Epoxy Camper Upgrade

I think a lot of us fall into a category where woodworking is maybe our main hobby or it's one of the hobbies we do. But I find in general, if people work with their hands and do woodworking, they probably do other stuff too. Same apply to me. One of the other stuffs I've been doing is a bunch of upgrades on this 1997 Salem Forest River camper. One of the upgrades I've done was to remove this awning on the front and replace the original, which was just a panel with the manufacturer's name on it, with plywood that I also then covered with epoxy.

So let's turn the clock back a little bit so I can show you where this whole thing started, what I did and how we got to this point, which is what a pretty upgrade to the camper. There is a technical term, awning, on this camper, and that technical term is it's icky. It's tired. It's been on here for 23, 24 years. And you know, there's just not much vibrancy left here, but that's okay because it creates an opportunity to do something cool.

Man, I thought about this a long time, and I think you're gonna really, really like what I have come up with. It's an approach that is gonna give us the opportunity to do some artwork here on the front. It's gonna look neat when it's done. That needs to be done, not in this building, but in a shop where the environment is a little better controlled. You're gonna see why.

So the first step, we gotta get this off of here so that it can go to my shop. I think this is ready to come off. In order to get to this point, what I did was I took the screws out of the brackets here on both the left and the right side, and then the way that this thing hinges onto the trailer itself is there's a long, I don't know, almost like a rod that's on the back of this frame. And that rod goes into a bracket that's up on top of the camper. I don't wanna take that bracket off the camper.

There's 11 billion screws holding it in and I don't want to disturb anything I don't have to disturb. Instead, I think I could slide the whole awning off. So what I found is that in order to prevent it from falling off by sliding, there's a sheet metal screw up in that pin, in that rod. I took that screw out, and now that it's no longer there to act as a stop, it shouldn't stop. You know, sometimes things actually go the way you think they're gonna go.

That's weird. Uh-oh. I thought I spoke to soon. All right, we are done with this for now, as far as what we can do her. Like I said, from here, it's gonna go to my shop where for a couple reasons we need a more controlled environment.

I think you're gonna like this. This is gonna be really cool. I've got the awning panel made up and there's a bunch of stuff that went into this that we did ahead of time. So let's have a look at some video that's gonna get you caught up on how this panel got this far to a point where we're actually ready to do the cool part, which is to put the color epoxy on this side. I keep calling this an awning, and it's really a rock guard.

That's a much better name for it 'cause that's what it does. It protects that front window from rocks. Once I got it in my shop I needed to get the frame disassembled. It's held together with pop rivets and the easiest way to get those out is by drilling using a drill bit that's about the same diameter as the head. Just drill the head, not the body of the rivet.

Once the rivets are out, you're probably gonna need a punch to drive the body out. So the heads are off, the body of the rivet is still in there 'til there. These aluminum battens on the back of my frame I'm gonna hold onto. Those are gonna get reinstalled to help hold the frame together after the plywood panel is in there. The rubber gasket, that can just get thrown out.

We're not gonna use it again. Be a little bit careful with the panel. We wanna have that intact so we can use it for shape and size. I used standard quarter inch plywood for my panel. Make sure that thickness and material is gonna be compatible with your frame if you're doing this project.

I'm cleaning it up with denatured alcohol, watching the paper towel for a point where no saw shows up anymore on the paper towel. Something you're gonna hear us say a bunch of times about working with epoxy is read the directions. That's very, very, very important. A foam roller works great for rolling this out. This is the backside, which is just gonna be left clear.

The bottom line is, the epoxy is gonna make this panel completely waterproof, like a boat. Once the epoxy is spread, but of course not cured yet, use a heat gun and that's gonna help knock any bubbles out of it. Here's where we're at. We're just about ready to epoxy the backside. Now Krista is here to help out and she's done quite a bit of epoxy work herself.

And the reason for four hands on this is that this is a big surface and we don't want this to get away from us as we're going, get away from us meaning like the epoxy starts to cure as I'm midway through if I'm doing this by myself. So outside of this, we're also doing a cedar strip canoe, and this epoxy that we're using for the awning is the same stuff that's going on that Cedar strip canoe, and the benefit it brings to us here is it's got some flexibility to it. So there's a lot of strength once it's cured, but think about this awning as you open and close, it's gonna flex a little bit. So this is a very good product for that. Now, one of the things, what do I always say when we're teaching this, we say eight and a million times?

