Self Drilling Screws, That's A Good Idea - Not

A nice dry day so time to get on with insulating under the plywood floor

 

Everything moved out of the van except the biggest piece of plywood and the floor swept out again

 

The first length of insulation cut to length, the cut out from the plywood used to cut out round the wheel arch

 

The plywood laid on top, the insulation is just about an inch wider than the plywood so a perfect fit

 

The second piece of insulation cut to length

The piece of plywood flooring being used as a template to cut the insulation to size and round the wheel arch and side door pillar.

 

A perfect fit

 

The 3 pieces of plywood flooring back in place

Next job is to screw the flooring down, I had my doubts about the capabilities of the self drilling screws I had bought, and my doubts were realised when the first screw made no attempt to drill through the metal floor. So plan B, drill a pilot hole first and then use them as self tappers, even then they were nowhere near as good as normal self tapping screws. Rickvanman used them on one of his Youtube videos and they seemed to do the job, so I took his recommendation; he was using them on the side panels though which is thinner steel so I will give them another go when I am fitting the side panels.

Drilling pilot holes first

Job finished, so everything back in the van plus quite a lot of other stuff that has been cluttering the caravan up, ready for the next job which I think will be getting some of the fittings I am going to use out of the caravan and making a definite plan of where everything is going to go.

 

I was just packing up when the fella across the road brought me this part roll of insulation over to see if I could make use of it. It will go in the bottom panels no problem which have a much bigger gap.

I have quite a lot of the insulation left that I bought and will probably put another layer in places, perhaps gluing it to the back of the wall panels as they are put into place.