Hello all,
I am in the process of restoring and re-tiling the floor on my '56
Caravanner. I have just repaired the area aft of the doorway using a
technique that I think might be of interest to others on the list.
Since the interior of my Caravanner is pristine, I didn't want to remove the
interior panels in order to access the areas of the floor under the
U-channel. I have only two or three bad spots on the perimeter of the floor,
and I am trying to repair these with as little disturbance of the trailer
interior as possible.
When I pulled the tile up to the rear of the entrance door, I found that the
wood wasn't rotted, but had been water-soaked so long that the plies had
separated. On small areas this condition is easily corrected by drilling
1/8th inch holes about half an inch apart into the wood (but using a stop
collar on the drill to avoid going all the way through), then soaking the
area with thin marine epoxy. Pushing down on areas of the floor affected as
the epoxy is poured over the holes will help spread the epoxy throughout the
layers of plywood as it seeps down the drilled holes.
When the wood is saturated (it will hold a lot of epoxy), put a couple of
layers of waxed paper over it and a heavy weight to hold the plies together.
Remove the wax paper as soon as the epoxy hardens to the touch. The
resulting floor will be hard as steel and impervious to water damage in the
future. I have corrected a couple of small (8"x 8") areas this way and had
excellent results.
The new technique I tried involved an area about 18" long under the
U-channel aft of the entrance door. This area is beneath the front of the
closet and the factory heater in my Caravanner.
I removed the front of the closet and the heater. I then cut out the bad
section of floor under the U-channel and out into the good floor about a
foot away from the wall with a spiral-cutter set to the depth of the
plywood. I was then able to reach back under the U-channel and remove all of
the bad wood there. The fasteners were still good, and still stuck down from
the U-channel.
I then cut a piece of plywood 18" long and five inches wide, and pushed it
up under the U-channel from beneath (this is all done from inside the
trailer with the belly skin undisturbed). When I pulled this new plywood
out, the tips of all the fasteners hanging down from the U-channel had left
impressions in it. I then used a 1/4" drill to drill holes through the new
plywood where the fasteners had marked it. Now I could push the new strip of
plywood all the way up to the base of the U-channel to check the fit. The
old fasteners went through the new holes I had drilled.
Next I coated the edges of the new plywood and the drilled holes with epoxy
and let it soak in and set. Then I put a couple of layers of masking tape on
the bottom side of each of the holes I had drilled (forming cups), and
filled each cup with epoxy. (Since I had coated the sides of the holes with
epoxy, this new epoxy couldn't soak into the wood.) I also put a thick layer
of epoxy on top of the wood, and fitted the wood strip in place under the
U-channel. As I pushed up on the wood, I felt each fastener punch through
the tape, and I tried to keep the tape tight around the fastener so the
epoxy would not run out. I rigged a system of levers to push the plywood
tight up against the U-channel and let it set.
When it was done, there was a two-and-a-half-inch ledge of wood left
sticking out from the U-channel at floor level. I weigh 225 and I could
stand on the ledge with no deflection of the wood at all. It was then a
simple matter to screw and epoxy a plate beneath this strip and drop in the
new floor section.
Since marine epoxy sets up as an extremely hard solid, I feel that this
repair has all the structural integrity of completely removing the interior
walls and putting new fasteners through wood. Even if the fasteners had
rusted away, I think that putting several course screws up through the
U-channel from below and then setting them in epoxy the same way would have
a similar structural integrity. Once the epoxy sets, the screws can never
move, and can never rust.
It seem complicated, but repairing the wood under the U-channel this way is
relatively easy, and the main advantage is that the interior of the trailer
is untouched except where cabinetry has to be removed. Maybe this technique
will help some owners who can't face removing interior panels and/or belly
skins to fix the floor.
Brian Jenkins