Rebuilding “Ms. Merry” the Amerigo– And the Story of the Flimsy bed–Part 1

So, once again, Ms. Merry and Jake the Pickup have slumbered through another soggy miserable Oregon winter, hoping that this year, THIS year, the Fat Man in the Orange Dodge hat with the power tools will finally be finished rebuilding Merry so that they can all escape from the Madness that has been 2020 and go to the more important places, the places where there’s more fish than there is people, because the Fat Man has grown extremely tired of people and their stupidity and would prefer the company of his wife, their cats, their camper, and a lot of fish and very few people. 

This brings us to today .  For the past few weeks, the Fat Man in the orange hat has been collecting supplies again to make sure that they have enough materials to work on Merry for the next couple months without needing to deal with crowds of people.   In the years past, The Fat man wouldn’t be bothered by them, but with the world darkened by a new sickness from China, the Fat Man has been spending many tiring months working and doing little else than walk from bed to the work computer, sit there for twelve hours, then go back to bed, with food sometimes mixed in between.   The never ceasing rain has not helped the Fat man much, so any sliver of it not being a dreary, drippy day on the weekend (The weather has been doing a fine job of being nice on those long days when he’s trapped inside working, and returning to absolute piss when the weekend finally arrives for the last two months), he grabs.  

Today, he decided to finally start tackling Ms. Merry’s Snap-N-Nap rear bed, the very last piece of Ms. Merry that hadn’t been changed since he brought her home several years ago.   It is still “resplendent” in its spray glued vinyl covering that at one time was white, but has yellowed and aged, and tacky 70s paneling.   He has many plans, plans to remove the original accordion sides and replace them with a single hinged fold down side that latches in place on the rear shell, allow the bed to have a thicker mattress and to fix the design flaws that rely on the rubber rain covers for the hinges to close gigantic holes in the corners of the snap-n-nap when its folded open.  

Little did he know what new madness he would discover……

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Hello, again, everyone!   Its been a long time since I last worked on Jake and Merry, and as I dramatized above, its been a rather poor winter and the world’s been a festering disaster since February, and I’m looking forward to trying to actually get them finished this year.   With me working from home part of the week and part on, being able to dive into work on Merry as the weather stabilizes will be a nice change. 

So, the story of the Flimsy Bed (AKA the Who-thought-this-was-a-good-idea! Bed).  

I call it this, because I’ve either found a ludicrous design choice that Gardner Industries made to cut corners and pinch pennies that could of potentially led to a lawsuit, or the last missing part in the Oil Embargo special that seems to have highlighted Merry’s original construction from day one of this restoration project. 

Since I was starting back into the home stretch on Merry, I decided that I would start the year by completing some of the last big lift items that still needed doing, the Snap-N-Nap being a big one that’s still as it was when I bought the camper.  I had always planned to remove the nasty, tacky vinyl and reinforce the bed pan because my earliest observations were the aluminum frame and door skin were really not strong enough to handle an adult sleeping in that bed much before things started to break.   Part of that plan involved reinforcing the floor by adding additional support structure as much as reasonable without making the bed too heavy, a proper plywood floor, and changing the accordion wings to a properly sealing design.  

Most Amerigo owners pride themselves on that rear bed with its automatically opening and closing wings, however, in almost all cases, the thin thermoformed plastic shells are almost always disintegrating by the time any of us get ahold of them and while they can be glued and patched, that plastic is still brittle and forty years or more old.   So, my plan was to completely remove them, and make a solid single hinged wing that would fold up against the “ceiling” of the Snap N Nap and be held in place by a sliding latch, one of the same ones that would later be used to latch the wall in the down position after the bed was opened so that it compressed tightly to the new sealing surfaces and make the snap-n-nap airtight and water tight to the elements, something the original design was lacking and tried to make up for with large amounts of vinyl. 

Unfortunately, like everything else in Ms. Merry, the wooden anchor bar at the top of the snap and nap sides was installed with those damnable double inward crescent security screws.    Since said screws just went through a piece of one by one cheap yellow pine, I just drilled holes in the wood near the screw heads through the piece and then wedged a flat head screw driver in the hole to split the wood and separate it from the screws, allowing me to pull the side down, so I could then use a 1/4” socket on my drill to disassemble the rest of the accordion for removal. 

What I wasn’t anticipating to find was that the only thing attaching the bed pan to the outer clam shell of the snap-n-nap was these flimsy plastic accordion sides that have no structural frames at all inside them.   I expected there to be a second piano hinge along the top far edge of bed pan that attached it where it met the clamshell so that the bed was hanging from the rear wall and the clamshell at two points with the sides just being attached so that they would automatically open and close.



Investigating behind the rotten vinyl I can even feel what appears to be a 1x4 piece of wood embedded into the fiberglass of the clam shell at the height where that piano hinge should be.  I don’t know, as these pictures are the first I’ve ever seen of the inside of an Amerigo’s Snap-N-Nap accordion sides, if this was by design, which makes little sense, given the wood you see in the pictures isn’t even attached to one another, they simply line the edges and are held inside the clam shell by a couple staples through the plastic.   There is absolutely no way these were mean to the load of that bed and its occupant, there’s simply not enough structural integrity to them to do that.
I might have believe it possibly the case, had these been welded aluminum frames or the wood was actually attached to one another, but there is literally nothing structural to these, and I seriously cannot believe a company would think a thin strip of Vinyl would be enough for a load baring hinge. 

My only conclusions I can draw are, there was a hinge that was supposed to have been installed, it never was.   Some previous owner removed it and never reinstalled it, but there’s no evidence of one ever having been installed.
















Directly behind that vinyl below that screw strip is that "potential" 1x4 piece of embedded wood.  The bed pan is currently hanging low on this corner because the side has been removed.   I’ll be setting up a cradle tomorrow to support the bed pan so I can fully detach the clam shell from it and set about installing the missing hinge. 

From what I’ve peaked behind the vinyl I’ve pulled free, its a very real possibility I may need to glue a 1x2 frame onto the fiberglass to give me a surface to anchor the RV wall paneling to to install it. 

So, welcome back to the restoration adventure, I’ll try to post updates as often as I can, so stay tuned! .