Airstream Retrofit: Progress Update

If you prefer to read instead of watching our short video, here is the transcript of the conversation between Mike Gilvar and Pete Adauto:

Mike Gilvar: Thanks to everybody for joining this session of The Bottom Line at TTG. I’m here with Pete and he’s gonna give us a progress report on the Airstream. Where are we Pete? What’s going on?

Pete Adauto: We got a lot of stuff going on here. One of the things that I really wanted to show this time was our windows. These are all the windows. We’ve actually pulled them out of the Airstream. We’ve got them all cleaned up and nice and neat, ready for some touch-ups here and there, and all these windows will be tinted. None of it was cracked. Everything is completely intact as far as the windows go in this Airstream, which is, you just don’t find that very often. All the hardware has actually been taken out and cleaned up and everything, so these have all been cleaned up and nice and ready to go back into the Airstream. All the hardware is all kept together in bags, kinda keep everything together so we don’t lose anything. So these windows are ready to get tinted and then go back into the Airstream when we get it back out of our metal shop.

Mike Gilvar: Awesome. Tell us about the door. I saw the door behind you that I think looks pretty awesome.

Pete Adauto: Yeah, yeah, so the door, what we’ve done with this is we’re working on the handle right now. The handle is extremely hard to find, and when you do find it, you’re looking for $500 for just the handle alone. So we’re trying to bring it back to life. But one of the things that I was gonna show you was that, the inside of these doors, the skin has been taken off of these completely, and what we did was we pulled all the skins off of the inside of this trailer because we wanted to look in between that. We wanted to change out insulation, make sure there’s nothing that needs to be addressed inside of the door or the frame of the Airstream for that matter.

Mike Gilvar:: Great. Let’s see the actual unit. What are we looking at here in terms of progress right now?

Pete Adauto: What we did was we stripped out the whole inside of this. Again, it’s a 1970, so over 40 years trailer. Once these panels on the inside come out, we noticed several wires that were burned and were kind of fried a little bit. It got too hot. Whole floor’s taken out. The wall panels, all the wiring, we’re almost starting with a brand new, blank canvas here. What we did find was some extensive damage to the stairs right here on the way these stairs come out. So what we did was we have the beauty of a full metal shop in here, a trade group, and Alex came in and basically rebuilt this back to the way it used to be, no rust. We’ll get that primed and painted back to the way it used to be, if not in better shape. With some of the rust that we found out now, some of this stuff is just surface rust. It’s not a big deal that we can’t fix, but right here, we added a new beam here that would help sturdy the trailer up, and then what we did was we moved to the back where we found all of our major damage to the frame. So this whole back area right here that you see that is silver down here on the ground is brand new Sea Channel frame with tubing across that sturdy… Makes this whole thing sturdy on the back half. You have to note that this is the area where the actual bathroom was, and water damage from the top in because they have panels on the bottom, belly pan, and then you have your wood floor. So this damage came from the inside out. It must have been some bad leak or something at one point or another that caused all this frame damage.

Mike Gilvar:: And how close are we, Pete, to actually being able to start making this thing come to life? How close are we?

0:03:23.1 S2: So we probably got about a week left here in the metal shop. There are some holes, vent holes and stuff like this that we’re no longer using. So we got about another week in the metal shop. Once it’s done from here, then we will add some wiring down here for the electric breaks, and then Brian and Javier, the team up in the wood shop, kinda go ahead and get the whole wood floor down. So once the wood floor goes in, you’re gonna start seeing a lot of progress with the insulation on the walls, and then we’ll start putting the skins in. All the wiring will be done at that point, and then we’ll really start building cabinets, and that’s when it’s really gonna come to life.

Mike Gilvar:: That’s great. Let’s do one more check in when you get the floors in and everything’s ready for the finish out. We’re really excited.

0:04:03.8 S2: Definitely. Mike Gilvar:: Awesome, thanks Pete. Thanks everybody for checking in on this project and we’ll see you on the next Bottom Line at TTG.