Airstreams Look Better When They are Moving

Yes, our trailer hit the road! It took a couple more days than we anticipated...involving a whole lot of clearing out and a fair amount of work, but we managed to get her moving on Saturday morning, just in time for the last day of the Cherry Blossom Rally.

Getting to that point was laborious. It took a whole evening to just clear out the tools and parts that we'd accumulated in there. I cut and installed several belly pan patches, finished packing insulation while Rick wired up the electric system. Rick fabricated a more stable steel channel reinforcement for the doorway. We did lots of structural riveting, removed the handing gas lines and put repair rivets on the bottom of the belly pan. The tires were re-pressurized, we tested electric, wired in the jack and hit the road.

Two efforts did not lead to success, mostly because we lacked of the right tools and fasteners. After taking on a very laborious task of cutting the bottom of the front wall down 2/16" to match our now slightly higher floor, we tried to reinstall it. However, lacking the correct clecos, we could not make the holes in the old wall match up. We left a few rivets in and decided to wait to get the right ones later. Our second problem was re-attaching the front banana wrap--ie, the lateral aluminum strip on the exterior separating the belly pan from the upper skin. Our problem there was that we quickly realized that this would require longer rivets than those available from our local big box store. A drive to our local Fastenal distributor revealed that these would be a special order item. So, that, too, would have to wait.

We finished at 10:30 pm Friday night. Realizing it was too late, we crashed and slept very soundly. First thing in the morning, we hitched her up, sucked in our breath and watched the trailer finally roll.

So, all in all, we managed to accomplish what we felt was a critical milestone: we got our trailer to this year's Cherry Blossom Rally. Riding behind it in a passenger car, I could observe that it rode with a noticeable degree less bounciness than it had in 2005.

That accomplishment, however, is fairly subtle. It's not showy, but it is significant. During open house, I could see that some folks who had seen it before were a little surprised by our pride in taking our trailer from this state:

To this:
However, what we have now is solid...and eventually we'll reinstall all the pretty stuff once again! Nobody will call it a polished turd!