I had a meeting at church in the morning, so I got a late start on van building. I started out by attaching that last furring strip around the window frame. Then, I fit in the window frame and traced a line around the window frame where the edge of the furring strips were. I used that line to cut the window frame down to size. I used my circular saw and did the cuts freehand, which was a little sketchy, but it worked. I was glad that Elizabeth helped me hold the frame while I was cutting it. It wasn’t a perfect cut, but it will be covered up with a wall panel and no one will see it. I test fit the window frame after cutting it, and it now fits fine. Here is a picture of the cuts mid-way through the process.
Then I glued strips of wood on the outside of the window frame, so that I can attach it to the furring strips. I also used a few screws to hold those strips of wood down. I clamped the strips on the first two sides for several hours before doing the other two sides later in the day. I ended up using almost all my clamps on this step. Here is what it looked like.
While the glue was drying, I moved on to my next big task, which was to rework my lower bunk frame. Before I received the van, I fabricated a lower bunk frame out to aluminum extrusion. Mostly, I did this to get some practice fabricating frames with aluminum extrusion, as I had never used it before. At the time, I knew that I would have to rework it and now it was time to see how bad it was.
Right away I could tell the frame was too tall. It blocks the bottom part of the window. The second problem is harder to see, but is the column that sticks out a few inches about halfway down the bed frame. This column keeps the bed frame from sitting flush against the wall. Its important for the bed frame to sit next to the wall, so I can use the unistrut to anchor it in place. So, I took some measurements and went to work redesigning the fabrication.
Once I had laid out a new design on graph paper, I went to work disassembling the original fabrication and started putting together the updated design. That work will carry over into tomorrow, if not longer.