A Round Tuit

Yes, it's been a few weeks since my last post, and if you think it's because I've gotten nothing done on the Airstream during that time... well that's where you're right.

For those who don't know, I'm a pretty big fan of college football, and specifically, the Texas Longhorns. Every year during football season, several of my friends and I throw tailgate parties for the UT home football games. Big tailgate parties. Like, serving 100-200 people each game kind of big. We do this because we enjoy it, but also because we are able to raise money for several important charities through our activities. If you're interested in more information, please feel free to check out our website at BFN . So suffice to say, these events take up a lot of time on weekend in the Fall.

On a recent epsisode of The Vap , Rob Baker mentioned an event he attended where they handed out little round bits of metal, with the word "TUIT" stamped onto them. I laughed, because this reminded me of my days as a Boy Scout, when we did the same thing. Well Rob, today I finally got a round tuit.

The project looming over me for the past three or four weeks has been the completion of my awning removal and replacement. And although I'm not 100% done, I made significant progress today.

I don't have pictures of the whole process, but first I removed the fore casting from the rafter arm, and detensioned it. Then I removed the aft casting from the rafter arm. But that step, which should have taken a couple of minutes, ended up taking over an hour, because there was a rusty screw holding it on. I had set some PB Blaster on it several times over the past few days, but when I tried to break it free, all that happened was that I torqued half of the head off. I ground off the remaining part of the head with my Dremel tool, and then drilled out the screw. It was a large steel screw, and it took a very long time, and two drill bits, to get it out.

Finally however, it was off and I de-tensioned that side as well, and then let the roller rest at the bottom. I slid the awning out of the roller, then slid it out of the awning rail on the trailer. I cleaned up both of those channels with water and a clean rag, and then I sprayed them down with Dupont Teflon Multi-Use Dry Wax Lube. I slid the new awning back into awning rail, then slid the roller tube onto the bottom of the awning. I then riveted the tube endcap back onto th fore end of the tune, and re-tensioned each of the torsion springs, then placed the castings back into the rafter arms, and riveted the castings onto the arms.

Two problems, I was running out of time and my wife Mary was helping me, but we needed to tend to the baby as well, so I didn't get the tube endcap riveted into its exact right place (one of the sets of holes didn't line up), and I also rushed so I forgot to put the awning scalloped edge in place. But, since I need to take the endcap off anyway to properly align it and re-rivet it, I'll be able to put the scalloped edge in place at that time. Still, tons of progress, and here are a couple of pictures.

Here's the fore torsion spring coming out of the roller:

Here are some shots of the new awning deployed:

And I'm also going to appeal for help-- does anyone out there know where I can get another casting like this one? My aft casting has this, but the fore casting is missing this half. If anyone knows of an EZ-Awn out there that is getting parted out, please let me know.

Thanks in advance!