Anglia4's Zephyr Caravan "George"

[anglia4]

To start at the beginning, my wife and I had been on a few tent camping trips since we had our first child.

We had a great time, but as we expanded it was getting harder to take all our gear in the car. (Our last tenting trip below - Only one child at this point, and inside the car was stacked to the roof everywhere that there wasn't a human sitting)

So part of the idea behind the trailer build was to carry our camping gear.

Shortly after I committed to building the trailer, we decided that actually, a caravan might be for us instead. So that is part of when the trailer started getting out of hand design wise, to be less of a "handy camping trailer" and we started looking for a caravan.

We were pretty keen on a Zephyr as we like the shape. Post covid, the caravan market seemed to be going insane; they were getting more and more expensive, and the ones we were looking at were more and more shit. It was starting to look like our budget was going to land us a big project.

Then one day I happened to be scrolling trademe just as this little zephyr came up for sale for a reasonable price. I rang the lady straight away, and asked when I could collect it. She was very surprised as she had only listed it some 5 minutes prior, but nonetheless some organizing was done and my mother in-law and I went for a drive to Paraparaumu to collect George.

George was named by his previous owners after George Lucas, as he is from the original star wars era.

George ticked a lot of boxes for us.

He is not too big, around 13 foot, 3 bed, which has been OK so far as last summer the littlest was still in a bassinet.

He is clean and tidy and dry inside with fairly new squab covers, curtains and carpet.

He's a little rough around the edges and needs a repaint outside which brought the price down to our budget.

Completely useable with room for improvement. 

[anglia4]

There wasn't much needed to be done to get him ready for our first adventure.

The little hatch in the side where the awning gets stowed fell to bits on the gloriously bumpy piece of tarmac labelled State Highway 3. That resulted in a garage sale of wheel chocks and shit down 800 odd meters of the highway out of Whanganui. Fun. So I rebuilt the hatch from a solid piece of Aluminium rather than sandwiched hardboard as the original was. No more drama there.

I had to go around the bodywork and add a bunch of extra screws where the edges of the Aluminium were starting to lift.

Beyond that, he passed his WOF and we were away.

This was almost exactly a year ago, so we booked our first trip. We wanted to go somewhere within a ~3 hour radius from New Plymouth so we could pack up and come home if it wasn't going well. A spot at Raglan was secured for labour weekend 2021.

https://www.rnz.co.nz/national/programmes/morningreport/audio/2018814892/covid-19-raglan-wakes-to-alert-level-3

Well fuck.

So we started to phone camp sites going south and ended up scoring the last powered site available at Himatangi Beach just out of Foxton. Probably a cancellation from some poor bugger in the Waikato.

[anglia4]

The Himatangi Beach trip was awesome.

We had a great time.

We were a little later arriving at the camp ground than we had hoped, and had never assembled the awning before...

It was getting dark really quickly, so I just threw it all on the ground and asked the neighboring group if they had ever put one up. Suddenly there was a team of about 6 of us assembling this awning, and we were friends with our camping neighbors just like that.

Successful trip. Yay! Camping!

[anglia4]

The next big trip was to Nelson.

We have family down there, so had booked in nearly 2 weeks at the Mapua Leisure Park. This was always going to be a BIG trip.

All loaded up and ready to head to the ferry, the caravan had heaps of gear in it, I had made some roof rack mounts and got the bikes up on the roof of the jeep. We were off.

We got to Hawera, just an hour into our journey to the ferry and decided to stop and grab a coffee from the service station.

Pulled away, the jeep loaded up, started to move, and then the revs flared up with no drive. Not good.

I rang my dad, who was very luckily on his way home from work nearby, in his VX Landcruiser. So we hitched George onto the Landcruiser, threw the bikes in the caravan, changed over the car seats etc. left dad on the side of the road with a dead Jeep and got on our way again. We rang the ferry to let them know we were now running late, they told us the ferry was also running late due to weather, but that if we didn't make it, we were unlikely to get another crossing for days as this was just before xmas. Stressful!

By the time we got to the ferry, we were quite late, and the ferry had got back on schedule. We had been on the phone to them multiple times on the trip down, letting them know what our ETA was. They let us on-board, as they were expecting us, and then turned away the people who had pulled in behind us. It was the biggest feeling of relief I've ever had.

