into another hiccup when I broke the positive battery terminal clamp in half.
I decided to order a new one, I had seen on the ToyHome forums people using some pretty cool quick disconnect terminal clamps and we had time to order one.
So our Ohana had no seats and no battery for the time being- for now she was officially grounded… 😬
Well, with that said, the next day was all about getting the cab back together while we waited on the new terminal clamp.
We began by removing the seat belts.
Then we evaluated the thick silicone bead they had sealed the cab to the camper with. Remember, nothing paints to silicone but silicone, so how were we going to prep this area to be able to paint over it with bed liner? Time to think…
Next was a large bundle of audio and power cables that had been ran to behind the drivers seat. When Nick and I had evaluated these the summer before, he recommended removing all of it- warning me that with the way it had been done it was a “Truck fire waiting to happen.” So that was exactly what I did next.
Then last but not least we gave the whole cab a good sweep and vacuum, where under the caked layer of rust on the driver’s side I found multiple holes all the way through the floor! 🥴🤦♂️
Not sure how to go about fixing it, I placed a call to Mike Devaney… who was incredibly backed up and busy with work.
While I awaited a meetup to evaluate the situation I began cleaning down the corrosion to see just how bad things ultimately were.
In the end, though the corrosion had done it’s work the majority of the plate was still there. A non-factory plate having been previously installed there told us this had happened before… 🤔
So while I awaited word we decided to fill all the holes in the cab that were left behind from the carpet fastening screws, so out came our old fried Lexel.
The next day we ended up running out of town in a pinch, we needed a new paint sprayer for the house. On our way North to Soldotna Laura had the idea that hit the home run out of the park; what if we fiber glassed the floor! 😲🤯
It made total sense!
We still had bottles of the 2 parts for the epoxy resin mix left over.
Fiberglass was light-weight, strong, durable, and could conform to the odd shaping of the truck’s floor paneling with added on plate.
Also- we encapsulate the silicone between the camper and cab, and paint over the fiberglass! Thus our painting over the silicone problem would be solved! 😃
And with that stroke of ingenious my brain was able to stop spinning its gears on how to solve our problem 😵💫 and get onto the steps of solving it- and soon.
I called and left a message with Mike thanking him and letting him know we had a plan. With that it was time to get to work.
My first step I took was too clean up the last of the rust the grinder could not get to. After that, I sprayed a few coats of undercoating with rust resistance.
Since I was doing the steps on the floor, I also tackled cleaning up the mounting rails for the cab seats along with the mounting flange for the stick shift boot. ✨
With the new LionEnery Safari Solar Generator, we were going to need a better way to run cables in and out of it’s storage compartment. So I ordered a locking cable hatch door- and we got to cutting it out and installing it!
It worked great! Now some Gaco in the future and it would blend right in.
On our quick Soldotna run we had picked up a couple of cheapie pool floaties. 😁 Laura had been super excited about the idea of having some ways to lounge gracefully upon the surface of calm waters- so this had been a fun and easy solution we decided on. They would be perfect for the get together at the lake next month!
Speaking of new little upgrades that Laura was excited about; we ordered and happily put our new trash can in place. This one doubled our capacity, allowed for 2 bags to be installed if we needed to recycle, and had a cool soft touch lift lid. Hopefully this one would give us the room for trash we needed!
Last but not least, definitely not least, started originally as a little joke on my part. I had been dreaming and scheming ways we could use the space behind our bench seats on the roof. Currently it was just a big open space of aluminum plate. So when I was joking around I came up the idea of installing a small greenhouse up there.
Well, once the words came out of my mouth, the gears began to turn. I spent a long time researching terrace hand-rail planters with locking lids. Nothing seemed just right until we came across this one:
Once it arrived we began modifying it so it would firmly hold together for the high winds and conditions we were going to subject it to. We drilled holes and zip-tied the base layer down, then got some high quality cable ties to attach the additional layers as needed. This greenhouse was able to adapt between 1 to 3 layers! All we had to do was store the small bit of extra parts and Laura could have a myriad of options for growing small flowers and herbs!
Super excited about a dream coming true, we prepared for mounting it to our roof. 😉
Geoff Murphy 7/7/2021
Oh the joys of fixing rusty floorboards.