Porches

All the liner boards are now attached for the front and back porches. Nothing really noteworthy here, much gluing, cutting, and screwing, liberally interspersed with swearing as the really thin wood cracked. I considered covering all the screwheads with fairing compound, but decided it would be more work, with all the hand sanding involved, than it was really worth for the amount of improved appearance I would gain.

Cover Up

As you can see, the top is now on, which also means that the bows and long runners have been attached. This turned out to be a multi-week event instead of just an afternoon of drilling and screwing stuff down. There were two main reasons. a) There is a lot of recurve in the lower two feet of the walls. b) I bent the bows to shape almost a year before.

Because I had put the shape in the bows so long ago, they had a lot of time to relax and lose some of the sharper curves, also they had not quite the amount of recurve even initally that the walls actually ended up with. I ended up attaching everything but the last 3' or so on either side and then wrapping the ends of the bows with plastic and wet towels to soften them up again. After several days of soaking we used a 2 x 4 to force the ends of the bows into the curve of the lower walls and used a lot of screws and glue to set them in place.

Vardo purists will notice that I used a hard shell instead of the traditional canvas top. If I lived anywhere else I would have used the canvas but living where I do in the land of sand and fog, canvas has a life span of maybe two years because of the salt, wind, and constant moisture. Rather than continually replacing the canvas I opted for 2 ply mahogany covered with fiberglass.

Learning Curve Note: It would have been much better to have kept to a modified horseshoe shape and not been so fancy with curved base, this would have also made the interior wall and furniture construction much simpler. Also it would have been best to take the bows directly from the bending frame to the wagon. That way they would have still been slightly flexible and still bent to the exact shape of the walls.

Final Movements

I had to hire a couple of guys to help me get the walls out of the garage and up on to the wagon. Glad to have them on for good because I put them on and took them off about a dozen times. In reference to the note on the previous post, if I had a taller construction space with a high enough door, I could have done all the construction inside, which would have let me build the end walls in place, and they would never have had to come off and on, and off and on, and.......

Out In The Elements

This is the roll out from the garage. From here on out all construction is weather dependant.

Note: Next time get RV sized garage.