Read the directions, read the directions, read the directions. Epoxy is cool stuff, but there's a lot going on here. It has to be mixed in the right proportions. The environment has to be right, meaning the temperature of the shop is a little warmer today than we would normally have it because we're doing epoxy work. So there's a lot of things going on here and you can't like spitball the mixing.

It's gotta be right. So just again- Read the directions. We can't say that part enough. Now we're gonna mix, and we're gonna mix off camera 'cause all we're doing is stirring. Once we're mixed then- We're gonna pour the epoxy into different containers, and then we're gonna add pigment or mica powder or a combination of pigment and mica powder.

So the deal with the pigment is pigment creates like one uniform color for your epoxy. So blue or green. Mica powder makes it this like shiny pearlescent beautiful thing. So we might do one or two or three pigments, and we might do just a mica or we might just do a combo. Yeah, you can mix and match to get the color you want.

So part of pigment is incredibly concentrated. So just a little bit of that is gonna give you a lot of color. So when you add pigment, start with only a small amount, mix, see where it's at. You can always add more. You can't take it back out.

Here's what we're gonna go for. You may have seen in the epoxy world what people call a wave pattern or a beach pattern where it looks like a wave crashing on a beach. So we're testing ourselves by committing to this ahead of time and saying that's what we're gonna do. What that's gonna look like, hopefully, is some dark color. You know, picture an ocean or a lake, and then a lighter blue and then maybe an even lighter blue and then the white, and then currently our plan is to leave the top part clear so you can see the plywood through it.

And that's kind of the beach, the sand part of this equation. Anything else? PPE, you know, we'll have gloves. We've got great airflow in here. So we don't have to worry about a BOC mask.

If you don't have the at air flow, you have to do that. And I think we just need to mix. Well, we gotta read the directions, of course, to make sure we're mixing it correctly. But other than that, nothing. All right, when we come back, we're gonna be ready to do a pour.

We're ready to go and we're gonna get moving here. Here's what you're gonna see. Krista's got the color that's gonna be this baseline color. That's gotta go all the way across end to end. Then I've got the next row end to end.

Then we've got another heavy mica powder one that's gonna go here. Then clear to the top. Then the white is last. We'll talk about that when we get to it. One of the things you'll see us doing, gotta have gloves on.

We're gonna end up putting our gloved fingers right in the epoxy to help manipulate it. I think you can go ahead and start pouring while I'm chatting. And we'll also be using heat guns in order to move the epoxy around. I'm gonna take this and kind of paint brush it. So the heat gun will do a couple things for us.

It's gonna knock bubbles out of it, and it acts a little bit like a paint brush. So keep a little one reserved there. It acts a little like a paint brush in order to manipulate the epoxy and it where you want it to go. So down here on this edge, what we're doing is making sure we get all the way to the edge. Oh yeah.

And it's good. So when I said to Krista, make sure you keep a little in reserve, if you end up with little bald spots you wanna have some epoxy left so you can go back and hit those. So that's our green-ish blue bottom of the ocean. And you can get right in here and pull these colors to gather, 'cause of course you probably, in the water you don't necessarily have distinct color lines. You have kind of a mix.

Need to mix some more. And I'm using the heat gun to kind of move this around a little bit and it's working really well. It's it's coming out nice. It's turning out pretty nice. It's moving a little bit better than I thought it would, actually.

So let's talk through this wave pattern that we're doing or shooting for, anyway. The crest of the wave is gonna be white. So, haven't mixed that yet. That's done with a real specific product called oxide white. That's the pigment, it's called oxide white.

And you don't wanna mix that until you're ready for it, which we just about are here. And this clear goes on first. And that's gonna allow the oxide white to kind of float on top of that clear. And that's the dynamic of what we want. That's the way we wanna make that happen.

All right, if you pull that together, I'll start mixing the white. I got a couple spots there that need to come together still. We did quickly mix up a little bit more clear. Wanted to push that clear up the board a little bit more for the wave, just so there was more real estate to work with for the wave pattern. And I think you can see that work that Krista's doing with that heat gun.

