She’s 21′, saddling a 1990 Toyota V6 3VZE, 1-ton of pure freedom.  March 17, 2015, marks the beginning of my journey into having no clue as to what the fuck I’m doing.  With the intentions of selling everything, quitting my job, packing up the dogs and hitting the road, I started tearing apart my new, old Yoterhome.  In hindsight, I shouldn’t have paid $9,000 for it, and got slightly hustled by a lovely 80 year-old woman from Sun City.  I didn’t realize that 4 walls were completely rotted out and had to be rebuilt, I guess I should’ve poked around more.  Oh well, not much I can do about it now, and the truck is mechanically solid.  Now, almost a year into the project, and 3/4 walls are complete, the stereo works, I have power windows and locks, and there’s almost no leaking! With any luck, my repairs are somewhat decent, and it will serve as one of the 3 things I need to survive.  I wouldn’t be sad if I never had repair a composite wall again.  You would think that gluing foam to wood to fiberglass would be relatively straight-forward, but it unquestionably isn’t.  It’s hours of scraping, cutting, measuring, bracing, and endless shopping for the right glue.  For anyone else that needs to repair a rotted out RV wall, here are a few tips that  learned the hard way:

• Stock up up on 4-5 of these braces from Harbor Freight (http://www.harborfreight.com/2-in-1-support-cargo-bar-66172.html).  They’re invaluable for bracing a vertical wall while the glue/ epoxy is setting.
• Use quality epoxy for gluing the fiberglass to a hardwood veneer plywood.  Nothing else I tried will create a hardened, waterproof bond that will last the lifetime of the coach.  I used the West System (http://www.westsystem.com/ss/) with great results, after Liquid Nails didn’t handle the job.
• Remove EVERYTHING that’s fucked up.  Don’t half-ass it, it’ll be harder retrofitting your broken shit than it will be to rip it all out and hang a completely new wall.  It brings a peace-of-mid knowing when a problem is fixed and will never happen again.

• Reinforce the overcab bed area. It looks like it happens to almost all Yoterhomes, the under-bed support is completely insufficient.  My solution was to weld a steel plate under the bed that’s supported by the truck.

• Test your glue!  I failed miserably with any adhesive that came in a caulk tube.  My new walls are held together with gorilla glue and epoxy.  If you want it to last forever, use quality materials.
• Attempt to rebuild the wall using the exact thickness of the pieces that came out.