Today: Bathroom door cut to new size.
As you can see from the last post - April of 2017 - I had just gotten my head into Bathroom plans, and then pretty immediately, my head went elsewhere.
"Summer's here, and the time is right, for dancing in the streets"! Well - it was actually more like yard work, house stuff, and lest we forget, we bought Tow-Mater and began spending quality time with him, before he even HAD that name.
But now, the little death is nigh, and every windy day is looked upon as favorable. It puts us inside, where the magic happens. ;)
And since we don't do FaceBook, and some other sites where people post "for sales", DSIL has began to send us potentials. That is to say he's an enabler for our vintage camper addiction and we keep going out to look at more old units. Simple Distractions - I tell you, Distractions!
Okay, back to the story of Lil' Queeny and the Bathroom door.
For just about her entire time living with us, Lil' Queeny has had her door off. We thought it was time to cover up that part of her.
Maybe you remember? When we first got this camper, it had a catalytic heater - no cover on it - so the heater was poisoned, meaning dust had been allowed to ruin it and make it unsafe for use. If you use this sort of heater, please learn about that. We just looked at an old unit yesterday, being sold by a young family, and it had an uncovered catalytic heater. We educated them.
That's it, sticking out at the bottom.
And when the PO installed that heater, it interfered with the bathroom door. What to do? Cut the door, duh.
Ouch!
This is it, upside down.
Now we didn't need her door to be full height, because we had changed the door opening for the shower pan and grey water tank, right?
But, we still needed full width, and there wasn't enough door length to work with that cut-out portion.
However, we had the other Travel Queen parts camper bathroom door. A little wider, and a little taller than Queeny's. But again, maybe you remember, I couldn't figure out how to get the handle off! It was a tricky little devil.
I removed screws (way back ago), and yet it still would not release! So I put it all away and went on to something else. Recently I got it back out and put my efforts back into it. But that was a few weeks ago, so now I can't remember exactly what I did. Age related memory loss. Who are you again?
But what I do recall is that I started fiddling with it again, and next thing I knew, it simply pulled apart in my hands. I think I started tapping on it or something. As it turned out, the problem was simply enough grunge on the square shaft that it was stuck on "installed".
With the door knob off, sans damage to the door, we had our spare part!
These doors are built with 1/8" wood paneling, and 1/2" plywood internals, placed in a frame style. That is to say the plywood pieces are four, and glued in a square frame onto one panel, then the other panel is glued to that. So the middle of the door is hollow, and the outer edge has enough distance to allow the plastic door trim sections to cap the paneling edges.
Like this.
But when I cut the door to size (length and width), it does this sort of number right?
Note the near and the right edges. Plywood right up to the edges. Non-starter for the plastic edge caps.
So I did dangerous stuff, with the table saw. Do NOT do this at home. Please allow me and Super Dave Osborne to do the dare-devil things.
I set the table saw fence at just a hair over 1/8", and the blade depth to about 1". Then one pass at a time, in 1/16" increments, I ran the edge along the blade (first the long way, then the tall way) until I had this sort of thing.
After a little fine tuning and a bit-o-wood chisel work, I had this.
That finished up three sides, and the fourth just needed a section of plywood glued in, like this.
So now the parts camper door was the same width as the original, but shorter.
Now we'll let that dry overnight and continue work tomorrow.
