With luck, this will be the last mundane, excruciatingly dull build post: yes, yet another floor.
Ridley has a very standard and boring floor layer cake, beginning with ½” polyiso foamboard in the channels of the bare floor (beveled at 45 degrees and cut easily with a jigsaw), attached with construction adhesive (Liquid Fuze IT) to the metal floor to make the floor level. (Oops -- that’s not quite right: some of the channels were filled with ½” plywood glued to the van floor. These give something into which to screw the full plywood layer.)
Next up is a full layer ½” of foamboard with foil tape on the seams. Great Stuff was -- in theory -- squirted all around the foamboard edge to seal it up and lock it into place. This would have worked better if the GS can & nozzle had not exploded. That goop is the very devil to clean up.
Here is a before-mayhem photo; I don't have an after-mayhem shot.
Then a ½” of plywood was screwed through the foamboard to the strategically placed plywood pieces on the bottom layer; the sheets of ply were staggered so that the seams were not on top of the foamboard seam. I don’t have a picture of the plywood layer (and it wouldn’t be exciting anyway) so here’s a picture of my “shade tree workshop.”
The final layer is sheet vinyl, attached with horrible sticky vinyl adhesive applied with a notched trowel. Honestly, the stuff is like stiff butterscotch royal icing with an incredible sticky factor. And it goes everywhere. Everywhere. And sticks to everything. Everywhere.
And because I was playing pastry chef with royal icing on this layer cake floor, I used a rolling pin to go over and over and over the vinyl to make sure it adhered without air bubbles.
Finally, the edges were sealed with Silicon II caulk. It looks a little weird, but it is waterproof, and since all of the edges will be covered with cabinets or otherwise not visible, who cares about aesthetics?
Why sheet vinyl? In my last van I used Allure click-lock vinyl floor planks and had problems with buckling and shrinking as I moved between weather and humidity extremes. I am hoping that sheet vinyl will not have that problem while giving me a waterproof, mudproof, snowproof surface.
Note: Five months and some temp extremes (18*F to 110*F) later, there are no signs of bubbling or buckling.
Still remaining: the trim at the rear doors and the stepwell. My floor stack is a bit too high to use standard aluminum stair tread edging, so I have to go on to plan B (when I have a plan B figured out).
And I’m considering cutting an opening in the vertical wall of the slider step-well for convective airflow (paired with the roof fan), but I’m waiting for someone else to do it first. And that will dictate the vertical cladding for the step-well, which will dictate the trim for the step-well…..
So, that's the last of the preliminary mundane posts. Now on to the more interesting build!