My focus today was to finish the upper bunk assembly. Unfortunately, that meant taking a step backwards for two steps forward. Yesterday, I had realized that forgot to add an eye bolt to one of the aluminum extrusions. I also had used too many fasteners in the assembly, which left me with too few to hang the assembly. That meant that the first thing I had to do today was to partially dis-assemble what I did yesterday. It’s always faster the second time, right?
I got it re-assembled and then discovered that the edge of the wider board did not rest on the aluminum extrusion when the bed was opened up. That caused that board to sag when weight was applied to it. Not a good thing for a bed. That led to the second dis-assembly of the day. But, before I got into that dis-assembly, I took a trip to Lowes to buy a tool and the fittings that I needed for the sink.
I dis-assembled the upper bunk after I returned and made the necessary modifications to the board, so it would rest on the aluminum extrusion. I was pretty sure that this would be the last dis-assembly, so when I was putting it back together I put loctite on all the screw threads. It worked well when I had it back together.
The final step was to screw in the piano hinge between the two boards that make up the bed platform. This hinge allows the bed to be more narrow when not in use. I screwed in the piano hinge to the larger board first and noticed that the screws stuck out the back side of the plywood board by about 1/16″. This wasn’t going to work for me, but I didn’t have any good ideas of how to trim these back. So, I went to Ace Hardware and talked to one of my friends there. We settled on a new Dremmel attachment that I could use with my Dremmel tool to trim down the protruding screw ends.
I came home and used the Dremmel to clean up the screw ends. I worked well. Then I went through the same process for the screws on the smaller board. At the end of the day, it worked well. Just some extra time and effort. Here is what the upper bunk looks like when it is in the extended and retracted positions.
I went into the van to think about how I’m going to hang this bunk on the wall. By this time, it had been raining outside for about four hours, and I noticed a small leak coming from the AC unit. It was dripping right in front of the sink. I cleaned up the water and put a bucket undder the leak. Once it stops raining, I’ll go up on the roof and add some more sealant around the AC unit.
I was very surprised that this leaked now, as it hasn’t in the past. I haven’t figured out why or how. I’ll have to think about that a little…
The leak prevented me from finishing up under the sink, as the the leak was right in front of the sink. So, I called it a day and did some more planning work on the next steps of the van build.