In this update, I will talk about the next job on the long list, which is the single overhead cupboard on the passenger side.
You will remember that the bank of three overhead cupboards above the seating area was the unit from ’Emma’, leaving Nina’s original cupboard for me to break down to fit the other side above what will be the fold away seat.
I did it this way round, because Nina’s cupboard was constructed in a more modular way than Emma’s, and easier to reduce to a single.
The first thing to do was break it all down into its kit form, ready to cut and re-assemble.
You will see in the timelapse that I was having a little trouble with my jigsaw, the aluminium cutting blade just snagged and jumped out of my jigsaw everytime I tried to cut with it, after a while I went back to a normal metal cutting (fine toothed) blade and it went through like a hot knife through butter. The GoPro did stop recording timelapse halfway through so you will have to go to the photos to see it finished, but the video will give you an idea of how it was all deconstructed then reconstructed to build a single unit.
Everything was going well, until I tried to put the carpet covered wooden base in to the framework, the carpet was a lot thicker than the original stuff, and I had also left some foam covering the underneath of the wood to make the carpet padded, this would be good as it’s directly over the fold away seat and you may just stand straight up from the seat and bump your head on the underside of the cupboard, so it was all a much tighter fit, I tried tapping the frame together over the carpet to force it in to the runners, this was a mistake, and resulted in me snapping one of the die cast corner pieces meaning that the one corner just fell apart. Of course all this happened just as the cupboard was about finished, and as I was trying to fit it to the wall in Nina, it just fell apart completely. At this point I was really fed up, it had taken me around three hours to get to this point, and I didn’t have any other corner pieces.
I removed it from Nina and took it back to the table, went in to the house and sat in the warm for a bit to ’ponder’ :S.
Once I had calmed down a bit amd started thinking rationally again, I went back out and started hunting the sheds for something to repair the corner with that would be strong and still enable me to somehow fix the chrome cover back over the corner to conceal the ’workings’.
I found a tent peg, not the wire kind, but the flattened steel bent into a right angle down the main shaft for strength and rolled over at the top where you hit it with a mallet. It was the exact size of the channel that the original corner piece slid in to. Out came the jigsaw and I cut it to size and made it into a right angle that held the bottom two pieces of the frame together, and riveted them in to place. This held pretty well and once I had attached the downward strut, the corner felt strong. Put it all back together and the unit felt good and didn’t look like it was going to fall apart again. Phew !
That’s a good point when doing a self build. If it’s going wrong, take a break, or even finish for the day and go back with a fresh mind, it’s amazing how much good that does for creativity.
I refitted it in to Nina, and it looks great and does the job it was intended for. Although I’m not used to having a cupboard on that side and have on a couple of occasions cracked my head in to it ! Might need to put a big flashing light on it ;).
Location:Gloucester
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