Day 1 of Building

Hey y'all, Kelly here.

Finally, after weeks of waiting for the shipment and Cody pouring over the builder's manual, we finished our first full day of working on the teardrop.  We spent 9+ hours prepping our work space, taking all of the wooden pieces out of boxes, going through our materials inventory, making a run to Menards, assembling the mold that we will use to form the shell of the teardrop, and finally connecting the roof and wall pieces to be installed on Day 2.

After taking the pieces out of the shipping boxes and checking over our inventory, we started by creating the base pieces of our mold.  The mold is essentially a big wooden skeleton that the walls of the teardrop will fit into so that everything bends and connects just right.  If any of the pieces of the mold are put together incorrectly, we'll have a warped shell or more likely, a shape that does not look like a teardrop at all.  Luckily, while I was daydreaming about all the trips we'll eventually go on, Cody was reading through the manual and familiarizing himself with what to expect when we finally started building.  

The wood pieces that come in the kit are too long to ship the full length we need them during the build, so they came as two or three pieces each that have puzzle-type seams.  After slightly sanding the edges of the pieces, we put some wood glue along the puzzle edges, fit them together, then glued and drilled on a stabilizing piece of wood to each seam.  I'm going to be honest, this was my first time ever using a drill (something new every day!), but we ended up with all of our mold pieces glued together and ready to go.  Each piece has notches that interlock, so we spent some time locking each one in place and drilling them together so that they won't wobble when we add the teardrop walls.  

At this point, we had a giant skeleton in the garage, it was getting darker, and we were exhausted.  The next steps of the build require us to use strips of fiberglass and epoxy to create strong, watertight seals, which means that we'll have to wait for the epoxy to dry overnight.  We wanted to get a head start on this process, so we shuffled our skeleton as far back as possible and took out the roof and wall pieces of the teardrop.  After laying out extra plastic and connecting the puzzle seams, we added a small drop of super glue to each finger of the seam so that it would stay still overnight.  We then got on some gloves, cut and laid the fiberglass strips, and mixed up some epoxy.  Now comes the coolest part of the whole day.  When the epoxy is brushed onto the fiberglass, it soaks through and the white fiberglass strip becomes clear - we can actually see the wood through the fiberglass!  The epoxy will dry as time goes on, and after sitting out for almost 24 hours we will have strong, solid seams on roof and wall pieces that we can lay into the mold skeleton. 

Hour Count:
Day 1 -- 7 hours

Check back for Day 2!

-Kelly