God it towed awful behind the Landcruiser. I had to stop a couple of times to shift some weight forward, but never got it right. In the end we decided it was because the tow-bar was too high and that was unsettling it.

Now the Landcruiser has always been the most reliable old workhorse, so we were fairly comfortable with it... But such was the luck we had on this trip, that the Landcruiser decided it wasn't quite up to it either...

Looking on the brightside, it was a beautiful day for a roadside picnic on the Whangamoas while we waited for it to cool down.

Eventually we made it to our camp site and again had an awesome holiday. We spread out into our gazebo a bit more for this trip just because of the duration. George is just the right size for us along with the gazebo for mum and dad to hang out in after the kids have gone to bed.

The trip home was very gentle. We took the Whangamoas at about 20km/h with the heater on full, all the windows and the sun-roof open.

21km/h or turning the heater off would start the temp needle climbing again, but we made it.

Dad has since overhauled the cooling system on the old truck and its back to pulling the big loads.

Meanwhile the Jeep lived up to its name of Just Empty Every Pocket, and required a transmission rebuild from top to bottom. It was eye-wateringly expensive, but supposedly now it will be stronger than when it was new. I definitely find I don't like to give it the whole 500Nm when I'm towing any more. This whole thing is not something I want to re-live.

[anglia4]

George has sat pretty idle in the driveway since xmas time. He left the property for his EWOF which he passed with flying colours.

Recently we decided to bite the bullet and make a start on the exterior.

The paint was really badly crazed and cracked. I don't know what it was painted with, but it doesn't seem like it was the right stuff. Where I had needed to use some duct tape to hold the hatch door together had peeled the paint off. It was just rubbish.

So I made a start.

Out with an array of sanders and varying grits to see what worked best.

The verdict was that none of them worked all that great, and it was going to take forever and leave me with carpul tunnel syndrome.

So I got some chemical stripper and tried that. Much more effective. I started with Selleys Qwik Strip, but now am using Septone Paint Stripper, which seems to be working better. I don't recommend adjusting your safety glasses with this shit on your gloves. It starts burning your face very quickly...

The photo below shows how much cleaner I could get the last part of this side for about 1/5th of the effort.

[anglia4]

Finding time to work on George is a bit of an effort with a young family. Most of my shed-able time is after the kids have gone to bed. Read: When its dark and damp outside.

So I made a wee habitat from a tarp and my fence. This is also good for keeping the sun off as you can't strip the paint in the direct sunlight.

The next issue was sunlight related. How was I going to strip the roof?

I managed to commandeer a nearby workshop over labour weekend and got organised with some trestles. This kept me out of the sun and I made really good progress.

Not too much more paint to get off now. Hoping to get onto the etch priming and water-proofing the roof in a week or two.

 

[anglia4]

Pretty much paint free now!

I'm hoping to get into the etch and primer this weekend.

I'm also really tempted to pull off the J-rails and Awning rails and redo the sealant behind them. It would suck to go to all this effort only to find I've created a leak somewhere with the paint stripper. But it does look like a shit of a job...

[j.e.d.]

you'd almost wanna clearcoat it, paint the chassis black and call it done? looks great stripped down.. like the english version of an Airstream

[anglia4]

You wouldn't be the first person to suggest keeping it aluminium!

That's not the target look though, and there are some dents and dings that it will be nice to smear some goo into to.

 

[Stu]

Looks great! Nice progress!

[anglia4]

Fuck its been a huge weekend with George.

Having had paint stripper over the whole thing, I was a bit worried that it would have damaged the sealant around the J-Rails, particularly at the edge of the roof. Apparently this is a notorious area for causing leaks.

So with little motivation for this job, the wife and I just got on with it. Pulled off the awning and J-rails, cleaned off all the old sealant. Reinstated with new sealant and new screws.

[anglia4]

I had hoped to get him into primer on Sunday, but by the time I'd finished the rails, then done all the masking and wax and grease remover, it was midnight on Sunday night. I've been borrowing some floor space in a local workshop, and was supposed to be out of the way before they opened again for the week 

I hid the caravan in the corner of the workshop under a cloak of un-invisibility (pictured below) to get through Mondays work day...

Then come Monday after work I got stuck in.

 

Etch primer:

I suspect I laid the etch on a little thicker than its supposed to be. The paint salesman told me it goes on thin, just a dusting... After emptying the gun the first time and the realisation that "holy shit I'm gonna run out of paint fast at this rate" I dialed back the settings on the gun a bit.

