Teardrop Camper Rebuild

February 2019

It has been quite a while since we have been able to do anything with the teardrop.  We moved to Ridgecrest in July/October 2016. We took the teardrop camper to Yosemite and Bear Valley Springs in 2017. It kinda sat, unfortunately, in 2018 and here we are. I badly want to camp with it again but it's gotten so beat up by the weather that I'm afraid it will fall apart if we towed it down the road. That brings us to today. Or, yesterday...

We picked out wood at Home Depot. This wood we picked because it is strong and more water resistant and also in our budget. We had to buy 3 pieces in total. 

Grateful for the roof rack on our Mazda so we didn't have to try and rent or borrow a truck.

We are using the old sides as a template. I used a black Sharpie to trace the shape on to the new boards. Tony cut out a lot of extra pieces of what we are using as a template in order to make it lighter. I think we are going to do that on our new sides as well, maybe not quite as many.

I stood on the wood so it didn't move around as Tony used the jigsaw to cut out along the Sharpie lines.

New board cut to match the shape of the old one - we are keeping the shape the same in hopes that the roofing will still fit and work so we can reuse it. 

First modification - a door on both sides. I am SUPER stoked about this. Often I slept by the door and Tony would get up and out earlier than me to start a fire or use the bathroom in the morning and he always had to crawl over me which of course, woke me up. But not anymore - now we will each have our own door to get in and out of. LOVE IT. 

Uneven on the left but Tony used the sander to smooth out the bumps and now it looks great (picture on the right).

Uneven edges from the jigsaw...

Clamped the new sides together to get them smoothed evenly and so 

that nothing would shift.

Go, Tony, go! This part really didn't take long.

Ta-Da!

Working on the base and testing putting up the sides. Had to undo that picture on the right though because our screws were not long enough. Another trip to Home Depot but the daylight was starting to fade at that point and it was really cold outside (thus my outfit and I was still freezing) so piecing the sides together will have to wait for another day. Soon.