Opportunity Drops in (on our Belly Pan)

It was a dark, dark Friday night. The wind blew through the trees. Lonely dogs howled at the moon. It was, as they say, an ominous moment.

After supper, Rick and I continued discussing our heater paradox (we are having a tough time finding a solution), so we went out to examine the logistics of the interior. Standing in the doorway, Rick rocked on his feet and slipped. He fell right into the hole he had cut into the flooring to remove rotted wood only a few weeks early. His foot went through the crack at the center of the belly pan, where the two panels met.

Oh, no.



This morning we checked out the damage. Some rivets sheared in the bottom (replaceable). Fortunately, no metal was bent. However, trouble with the door showed that we altered a critical structural connection with the upper body. We pushed the belly pan as close as we could to its original position and that relieved the door stress.

Well, there are different ways to look at this. Riveting more of the belly pan back together, patching the places where it sheared will be a pain. However, the access gave us a good chance to look further back and to treat more of the frame. I quickly cleaned up the area, mixed up some rust converter and applied it to the frame.

So, our mission is to get the work in the front done as quickly as possible and to seal up the belly pan. Luckily, there isn't too much to do on that. We're in good shape, but the next few weeks will be busy ones.

On a related side note: A few months ago, I installed Google Analytics on this page. That's a service that gives information on traffic a site generates. It's a useful tool for understanding who an audience is and how to improve. To my surprise, there's a decent degree of traffic here, even though I've done little to promote this blog. Apparently, a couple of other sites link back here. A significant degree of traffic come from a link on VintageAirstream.com. Wow, I am so honored by this! Then I looked at the description given to my blog:

The Nightmare known as finding out just what a vintage trailer can hide...

I love your website, but I beg to to differ, RJ! I'm enjoying myself way too much to consider this a nightmare. Certainly, there have been challenges with fixing this vintage pile of metal--but we've been able to face them. We repaired the front end relatively fast--we chose to do more, and then let the project fall into a hiatus. For me, I'm really enjoying learning more about the trailer and figuring out how to fix it. Both of us also feel that the result is worth it. When we are done, we'll know our trailer will be up to decades of serviceable miles on the road. We'll know how to do field repairs. But ultimately, we've learned repair is mostly a matter of attitude.

So, Rick slipped. Things like that are liable to happen. Yes, we do have an extra job ahead. But we also have access to places in our under-body that we've never previously had access to. We got to inspect a significantly larger amount of the frame (and found it's in pretty good shape. We get to replace more insulation. No significant damage was made.

And all of that is pretty excellent. I just hope our future mistakes are as productive!