Atfore

There was a hiatus between dry fitting, hole cutting and the actual installation of the water heater. There was some cabinet work that needed doing before we could complete the heater installation. Our Master Plan involved ripping out all the old base and tall cabinets and replacing them with Ikea cabinets. The benefits included zippy interior fittings along with instant doors with the proper design aesthetic.  Besides, they look amazing in our Ikea kitchen.  What’s not to love?   Wee problem though, Ikea kitchens are square and Airstreams are roundy. Our good friend John introduced us to the perfect tool to fit a square cabinet into a round Airstream.

The Compass

You remember, your old friend from third grade. Well, it turns out that you can trace a wonderful curve on a slab of Ikea press board, trot that press board over to your handy Jig saw (our Brand of Choice is Bosch) and et voila an Airstream-fitted cabinet side.  Now, the tedious part is to do this properly, you must have your tired and irritated helper hold the cabinet side perfectly in place, while you traipse back and forth, cut a curve, fit that cut against the trailer side and cabinet base (held perfectly in place- helper irritated, tired and now hungry), draw a new line for a better fit….repeat.  You repeat this until the fit is perfect or your helper smacks you on the head and demands a beer.

In reality each tall cabinet took roughly a day to fit. This is also where you discover the concept of Good Enough.  What is Good Enough for me might be clearly a Crappy Job for your helper, or vice versa. Ahhh, the opportunities for neighborhood entertainment are endless. Especially when you do this work in the front yard and your helper is your spouse.

Below is a picture of the cabient slot in the trailer.  We have dry fitted the other cabinets and the new bathroom.  We had not cut any holes yet, but you can see where the hole will be cut.  Dry fitting the base cabinets is extremely easy with the compass. It is also a one woman job.  This alone ensures that the next trailer I do will not have any tall cabinets.

Above you can see the cabinet, now dryfitted and attached to the adjacent short base cabinet with a clamp. You can see the curves that we cut in the Ikea tall cabinet.

Pretty nifty for a tool you used last in third grade!

Each of these sets of steps occurred over a weekend. So, each Saturday morning Chris and I sat at the island in our kitchen and planned the weekend’s work. The “Cut the Hole in Trailer” Saturday morning mission brief went something like this…

Leslie “We need to cut the hole in the trailer for the water heater…”
Chris ” OK, where?”
Leslie ” I thought you knew where!”
Chris ” Me!! I thought you had all the plans!!”
Leslie ” I have the visually appealing design plans..you have the rip open the side of the trailer plans.”
…

Now I admit to some hyperbole here, but I can say that cutting a 12″ x 14″ hole in the side of my perfect vintage trailer was, well breathtaking.

So I left.  I left the kitchen, block, town.  I figured three hours would just about do it.  I went to Ikea and then to Trader Joe’s with a brief stop at Target to check out the latest from Isaac Mizrahi.

When I returned, Chris had cut a perfect hole and was well on his way to dry fitting the water heater.

“What, and you didn’t wait for me to see how you did it?” He’s right, you know he really can’t win.

To hear him tell it, was pretty simple. We were replacing nearly all the interior cabinets with Ikea cabinetry. All of those cabinets, including the one that would hold the heater, were assembled and dry-fitted. So the dead simple approach was to fit the heater inside the dry-fitted cabinet and draw on the interior around the edge of the cabinet. When he removed the cabinet, the outline was left on the wall. He then just cut from the inside out following the line he had drawn. Tools used? Mostly a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and metal snips

Above., left looks from the inside of the trailer out. Above, right, the outside of the trailer in.

We have found that the aluminum skin on our trailer is soft enough that this makes for a simple and controllable cutting. I would not use anything more powerful than the Dremel.  A a standard sized cutoff wheel on a grinder is just too aggressive. It cuts through the thin aluminum like butter.

One interesting note on both of the pictures, you can see the U-Channel that the aluminum shell is attached to.

Before we could or should cut the new hole in the trailer, we did some dry fitting of the old cover to the new heater. This was to get the dimensions for the new appliance- which was the combination of the old cover and the new heater. There was a lot of fiddling in this process so to reduce the likelihood that the styrofoam insulation on the Atwood would be damaged, we removed it.

We flattened out the lip on the front of the Atwood as well as any bends in the Bowen Flange with a heavy hammer and a metal bar-any heavy bar seemed to work. The bar is used as a metal break so it must be harder than the metal we were forming. Not so tough with aluminum! We used a spare hitch extension for this work, you can see it in the picture below. Once this was done the Bowen flange and cover would fit snugly against the front of the Atwood.

After flattening, the larger Bowen flange was snipped to fit the outer dimensions of the Atwood. You can see the initial snips in the picture above, left. We were really amazed at how well this worked! Take a look at the picture below (the intial mating of the Bowen and the Atwood). We used tin snips and a Dremel with a metal cutoff wheel to do the fine fitting. While the Atwood is about the same width its slightly taller than the Bowen. Cutting the Bowen flange and bending the extra bit inward also gave some additional structure to the new contraption so we left the bent pieces.

I am going to give you a sneak peek of how the flange fitting looks finally assembled. We were just amazed that it went together this well.

In the next episode, I will discuss that most terrifying of all…cutting a hole in the outside of the trailer and how we figured out where to do it!