It is, this epoxy is mirror-smooth right now. And that comes from it self-leveling and from the work with the heat gun to knock bubbles out of it. All right. Yeah, thanks. Are you ready for this?

Yeah. Now this is where again, you can and use the heat gun to manipulate this white and get it to kind of fan out. This is more of an art than a science. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Your heat gun might be more powerful than mine.

Yeah, you have to get right down in there. You can kind of blow it around, disperse it a little. Thank you. And this is what was gonna help give us that wave that we're after. Then as another step, isopropyl alcohol.

Oh, that's cool! I'm gonna do a little, I'm gonna help that white just a little bit. All right, we'll get this one more time. Don't overdo it with the alcohol. It can start to have a negative effect, kind of pock the epoxy if you do too much of this.

Nice. All right, heat gun one more time. Now what we'll do to finish this is we gotta mix one more batch of clear and that's gonna take us the rest of the way to the top of this board. We'll take care of that, and then following the epoxy, there's one more step that has to happen to make this whole thing UV-safe. And that's not gonna happen for a little bit.

Here's what we decided to do. We mixed up some more clear. And then, we went back and forth a lot 'cause it's art, not science. A lot, a lot. And I thought it would be neat to have just a little color at the top that's kind of sky-like, so that's what Krista mixed up and has going there and then we'll meet it.

And what I like about what we're doing here by manipulating the epoxy with our fingers is it gives you that irregular edge, like I did with the waves. You're pulling one color down into the other, and that I think is a little more organic. It's what the world kind of looks like is you don't really have straight lines. You have all these irregular lines. I'm gonna hit at with the heat gun, I think.

Yeah, I think we're like done. It's look super satisfying to watch the bubbles come out, really satisfying. And it's amazing how well the heat gun works at that. So a couple things there kind of in closing. We may have mentioned.

Read the directions. It it's so important. Epoxy is expensive stuff, so read the directions, use it the way that manufacturer wants you to use it. Again for us, total boat high performance gives us the flex that we want in this awning like it's giving us the flex we want in the cedar strip canoe. The heat guns work great, but you gotta be careful.

Don't, if there's a bubble that's being obstinate, don't just keep getting the heat gun closer and closer, 'case you can scorch the epoxy. Yes, you can. So yeah, there's definitely a point of diminishing- Oh, experience? I've done that. You totally can burn it.

And then other than that, just, I don't know. We're a little furtive here on this because we don't want this to get away from us and then you can't get the bubbles out. You know what I mean? Where it starts to cure before you're actually ready for it to cure. So plan your work, work your plan, get somebody to help you.

And like I said, we'll come back. There's another step this needs yet before it's done done and ready to go back in the frame. But we'll talk about that in a little bit. Remember that when we were wrapping up the epoxy, I said once it's cured, we need to come back and do another step. And what we need to do is add UV protection to this.

So the specific product I'm using in is Halcyon. You can brush it on, you can roll it on. Read the directions. And with a couple of coats of that on top of the epoxy, we'll have that protection that we need. In to get to this point, the whole surface was just lightly sanded.

Again, read the directions, you'll get what you need there. And then from there, it's just much like applying finish because we are applying finish, and I'm gonna just coat this entire surface. I've already done the backside with the exact same thing. The other thing we get out of this finish choice is that remember we talked about the reason for selecting this epoxy was it allows the flexibility we need on this component or on a canoe to be flexible to move a little bit and not crack over time and same feature we're getting outta the epoxy, we're getting outta this top coat. So from here, apply, read the directions.

Let it dry a little bit, get a couple more coat on here. And then from here the awning is gonna be ready to reinstall. It's gonna look so cool on the front of the camper. What do you think? You know, honestly, not a bad process.

Trace the old panel onto the new piece of plywood to get it just the right size, follow the instructions to do the epoxy work and practice with small scale-stuff with epoxy before you take on this much surface area. Like I did, get another pair of hands if you need to. But in the end, man, I absolutely love that wave pattern on the front of this camper. What a great application for epoxy to really dress this baby up.