Chassis

We had to take a few extra days off from working on the RV because the weather got insanely cold, especially for western North Carolina! The polar vortex came through Asheville and the temperatures dropped to a record low of -1 °, more like -teens° with the wind chill. Everyone in town pulled out their warmest clothes and put them all on. I finally put a use to my burly Sorel winter/snow boots! The inside of our front door at home froze!

We went back to the storage unit once the temperatures were more reasonable. Since we've already done the majority of the tear down, we had to think about what needs to be done next to start rebuilding. The chassis is the first thing we need to work on since it's the foundation of the RV. We need to make sure the chassis is in good condition before we start laying new structure on top of it. Jerud and I mainly focused on the chassis at the front of the RV: 1) It's the most exposed from us tearing the trailer apart and 2) It has the most damage/rust. We spend a day or two after work and part of the weekend to work on the chassis.

The chassis has a lot of rusted spots that we need to remove before putting the new underbelly sheet on. This picture shows the mix of rust and old glue that was used to put on the original underbelly wrap.

Me using the side grinder with the wire wheel. The wire wheel isn't as effective as the flapper wheel, probably because the flapper wheel is more hard/rough and had more contact against the chassis.

Rusty vs. not so rusty.

Although the really chunky rust is removed, you can see there's still rust in the divots. That's where the rust ate the metal and it also needs to be removed.

Jerud uses the side grinder with the flapper wheel. You can see how effective it is, all the silver metal is from the flapper wheel removing the rust.

This is what done looks like.

We recommend using a dust mask when grinding the rust off. Preferably over your nose and mouth.

All the rust bits, dust and other gross stuff gets caught by the dust mask. But don't be surprised when you still blow out black boogers.

Once the rust was all removed, we first sprayed the chassis with Rust Reformer primer. The primer stops any additional rusting from any leftover rust that may still be on the metal. Once that dried (20 - 30 minutes), we used the Rust Resistant spray paint to prevent future rust from occurring (take 12 hours to dry). We sprayed two coats of each.

The Rust-Oleum has to be around 55° degrees to use. So we had to warm it up in front of the space heater.

We covered parts of the RV with plastic sheets so when we spray painted the chassis, it didn't spray into the basement area and on the sides of the trailer.

TADA! Done.

Since there's two of us and cleaning up the chassis is mainly a one-person job due to number of tools, we multi-tasked while working on it.

Worked on cleaning the frame of the RV, especially by where the slide was. The luan was glued to the frame and when it was ripped off it left chunks of luan on the beams.

Staples, staples, staples! Turns out RVs are primarily held together with staples.

We used a Dremel to cut off all the copper clamps from the water pipes so we could remove and reuse the brass fittings.

Keeping the copper clamps to sell to a scrap metal yard.

Using the table clamp makes the whole process so much easier!

Jerud used a pipe cutter to remove the damaged parts of the water pipes.

Box full of brass fittings to be reused.

One weekend morning we hit the Blue Ridge Parkway before heading to the storage unit. Not only did the dogs need some outside time but we did too. The parkway was still closed because of the cold weather (ice), so we did a mix hiking on trail and on the road.