Some small things

Got off to a late start thanks to my ill-fated decisions, but Peter was a good sport and he bought me a chicken biscuit. 

We are getting the hang of the electrical set-up. First I noticed that with the shop-vac and the air compressor both running via the outlets, the inverter was blinking overload, so we switched to running the air compressor directly from the house instead. Then the surge protector inside of the Airstream started blinking a red light that said "CAUTION WHEN BLINKING" and wouldn't send any power to the inverter. Strangely, the fans (which are 12v and theoretically hooked up to the battery, which had plenty of charge) would not power on either. 

And then after maybe 2 minutes of us staring at it and thinking, it fixed itself. This happened a few more times. Throughout the day, I would hear the inverter running while we were only using AC power, which troubled me a little because I thought shore power should be able to bypass the inverter, but once or twice the "AC Mode" indicator was glowing, which comforted me. 

What did not comfort me is that when the surge protector detected an error and blocked incoming power, the power tools we had plugged in would continue running off the battery like nothing was happening--a cool feature for uninterrupted power use, but now how I'm wanting to use our battery. I am regretting having it wired to bypass the fridge, because it seems like we actually would have enough power to run it off our battery. 

Also, the 12v lighting worked even when the battery switch was off. How is that possible? This is the disadvantage of not doing your system yourself--you don't know how to troubleshoot it! 

First, Peter installed the shocks. He used blocks and the hydraulic lift to force pressure on the tires until the wheel mount was aligned, and the shocks fit right into place like Colin said they would. The washers that came with the new one weren't quite right, so he reused the old ones. And we were one short! So Peter made his own by using a fat drill bit to widen another washer he had. Such a problem solver. 

After that, he came inside the rig with me and riveted in the rest of the upper walls, which took some finessing to preserve the tension in the curve, especially around the vista windows, where you can't rivet due to the sliding window shade. He also wrapped up with the rivets in the front end cap. We are still waiting on the aluminum for the back end cap. He ordered a thicker gauge for more support. 

I think he's glad he started with the front end cap, because if he had started with the back, he might have lost his enthusiasm for it, but the front one looks so good! And I think the back one will look nice also, even if it's not perfect. 

My contribution was to try to strip some of the lingering paint lumps off the skins and also the rods that hold the ceiling in place. I also used some 60 & 120 grit sandpaper on the multitool to prep the walls for painting. It was so nice to have our fans going while we were working in there! And the light! We got some Bondo to patch areas where the vinyl has pulled away and also too-large rivet holes. We also got some self-etching primer and TSP. So close to painting, so close!