Big Foot 28

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"BIG FOOT 28"

2005_05_16

"Floor and other fine-tuning"

It got quiet silent about my camper. The reason was that most of the BIG things are now ready and I have to go more and more into detail. Furthermore whilst the more or less 2 years of construction work on the camper our house and garden was neglected. So I have renovated some of the rooms and spent more time than normal for garden work.

Nevertheless Big Foot was not left completely unattended. One part of the very first construction work which I hadn’t respected in all aspects was the floor to the “cellar”. The covering-plates reached directly to the vertical walls above them. My idea was to have maximum access to the “cellar” but it proved to have some unacceptable disadvantages:

	The most severe was that most of the covering-plates could not be removed without dismounting doors, the outlets streams of the hot air heating or other parts of the furniture.
	Not that severe but not perfect: Some of the installed furniture was not 100% in a rectangular position. But the covering-plates of the floor had been cut exactly in 90° angle. This caused because of the sometimes very long plates increasing gaps in the floor. (What finally had caused the mismatch I cannot prove now any longer. I had paid as much attention as possible.) These gaps had been covered by the floor covering which was glued afterwards onto the covering plates but still gaps remained and the overlapping floor covering was too soft to prevent dirt, hairs from the dog etc. to fall into the “cellar”.
	Last but not least some of these covering plates were huge, heavy and uncomfortable to handle. So I wasn’t very happy when I knew that I had had to remove one of these covering plates plus dismounting lots of stuff.

The only solution to solve this after everything else had already been finalized resulted in more work. But I have to admit that when I began to construct my camper I wouldn’t have been able at all to do something similar and even now I would not be able to do it and by no means with such an accuracy as my friend – he knows whom and what I mean!

First of all a profile had to be moulded out of a bleach board. To have 100% enough of this profile 30 meter had been produced of the profile shown below, than the floor covering was glued onto it and finally painted. The vertical walls from the cellar are made of a special kind of wooden board which will not be effected by humidity. The thickness of these boards is 20 mm. The moulding from underneath in the profile fits exactly onto these vertical boards. When put onto the vertical boards the level of the floor is not raised at all (very important!) because the floor plates were laying on the vertical walls (directly side by side where applicable). The edges to the left and right of the profile carry now the floor plates. Although the thickness of the remaining wood looks quiet small it is more than enough because bleach is a tough material. This is the rest of one of the profiles.

For those areas where the profiles didn’t need to be for both sides it was simply divided.

The formerly huge plate covering the fresh water tanks was split in two units. The gap between the edge and the floor plates is now max. 2 mm!

The floor plate above the batteries is now in two sections as well. In the very front you see the top plate of one of the shoe storage compartments.

This is one of the opened floor plates of the battery storing area. The upper wooden strip is where the floor plate rests on. The lower strip (the one to which the arrow shows) was dump of one of the profiles but it fitted perfectly to clamp the batteries. The strip is fixed with 4 screws to the vertical wall and will tie down the batteries even when Big Foot is driven on the roughest roads.

Even though the furniture is ready since several months still a small issue was outstanding: mounting of the locking plate. Now I am able to delete this part of my To-Do-List. Here you can see one of the more than 40 locks. For all those who have no experience with camper: These special locks – named “Push-Lock” – are essential for campers to prevent e. g. the stored items when driving to push against the doors and open them. If they are not locked it is easily visible by the knob reaching out. This knob is used as well as a handle.

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Stand: 24. September 2010