Category Archives: Retirement

A few projects

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Since our trailer was a 50amp model it came with two Air Conditioners.  This meant no Fantastic Fan above the bed.  This also meant there was no direct source for airflow to us, like no ceiling fan (in household terms).  When it gets hot it is nice to have a fan blowing on you.  I found a Vornado fan at Target that would work and we put it on the floor, blowing up to the bed.  This was adequate, but I wanted more.  I wondered how I could mount the fan on the wall but didn’t want it adding weight to the wall as we were driving down the road.  I put a hook in the wall where we can hang the fan when needed:

We have been having some issues with our walls in the trailer sliding inward as we travel.  Some of the movement is close to 1 inch.

These walls were very cheaply made in Airstream and no require reinforcement, Airstream just stapled the corners together and covered them with trim.  The first wall is the hallway wall for the bathroom that attaches to the wall in the bedroom (behind the bathroom).  I took a 1×2 and mounted it vertically and screwed the walls together:

Inner structure

Hall wall with structure screws covered by trim

Bedroom wall with structure screws covered by trim

Another location of poor wall construction is next to the refrigerator.  There is a small 45-degree wall there but all Airstream did was put screws through a panel and into the next.  These panels are really thin and don’t have anywhere to bite:

I shored these walls up with some better anchor points and re-attached them with screws:

The part of the wall that is most concerning to me is the wall between the bedroom and bathroom.  The first picture shows the gap.  I put some brackets in the floor and secured the base of the wall (we will see if that works):

One problem we have been having is with our Dometic thermostat.  It consistently shows a different temperature (hotter) that just a few inches away.  I attributed this to having a large hole in the wall where the thermostat attaches to the wall.  Behind this wall is the side of the refrigerator and a lot of hot space during the summer temperatures.  We found a few bamboo flooring samples from a local home store and moved the thermostat up (so we could see it behind the TV) and to cover up that large hole.  Also filling in behind the new bracket with some foam has solved the issue.

Another upgrade was the TV in the bedroom.  The old setup was a 22″ that came from the factory:

This was the only place for one in the bedroom since there was a sliding door on the other wall to close off the bedroom.  I removed that door almost a year ago as we did not use it.  The gave us the option to put a 32″ TV on that wall:

A huge upgrade was accomplished in changing our sliding doors in the hallway wardrobe.  One of the selling points, for me, was the large wardrobe that this floor plan offered (twice the size of the 30′ Classic).  However, the doors would continually jump off the tracks.  Some on Airforums found the same problem and posed some solutions.  None of them worked very well.  Airstream themselves moved away from the sliding doors in the next two model years and created hinge-attached swinging doors but they were almost $1400 for the parts!

Enter Willard Amtower.  He saw a post about the doors and contacted me.  He had full plans for creating new sliding doors with appropriate hardware to not jump the track.  I did it.  I did not use as nice wood that Uncle Bill did but it sure works great!  Heavy mirrors, heavy hardware and tracks to keep it in place.  We have done about 1600 miles on the new setup with no issues.  Here are some pics:

I was able to find a good handle match also (original and additional):

Uncle Bill also showed me one more trick.  Our water pump can be turned on/off in two locations, the kitchen and the bathroom.  This requires a 3-way switch so you really cannot tell if the pump is operational by switch location.  I was replacing the water pump because the backflow valve was faulty and I wanted a more efficient one.  Bill showed me that he simply added an LED indicator that was tied to the water pump.  When the pump was energized the LED was on:

I like it but I used an LED for a truck trailer side marker so it might be a bit bright.

So far, I am very happy with all these modifications.  Am I done?  I will never be done.

 

Hawaii!

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Roxie has wanted to go to Hawaii for many years and was trying to coordinate her side of the family going also. I finally told her we should just schedule a time and they could then have a target to shoot for.  We chose a time that covered Roxie’s birthday, our granddaughter’s birthday and our anniversary, it was also pretty close to my birthday.  We also decided to take our granddaughter with us.  Unfortunately, it was not conducive to take the Airstream.

We scheduled 5 nights on Maui.  After a very cramped airline flight, we arrived in humid Maui.  Here is the view from our hotel room near Lahaina.

On our second day, it was Paige’s (granddaughter) birthday so we surprised her with a Zipline tour.  She and I both went on the lines.  We had a good time but I got stuck on one of them.  I came in very fast, even after following the hand directions, I hit the limit of the line, smacked the springs and shot back down the line.  Stuck in the middle over a canyon.  It was not traumatic, I just worried about taking up time from the others.  Here we are on top of a hill:

Another ‘Hawaiian’ tourist thing to do is go to a luau, which we did also:

One day we drove the road to Hana.  We got a photo by a grove of bamboo:

We had the same airline flight back, Roxie wants to go first class next time!  Our son picked up Paige from SFO as she had high school orientation the next day!  We stayed to visit our other grandchild (Atlas) for a few days.

We had a good time in Hawaii and will go back sometime to a different island.  I think we would like to avoid August as it was very humid and our last day was somewhat impacted by a tropical storm to the south of the big island.