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.