Overkill

This morning I woke up and took a look at my indoor/outdoor thermometer:




This means that the temperature outside is only 73 degrees, and is actually cooler than the temperature inside the house. This is the first time we've experienced this in, oh I don't know, about FOUR MONTHS???


So I decided to get some Airstream work done. On my shakedown cruise, the one bad thing that happened was that the top awning bracket mount at the front of the coach came off. It had ripped through the skin, and after taking a look at it, I could see that this was at least the 3rd time this had happened.

I don't like things ripping through the aluminum skin on my Airstream, and I sure as heck don't like the thought of the awning flying off at freeway speeds, gashing huge chunks out of the side of the trailer and clattering down the highway, potentially endangering someone else. So I decided to create a sturdy patch out of aluminum, affix it to the outside skin of the trailer over those holes, and then re-mount the awning bracket. I cleaned up the opening, drilled out those two rivets that were plugging a previous "rip-out event," and then fashioned a patch.

And this is where I might have gone into Overkill mode a bit. I don't want to repeat this again, so I ordered a piece of 0.050 2024 T3 aluminum. The original thickness of the exterior skin is only 0.032, but I wanted the patch to be made of stronger stuff. Now that isn't really overkill, but then I decided to rivet this small patch with 20 rivets. Being a riveting novice, this seemed like the right amount to me. After I told Frank about it, his only comment was, "that might have been too much." But like I said, I don't want to re-do this!

I also might have gone Overkill on the Vulkem too, but I don't want it to leak...

After some clean-up:

And now with the awning bracket re-mounted to it:

It's great to be able to deploy the awning, but the old one is really tattered now.

Darn good thing my previous owners, Terry and then Cat, saw fit to pass along some new awning fabric. Hopefully I can get that installed tomorrow, and then the awning project will be called "complete."