Full Coat and Some Accessories

Let's keep the paint rollers rolling! The Teardrop now has a full coat of the Fire Red polyurethane paint, including doors, hatch door and the body.

The sides require another coat (or two), but this is essentially cresting the wave of completion. I've completed the fan install and will begin installing the hatch shortly since the roof/front surface has received 2+ coats of paint.

Installed fan, silicone sealant around the bezel for waterproofing 

Interior fan trim piece, trimmed to size to snuggle up to the ceiling

Alright, what else? The new door handles and locks for the side and hatch doors came in yesterday. I'd ordered a full set via Amazon earlier this week. I'm also visualizing the utility/tongue box finishing. It's gotta be diamond plate. I'm looking at aesthetics here, so I don't need heavy duty sheets. This product from Home Depot looks pretty good.

A rainy weekend is upon us, so I'll get some more progress in for sure.

-cheers

Teardrop Wiring: Raceway, Lights and Fan plus some Other Goodies

Spring 2018 started to show itself a bit a week or two ago. I decided to get into some wiring and also made my final decision on building a tongue box rather than buying one. The motivation was that I could customize the size to fit my needs. It'll be large enough to house the deep cycle battery and a full size propane tank. I'm not sure yet if I'll run a full size propane tank regularly, but perhaps for longer trips. 

Above, I'm cutting chunks of 3/4" plywood for the tongue box. The temperature was finally in the 50s again finally. Immediately the next day we had about 4 inches of show. Such is the new Spring here in Pennsylvania.

I've now mounted key elements of the wiring blocks in the raceway. Below, from left to right: busbar, ground-bar and fuse block.

The photo below is just a higher elevation view of the wiring raceway to provide a different angle. I have to break now to establish a milestone. Up to this point, the cabin lights and fan have been sitting quietly in place with the their wiring running through the ceiling and dangling into the raceway. I've finally terminated all that onto the fuse and ground blocks. The wiring from the tongue to the raceway is now also in place and connected.

With drums rolling, I set the battery on the tongue, popped in my fuses and flicked the switch on the main fuse...

We have power!

Ok, it's a minor accomplishment, but a good sanity check to ensure I didn't drive a screw through a wire somewhere up there. Below, I have two photos of all four cabin lights in all their glory.

I have the battery resting below with temporary connections, waiting until I have the tongue box built up. In the lower left of the photo you see the 20 amp fuse on the positive terminal side.

Below, I have a more focused view of the electrical raceway. On the left is the main busbar with the positive feed from the battery. The busbar breaks off at the top into the fan and two light feeds into the fuse block on the right. The middle block is the main ground. I'll post explicit wiring diagrams in a later post. I mean really explicit, NSFW (not safe for wiring more likely).

I've also tested the fan wiring, which you can see temporarily wired up in a few of the previous photos Final wiring for the fan will occur after painting and trim work. It was certainly a milestone to see the internal wiring operational.

I'll move on to the tongue box this week with a really nice battery mounting situation in mind, along with storage.

-g

Fan Club

I received the vent fan yesterday. It's a Fan-Tastic model 1200 12v DC unit. The box was fairly dinged up, but the contents were just fine. My first impression was that this was of much better quality than my previous fan. Here I have it placed on the roof.

The body is molded in plastic, which I feel is an improvement over the white-painted metal of the prior fan. The paint began to chip and peel over time on that unit. Below I have a photo from the interior. The fan included an interior molding piece, which will clean up the look when finally installed.

Back on the workbench, we can take a closer look at the underside. There is a 3-speed control knob, a fuse slot and the dome lift knob. It lifts easily and smoothly.

The first thing I noticed with the fan was that its diameter was nearly the size of the entire unit. It's quite a bit larger than my last fan. The next thing I noticed was how much more air this fan pushes, and how quiet it is while it does that. I took a quick video of the fan's operation, embedded below.

Like I've said in the video, the lowest fan setting provided great airflow, certainly appropriate for the Teardrop cabin. I actually think the two higher settings would make it downright windy inside the cabin.Those may be handy to blow out moisture perhaps or obtain some sort of atmospheric liftoff.

Maybe that's a stretch.

-g