However, there have been a couple of significant recent wins. First, take a look at this cute young man playing with this perfectly-hung door:
It latches and everything! Exterior handle not completed, some assembly still required.
There's an inside lip around the whole works where the seal goes, and that was really fussy to install because it has to "gap" just right. The door strike was also pretty picky and required a couple of tries. No real engineering feats to share, just a lot of precise and fussy woodworking. The top part of the rim was a laminated job, so it needed to be clamped, ripped, and cut to size, like this:
The door hinges I ordered originally were fairly inadequate. They're now archived in a spare parts box for future projects. The ones I wound up with, though boring and square, do lend kind of a nice solid look to the side of the whole beast. It's starting to look a bit less, er, European.
I'm told that I should close off the openings on both sides of this Egg, so I suppose I'll have to go through this whole process again.
But wait, there's more!
The gas springs to hold up the hatch had given me a hard time before, largely because I didn't really pay enough attention to the weight requirements or the ball joint design. The generic models I picked up at Canadian Tire failed in a fairly depressing way. As with many half-assed decisions, there was a lot of work to undo and redo.
This time around, I offloaded some of the engineering to Gemini Gas Springs in Vernon. Henk helped me out a lot and delivered a great set of springs, custom made precisely to fit in short order. The best part of the Gemini springs is that the pressure is adjustable. By letting out a little bit of gas at a time, I was able to make sure the resulting force "felt" right without doing a slew of calculations.
Here's the result:
They work perfectly. The hatch holds solidly open, but begins to fall closed on the bottom part of the movement. If anything, they're a little on the strong side, meaning they'll push the hatch open quite aggressively if a hand isn't on it. If this turns out to be a problem, it's simple to take a little more gas out later on.
Here's a slightly closer look. Once everything's finished, it should look quite nice:
I have a few remaining major tasks for the winter. I think it's reasonable to expect that everything will be finished for Spring, but sometimes "reasonable" means different things to different people:
- Install left door sealing surround and latch
- Install hatch sealing system
- Refinish trailer frame
- Full exterior finishing (including epoxy, fibreglass, primer, and topcoat)
- Miscellaneous finishing tasks (windows, seals, caulking, fenders, organizers, etc)
The last few hardware additions have this project looking less like a dusty pile of wood and a lot more like, well, a camping trailer! Imagine that.
