Daryl May's travel writing draws from his visits to forty-five U.S. states, nine Canadian provinces, and sixty countries. Whether as a notable hiker or a lowly hitchhiker - or in cars, boats, bulldozers, planes and RVs - his stories are generally wistful and self-deprecating as he faces adversity and extricates himself without losing his sense of humor. Follow his journey as he builds his own trailer and learn the basics of how RVs are constructed.

A lesson I never learn is just how long it takes to construct things. In my mind, flash, and the project is done. In reality, things take longer.

That’s how it’s been with Tommy. Tommy is the teardrop trailer that I’m building in my garage. I’ve spent long hours selecting the wood and the right fasteners, and ordering windows and vents and door hinges and latches. The aluminum sheet for the roof taught me another construction lesson – special orders take longer than any estimate.

In my case, the aluminum sheet was not just delayed, but was so poorly packaged that it arrived with its corners bashed and edges scraped.

Mangled aluminum
“We need to buy a good one,” said my wife Jennifer. She was thinking not just about my homebuilt trailer, but of a beautiful dream – that of heading to the RV dealer one weekend, and buying a gleaming new machine which smells like a new car – one that you drive home instantly ready for the great outdoors.

“RVing,” said Jennifer, “is about camping, a home-away-from-home – and not about construction.”

I hid from her the thumb I’d just bashed with a hammer, and went back to work in my snugly warm Florida garage. “Snugly warm” is a term that allows me to pretend that it’s not 100-degrees in my garage in this, our Florida summer. And more like 115-degrees when the garage is closed, creating an oven behind the metal door that’s soaking up the afternoon sun.

I am a stubborn old engineer, and I get satisfaction from solving construction problems, and working with my hands, and watching a project move from nothing to . . . well, in this case, a teardrop trailer. Despite buckets of sweat, insect bites, a bruised thumb, and the bottomless pit of expenditures, this is a project I want to do myself. I just need to mention that there’s a lot to be said for buying an RV already completed. The factory knows how to build them better than amateurs like me, and with all the right fixtures, and without excess weight. Plus you get a warranty instead of the doubtful joy of redoing your own work.

Nevertheless, I busied myself with cutting the trailer sidewalls out of exterior grade plywood for

the outer sheets, with a thinner inner sheet separated from the outer by rigid frames and foam insulation. If you’ve ever slept in a car in cold weather, you’ll appreciate why insulation is needed in an RV. It not only keeps out the cold, but it keeps condensation at bay. Condensation is a word that describes a hot-and-cold, sweaty, sleepless night. Never build an RV without insulation, and always ask about it when you buy one. The best insulation, I figured, is solid rather than fluffy, because it stays put even if it should get damp, and it provides some stiffness when glued to the facesheets of the sidewall.

Sidewall construction
I completed the sidewalls using the flat bed of the trailer as a spacious 5 ft by 8 ft workbench. Each sidewall has cutouts for the doors and windows, and generous quantities of waterproof wood glue and galvanized screws. Next, I built “rails” on the edge of the trailer bed, running fore-and-aft, heavily bolted right through to the metal frame of the trailer, as well as glued to the floor. Now, the sidewalls were supposedly ready to be lifted vertical and lowered on to the rails, with the sidewall sides straddling the rails, which have indents to accept steel straps that are screwed to the vertical frames. The sidewalls are then glued and screwed to the rails as well as to the trailer frame. There is nothing that haunts my engineering mind quite as much as the thought of the living quarters departing the trailer bed on a dark and stormy night on the highway. That’s why I’m building as strong a structure as I can. And that, too, is a reason to consider buying an RV from an established manufacturer who really knows the safety aspects.

I’ve always trusted my eyes when selecting wood studs or furring strips at the lumberyard. I close my left eye, and bring the wood up to my right eye so I can see down its length. Unwanted bends or bumps show up easily enough. It’s a commonsense technique, and a time-honored one.

But not this time. As the sidewalls were just starting to take shape, it came the time for cataract

Not-so-straight furring strip
surgery on my eyes. Modern medicine makes this a routine and safe procedure but with sometimes-quirky consequences. Long story short, my eyes have a curvature that needs single-focus lens implants, and not the new variable-focus ones. In an effort to give me a chance at life without glasses, the ophthalmologist implanted a distant-vision lens in my left eye, and a near-vision lens in the right eye. My right eye, the near-vision one, actually focuses just one foot away. The two eyes see different images, leaving the brain to meld them into one – a process that takes some time and patience but generally happens successfully.

So picture this. I am standing in my garage without glasses. My woodpile is at hand, and I am ready to select a nice, straight-as-a-die furring strip to frame the sidewall. But I am only a week out of surgery after a lifetime with glasses. Bringing the wood up my right eye, I realize I mustn’t bump my glasses – and it takes a distracting moment to realize that I don’t have any eyeglasses to bump. Continuing with the task, I line the wood up with my right eye, with the left eye closed, and now I realize that that the right eye can see barely a foot down the wood because it’s so near-sighted. So that’s the next moment that I think, “I need my glasses to see down the wood” – and for the tenth time that day, I either reach to put them on or take them off, before realizing they aren’t on my nose or on my desk, or anywhere else. Finally realizing what’s needed here, I close my right eye, and raise the wood to my left eye, which is the one that will now check that the wood is straight. But suddenly there’s another problem. To use my left eye, it helps to hold the wood with the left hand where the right hand used to be, and vice versa.

Perhaps because some of the wood was slightly bent, I had a challenging time attaching the sidewall on one side. Sidewall and rail didn’t quite line up. But my friend, Jackson M, who is an old woodworking pro, came to the rescue. With a little chiseling here and there, and some gentle taps with a mallet, we had each sidewall nicely in place, glued and screwed – and as vertical as it needs to be for the moment.

Jackson and I wiped our hands on our shirts, which is what shirts are for, and were just retiring to the end of the garage where I keep a couple of bottles of Foster Lagers hidden from Jennifer – when she appeared.

“You need to get a move on,” Jennifer joked. “When is Tommy taking us to the Keys?”

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Jennifer is contemplating Lasik surgery, and – free of glasses – she visualizes herself snorkeling and actually seeing the fish, which is not something either of us has been able to enjoy with impaired eyesight. So she’s looking forward to Tommy being finished soon after she has her Lasik procedure. We both dream of the moment when, bags packed and trailer all readied, we head out down the highway for a camping adventure.

So, with Lasik in mind, Jennifer accompanies me to the ophthalmologist when I go for my post-op visit. “Am I a candidate for Lasik?” she asks.

“No,” says the doctor, “you’re not. As a matter of fact, you have cataracts.”

So now Jennifer gets cataracts removed from her two eyes also, though not at the same time as mine. And for the fourteenth time, we drive to Largo, Florida, some twenty miles from home, because that just happens to be where the ophthalmologist is.

Fortunately, Jennifer’s eyes were also successfully corrected. In the days that followed, I smiled as I saw her reach to take off her nonexistent glasses as I had.

Our eye surgeries are why Tommy is taking shape slowly, but taking shape it is.

See Part 1 in this series.