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Page Updated: Sat, Jan 06, 2007

Progress To Date (Page Five)

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June 19, 2005 - Where did winter go??!! I barely got started on the things I wanted to do this winter and suddenly it's mid-June. Forget spring -- it feels like I went straight from boots, coat, and frozen fingers to flip-flops, shorts, and sweat.

Actually, I've been working so hard on the motorhome, and making so much progress, that I've barely noticed the time passing. So, why haven't I updated this site? Because most of what I've been doing is about as interesting as watching paint dry ... of interest to the person doing the work but just about as much fun as cold eggs and soggy toast to everyone else. Plus, I really have been very, very busy working on the motorhome itself.

I reached a turning point in the project about a week ago. Up until then, all the work had been dismantling, cleaning, planning, designing, and accumulating stuff. That changed a week ago, when I reached the point of actually assembling part of the new body. Oh, I'm still doing all the other stuff ... I've just added 'putting the body together' to all the other things I'm doing.

Plan View, as of June 18, 2006

Because I want to build a completely new custom body, most of my time has been spent working on the design for the body. If I had been using a conventional (old-style?) drafting board, I would have used a small forest worth of paper, yards and yards of graphite (pencil lead), and enough erasers to supply an entire grade school. Instead, I've been using copious quantities of electrons scurrying around inside my computer, in the form of computer assisted drafting (CAD) software.

Right Side (Starboard Profile) View, as of June 18, 2006

The CAD software I'm using is MacDraft&trade 5.5.9 by Microspot Ltd. All the drawings on this page are "works in progress" extracted from MacDraft drawings. The originals of the first two drawings (above) are 24 inches wide and have been drastically scaled down to fit this page. The rest of the drawings, to various degrees, have also been scaled down to fit.

Rear (Astern) View, as of June 18, 2006

By the way, the information on this web site is the "tip of the iceberg" as far as this project goes, condensed and organized. A lot of discussion, in the chatrooms and various threads, has gone into this project at Mopar Truck World and Wild Mopar Truck Country. Those discussions, in turn, are only a part of the information, drawings, notes, bookmarks, and "clippings" I've accumulated on my hard disk. (I try to keep that to under a half gigabyte -- when the "stuff" approaches that amount, I take time to sort, organize, and clean things up.)

Wheel Well Detail, as of June 18, 2006

Some of the drawings I do are detail work, used to figure out and check various parts of the body. In the case of the wheel well example (above), the outer tire represents the rear tires with the axle in its normal position. The inner tire, in turn, shows their position with the rear axle up tight against the frame (bottomed out). I did this drawing to make sure I had sufficient clearance in the wheel wells without making them any bigger than I absolutely had to.

Center Beam Cutting Diagram, as of June 18, 2006

If you're starting to think I'm some kind of obsessive-compulsive perfectionist, forget it. It's true I like to work things out on paper (or its electronic equivalent) in order to save time and materials. However, once I'm reasonably confident things will work the way I intend, I quit drawing and build whatever it was I was designing, even if the drawings are incomplete. In the case of the cutting diagram (above), I had worked out the details but wasn't ready to do the actual cutting yet. I did this diagram to avoid forgetting something or having to reconstruct the train of thought that produced the information in the drawing.

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