Followed by the primer. I finished up and got into bed at 1am, and then back at the workshop at 5am to un-mask and put it back together enough to take it outside and get it out of the way before everyone started work for the day.

Now I've got an acre of sanding / filling / sanding / spot priming to do before he goes off to the painters. Pretty stoked to be at this milestone though.

[anglia4]

Fuck that was a massive amount of sanding!

George was delivered to the painters this morning. Very exciting times.

I was thinking this morning, that its been a decade since I finished building my CB650, and this is the first project I've managed to get to this kind of point since then.

I also took a few minutes the other night to test fit the new wheels I got for him, they fit and look great so now I can arrange some new commercial tires for them and get onto painting the rim centers.

 

The instructions for the painter:

FIZZING

[anglia4]

Absolutely stoked.

Now I've got hours of painstakingly screwing all the awning buttons, hooks, lights etc back on, making sure every screw goes into a little dot of sealant to make sure I don't make any new leaks.

2 buckets of water proofing goo arrived in the mail yesterday as well, so I can get onto coating the roof.

[Stu]

Seriously awesome!  Love the progress!

[anglia4]

Well I haven't updated this for a while!

After the re-paint, we took George to Cooks Beach over New Years '23. This was quite a memorable trip. On our first day, we got back from a bike ride to find the rear tailgate window on the Jeep smashed... Turns out it was a casualty of a nearby game of soccer.

Then the weather turned bad and it started raining, and didn't stop... We had something like 9 days booked and by day 7 we were part of only about half a dozen people still at the camp ground and decided to pull the pin. I packed everything away, awning, gazebo etc in torrential rain. All our stuff was so waterlogged it wasn't funny, and then as we went to drive out, the camp manager came to let us know that the roads had just been closed for flooding... Thankfully they put us in a cabin for the night and we were able to escape the next day.

Finishing touches were applied:

Toddler proof camp site:

Pumas don't piss around:

Mostly smiles

Giving up:

And once everyone had taken their tents away there was just a lonely offending soccer ball left, so we kept it as a keepsake.

The window on the Jeep was a prick to replace. They don't make them anymore, and the useless glazier couldn't find a second hand one... I started making phone calls and found him 3 in the space of about 15 minutes. I think it was March by the time it got fixed, and in the mean time the water ingress killed the reversing camera too.

[anglia4]

Stayed at some campground that I can't remember near Pukekohe with @Duke Blackwood for the final event at the race track.

[anglia4]

*Insert photos I didn't take here*

Went to Kai Iwi beach with @alfalfa and Co for a weekend.

[anglia4]

So with the track record we have had with the Jeep on our big summer holidays (Transmission expired 2022, window smashed 2023), we decided it was cursed and dad offered the use of his Ranger for our trip to Nelson.

All packed up, we set off from New Plymouth early in the morning to catch the Ferry. That part of the trip was uneventful, perfect!

Once off the Ferry we set off for Nelson, not far past Spring Creek, into a roaring headwind and I noticed that stuff inside the caravan was flapping in the wind...

The front window had fallen out... FUCK!

This was an unlucky event, with an incredible amount of good luck thrown in.

Firstly, the window fell out of its hole, sat on our nice soft stuff that was on the table, didn't fall out on the road AND DIDN"T BREAK!

Secondly, as all this was unfolding, and in the ~30seconds it took between the window coming out and me pulling over, a glazier drove past and saw the whole lot unfold infront of him. He threw a u-turn, came back and re-installed the window roadside! Turns out he's also a vintage caravan guy, and gave us a bunch of advice for getting it repaired properly later so that it doesn't happen again.

Thirdly, the GC glazier was booked at the same camp ground as us, so we got to buy him beers and do a home-made pizza night with his family.

Legend!

Lots of duct tape to make sure it stayed in for the return journey. The glass is cut slightly undersized and the rubber is for the wrong thickness, hence it fell out in the first place.

So it was pretty late by the time we arrived at Mapua, and all the other campers thought we were nuts arriving at ~8pm with two young kids and attempting to set up all our stuff. It was all good though and we had a fantastic trip.

It was good to get the curse out of the way early on in the trip.

18 days away total, 16 of them in the Caravan.

New nic-nak: