Last weekend the storage door to the door side dinette bench caved in thanks to my wife's knee and the attachment for the outside table was nearly ripped off of the side of the camper when I tried to remove it. Both of these things were 100% due to poor patching by a previous owner and poor design on Starcraft's part.
That and 30 years of wear and tear, I suppose.
For the storage box door, nothing was actually broken except for the plastic hinges. The wood supports, I discovered, were simply stapled gunned to the underside of the top and they all pulled out of the wood. The door itself was not broken, fortunately.
Here is a shot after I removed the broken door:
Here is a shot of the storage door, itself:
I went to the Tool Box hardware store and picked up some hinges. I intended to replace the wood braces for the door with screws which should be stronger than the staples that it had previously.
Back home with the new hinges, I realized the purpose of the flat plastic hinges. They could sit directly on top of the door and act as a hinge. The new metal hinges has a mechanism where the two pieces fit together that had to somehow fit between the door and the edge. Note that this door fits inside the hole exactly with no gaps around edges.
Unwilling to try to go out again and find a different hinge design, I opted to jerry rig what I had to make it work. I took a hammer and screw driver and carved out a small square on the door edge so that the hinge would fit properly.
This pic is a little blurry but you should be able to make out the cut out I had to make for the hinge:
The hinge hardware now could sit flat against the door. Again, this is blurry (stupid camera!) but you should get the idea:
I did these for three spots, installed the hinges, and put the whole thing back in Frostbite:
I went for three hinges to replace the two plastic ones that were there already. I also added the wood support dowels by screwing them to the underside of the bench top for added support for the door. The previous supports were stapled in place.
Here is a shot of it open just in case you wondered if it still worked:
Good as new!
Next, I tackled the attachment for the outside table. Previous owners apparently had trouble with this also and they fixed it by nailing the thing to the side of the camper. These nails pulled out last weekend when I was fighting to get the stupid table off. Here is a shot of the aftermath:
I first thought I could get some larger wood screws and screw the thing back onto the side so I went back to the Tool Box and got the screws I needed.
Didn't work.
I then relented and decided to nail the thing back on to the side.
Didn't work.
Frustrated now, I decided that, since all the holes are stripped, I could run a bolt through and attach it with nuts from the inside. I went back to the Tool Box and got the hardware I needed.
It was a pain getting the things attached tightly but it did work and man, it worked good! This thing won't be coming off again anytime soon.
Here is a shot from the outside:
from the inside:
There was one final thing that I fixed that day. It wasn't a repair from the weekend but rather a left over from when I initially put the camper back together. The electric outlet in the galley side box was sitting loose in the opening.
There were holes in the cover for it to be attached to something but there was nothing for a screw to actually screw into. The holes just opened to empty space. I put this off for months because the answer wasn't obvious to me. I decided to search though the bin that contains all the parts left over from putting Frostbite back together. Everybody has one of these after a project, right? I happened to find a couple of plastic pieces that, upon close inspection, were actually brackets and screws that allowed the outlet cover to be attached to the box.
Glad I didn't throw any of that junk away. I suspect that I will have to dig through this bin a few more times as unexpected problems arise.
Frostbite is now fixed and stronger than ever. Next weekend I hope to install a couple of drawer/shelves that I haven't gotten around to reinstalling in one of the storage boxes. There is also a shelving modification I read about on the popupportal.com that would provide some shelves above the sink which is desperately needed. Currently, we are using the dinette table for storage of kitchen stuff while we are camping which sort of makes it a pain to actually use the dinette table for anything else. I'm hoping that for our next campout will actually be able to use BOTH sides of the dinette.
Next trip scheduled for October 16th, 17th and 18th which is my daughter's fall break. We are going to Natchez Trace State Park. We had originally planned to go to Pigeon Forge, TN but got scared of the potential wear and tear on Bluebell tugging Frostbite up the hills of East TN without having a transmission cooler. It's a nice flat shot to Natchez Trace.
