Rebuilding “Ms. Merry” the Amerigo– And the Story of the Flimsy bed–Part 3

 Alrighty!  While the date on this reads June 28th, its actually been about a month since I last updated this blog!   Lots of works been getting done, so let's get caught up! :)


When we left off, we were rebuilding Ms. Merry's Snap-N-Nap Wings, as the originals were a trash design that we've yet to figure out the logic of.


So, we've been recreating them using proper laminated wood truss-type construction with a 1x3/1x4 inner frame, a thin plywood exterior.


Now that we've got the body of these made, we've installed 3/4" Polyisocyancurate foam board in the center (Yes there is glue between the other side of the foam board and the outer plywood, and now we're laminating on the Finished RV wall board that will be the interior facing side of the wings :).

 Since we can't really hide the staples we use for anchoring the  wall board in place while the adhesive cures for the inside, the solution has been to apply the adhesive to all the gluing surfaces, then temporarily clamp the panel on the mirror side of the section we're working on so that we can flip the inner wall sides facing each other and make a compression clamp sandwich of the two, using the wing pieces to give us a nice tight bond.  

These will be left to cure for about 24 hours in this state so that the glue properly sets up before removing the clamp sandwich.


Because I'm working on a few different areas of Ms. Merry at the same time, the second sandwich got set up on the roof of Beasley the Bambi-Slayer's roof while the work bench got used for other tasks :p

For those that haven't met Beasley, Beasley is my donor Suburban for my next vehicle project, the restoration and 4x4 conversion of Charlie Blue, my childhood family car that I grew up with.

I bought Beasley off a neighbor who paid to have him brought back from Southern California sight unseen only to discover Beasley was going to be a bigger project than he was hoping for, so I bought Beasley off him to donate his 4x4 parts, and drive train components to finish getting Charlie Blue back to road worthy status.


Now, that the panels have had a couple days to finish curing, we can tape up the corners of the RV wall panel side so that over run from the base coat of fiberglass resin won't get on the nice wall paper sides of the wings.

We'll be removing the tape after the first coat has had enough time to setup to were it can be touched, but still soft enough that we can remove the excess by simply peeling the tape of.

We'll be applying multiple layers of fiberglass resin, along with the cloth after this base coat, as the base coat is simply meant to seal the pores of the wood.


The results of the first fiberglass coat, looking shiny!  We'll fix that with some nice sanding to prep it for the application of coat number two, and the fiberglass cloth around the edges.


And sanding is complete!