Like cars, boats, and planes, campers are built in facilities specially designed to efficiently assemble the unit. Working in a pole barn, garage, or driveway limits your resources. Fortunately, there are clever work-arounds to make the restoration process possible. Intermountain Airstream is a factory-authorized retailer and service shop in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Because these trailers use a riveted body, you might want to outsource panel replacement and bodywork to someone who is proficient in aluminum fabrication, often found in the airplane world.
Throughout the build, there will be plenty of large purchases. Budgeting for these will help keep the restoration on schedule and within your goal.
Once you’ve acquired a camper to restore, it helps to make a list of its needs, based on the discussions in various chapters in this book: chassis, floor, body, house electrical, insulation, interior skin, cabinets, appliance and hardware, propane, plumbing, windows, and polish.
You can also list what you plan to spend on each section (in both time and money). For reference, this little Cruisette required nearly 400 shop hours from commission to completion.
Tools and Equipment
When manufactured, Airstreams, Spartans, Boles Aeros, etc., were constructed in a factory specially designed for camper production and assembly. Unfortunately, you probably will not have access to all the resources that a factory possesses. A handy person, however, is capable of many things in his or her own driveway, including separating a riveted shell from its chassis.
At the top you see a couple of hammers and assorted dollies used to shape sheet metal. The blue tape helps prevent marring surfaces. At the bottom (left to right) are a grinder with cut-off wheel and pneumatic shears, aviation hand shears (the handle colors coordinate with the blade: red cuts right, green left, and yellow straight), and a hand seamer. These are just a few of the metal-working tools necessary to perform restoration on a vintage aluminum camper.
Making a Brake
The bend I needed was too deep for my shop’s brake with a 1½-foot throat; it required either setting up a job order from a local sheet-metal business or fabricating my own tool. I chose the latter due to the relative softness and malleability of the .032 5052 aluminum and resources on hand. If this bend had been attempted with typical .040 2024 T3 Airstream upper-body panels, there’d be little success due to the needed leverage and lack of edge-holding capabilities of this setup.
Using poplar board stock as a flat, a reinforced surface on the table, and a piece of angle iron as the clamping bar, I was able to make the 90-degree bend needed. The clamping action of both the front plate (again, more poplar stock) and clamping bar is achieved with various C-clamps.
The idea is to hold the material firmly during the bend process to avoid movement and a mis-bend or poor edge. The angle iron is set up so the bend can go beyond 90 degrees, allowing the material to spring back and settle into a perfect bend. If the angle iron was set on its flat edge, you couldn’t bend beyond 90, and the piece would bow out at the bend.
A drawback to setting the angle iron on its two edges is the potential to mar the surface due to the outside edge’s pressure (an actual metal break has a flat clamping surface). You could set the angle iron flat with the angled portion to the rear of the brake to create a flat edge and reduce the chance of defacing the material.
This brings up a good point: The process of restoring things is a learning experience that involves experimenting to learn what works best. ■
Using your head, you can work around problems such as making a deep bend on sheet metal. This requires a quickly made, yet fully functioning sheet metal brake.
With items around the shop (lumber stock, C-clamps, and angle iron), You can make a bend that would require tooling much bigger than you have available.
Some important tools used for this restoration cover metal, wood, and finishing. For metal, quality hand shears, a bi-metal hacksaw, and assorted files are essential. As for powered tools, sheers (either pneumatic or electric) make quick work of cutting large sheets of aluminum; a metal chop saw is needed to cut steel frame members; and a grinder with assorted wheels (cut-off, wire, and grinding) gets a workout cleaning rust and prepping for welding.
A metal brake (used for bending sheet metal) and a pneumatic shear might be out of the budget but can be worked around by either outsourcing the job or using some creative engineering with clamps, steel straightedges, and routers (a rotating cutting tool). Also important to metal working is a variety of hammers: ball-peen, claw, and auto-body hammers and dollies. The more, the merrier.
Ideally, woodworking tools and metal tools do not replace one another. A hammer used on metal should not be used on wood, as the shavings, dust, and oils associated with metal fabrication permanently contaminate porous lumber. The same goes for saws, sanders, etc.; it’s best to keep metal-working tools separate from woodworking tools. However, in some instances, it may be uneconomical to purchase two of everything. If needed, you may cross tool genres; just be mindful that the chance for frustration due to object contamination and/or tool damage exists.
Standard woodworking tools such as a handsaw, pull-saw, hammer, and chisel are essential to the building process. Likewise, power tools such as a jigsaw, circular saw, router, belt sander, and orbital sander, along with a pneumatic nailer, are vital to any carpentry work. Also visible here are standard wood shop equipment such as a table saw, bandsaw, drill press, joiner, and dust collector.
In the world of woodworking, an important tool to consider is a sander. Well, let me rephrase that: sanders, plural. Not only do you get a workout using handmade sanding blocks, you will also use a random orbital sander, a belt sander, and a drum sander during this restoration. The random orbital is used heavily in prepping wood surfaces for finish; belt and drum sanders come in handy when shaping the curves that define vintage campers.
A good router is useful in many instances, including trimming laminates and tracing damaged paneling. Also using that same router mounted on a table is handy for many cabinetry and interior trim projects.
As for saws, of course, a table saw, a miter saw, and a bandsaw are the backbone of any wood shop. Equally important are a couple of good handsaws, including a flush-cut pull and a fine-finish.
General shop equipment to consider is good work lights, droplights, and flashlights. Keep in mind that you’ll be working over the course of a year or more, and lighting requirements change with the seasons. Being able to effectively light your jobsite and task at hand is essential to precision and tight tolerances; it also directly affects the amount of fatigue and amount of time that goes into a camper restoration.
Finally, a well-stocked cleaning station with a quality vacuum, broom, dustpan, scrub brushes, degreasers, and detergents ensure a clean workspace. These items also help guarantee a quality finish, whether it’s paint, stain, or varnish.
Fasteners
During a camper restoration, you use a variety of fasteners, from carriage bolts to grabber screws to rivets. During assembly, camper factories used particular fasteners for specific jobs. If your goal is a period-correct restoration, reusing or replacing these fasteners with the correct size and style is important for authenticity.
In 1940, about 85 percent of U.S. screw manufacturers licensed the design of the Phillips-head screw. However, during the post-war travel trailer boom, many factories still relied heavily