9 - The Rotting Cabover, We Did NOT See That Coming

The walls of the bed area over the truck cab were fine. We did not check the actual bed platform though and we were in for a surprise. It was completely rotted. It all had to come out. We ended up replacing it with 3/4" exterior plywood. We saved the exterior "skin" and were able to glue it to the new ply. It worked out really well. Adam measured and cut the ply. We slid it into place and screwed it back into the side walls and front.

At first, we did not realize the extent of the damage to the sleeping platform. Adam sat up there to remove the old curtains with no issues.

Upon closer inspection, we realized there was a big problem. Adam tore out the rotted wood:

Finally, we were down to just the "skin"

Adam cut a new bed platform

The original skin was saved

Adam used Weldwood cement to adhere the skin to the new plywood piece

Our friend Al was a HUGE help. He made us laugh AND offered excellent advice. Al fixes and remodels RV's for a living. Well, he's a master carpenter and does pretty much everything. RV's are not built like a house or boat. They are in a class of their own. Having Al working nearby and happily offering sound advice made this project do-able for us. 

Something weird showed up on Al's back when I took this photo... strange

Then we slid the plywood with the skin glued to the bottom into place

There was space in the "joint" between the truck cab ceiling and the over cab part of the RV. Adam inserted 1/4" ply to fill in the space. Then, from the outside, we taped off that joint and smeared, with our fingers, Dicor. Then, we put butyl tape over the Dicor. We had to use small strips of the butyl tape. It was very difficult to apply it to the narrow space.

Our friend Mike was really helpful in getting the Dicor in that narrow space.