Monday, November 12, 2007

Flooring a gogo
















The floor is in!!!!!!! Wow the hardest part is over.....I hope. OK I finally finished the flooring, BIG JOB, so I cleaned and cleaned all of the frame rails and used a rust converter on all of the light surface rust. Once this very dirty part of the job was done it was time for the super insulating. I finally got to use the Tiger Foam spray in polyurethane insulation(http://www.tigerfoam.com/) This stuff is great, easy to use, waterproof, fire retardant, a great vapor barrier and offers a good deal of structural help holding all if the underbelly to the ribs and out riggers. This foam really seals all of the gaps and seams/holes and any spaces it touches. All of this in less than 60 seconds dry time. You do have to be fast. Once all of the tanks were foamed in (sides and bottoms) I sprayed the entire under belly with about one inch of the foam, this give about an R value of 6. I then added the R13 pink stuff in all of the open floor sections. Now we have R19! But I am not done yet, Oh No! I then covered the frame and belly with Foil-Foam-Foil insulation from Prodex. (http://www.insulation4less.com/) This stuff is a radiant heat barrier that has an R value of about 14.





Now we are cooking with R33 in the floor section!! That is better than most houses! I finished up by putting down new plywood on the floor. this is a much harder job than it would seem. You see when this Airstream was built they put the floor down first ind then put the shell on it. It went something like this. Build frame, put down plywood, add c-channel around plywood floor, then attach shell to floor and frame. Now putting the flooring in involved driving the plywood into the channel and lining it up halfway on the frame rail so that there would be room for the second piece to fit in the opposite side. Since you have two sides to fit into each 4 foot section went in in two pieces. Long and tiring part but it came out great.





Now it is time to tackle the wall insulation. First I will add in some wiring for a modern entertainment system, gotta have the surround sound! Next will come the tiger foam and prodex insulation and so on and so on...





Well more to come soon, I hope.





Rick