Caravan rear bumper with bike rack mounting point.
Making a rear bumper for Dad's Caravan to mount the bike rack onto and to offer some protection has been a plan on the cards since i first used the caravan 2 years ago.
After picking up the caravan from storage in Portarlington and on our way home we made a detour to Cath's Dads to have a rummage around his back-yard for some steel. We found a nice looking piece of 100x50 from a pallet packing shelf for the bumper itself, some 75x75 angle and some 50x50 box tube to form the bumper mounts.
With the steel in hand i came up with a rough plan which David dropped over to have a look and confirmed that it would be okay. From here i came up with the final design and cut the steel to suit ready for David to weld for me.
Taking the caravan over to David's we spent the day welding up the bumper bar and putting the spare wheel carrier on... with David doing all the welding :) .
A quick coat of black kill-rust applied with a brush and it looks like its always been there.
This is something I have been wanting to do for the last couple of years and have been slowly making progress with the exterior the last few times I have had the caravan at home.
The paint is so thin and chalky on the caravan now that if you scrub a little to hard you go back to the aluminum underneath and with the paint so porous it stains with every bit of dirt that comes in contact with it.
This time I scrubbed the van clean and gave it a wax, what a difference it made and I never realised that the paint is actually cream and beige, as its always been flat chalky white in colour.
January 2007 - Dad's Caravan before i started work on it. The caravan has been sitting for 2 years, so after checking the brakes and with 4 new tyres that Dad kindly paid for, I dragged it back from storage in Ballarat.
As the drain holes in the windows had filled with moss the rain was unable to drain from the windows and had been over flowing into the caravan itself.
Having only 3 days for maintenace and packing before it became our home for 10 days in Robe SA we set to work cutting the rot out of the plywood and cleaning everything up before heading off.
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Caravan Works03/09/2009 07:26 PM