how to make poor mans fiberglass look good

all right so finally we're going to start on the exterior finish for the trailer i did a lot of research to figure out what method to use for the exterior finish for the trailer there are of course a lot of different options but nothing really came close to the potential low price of poor man's fiberglass or pmf the basic idea for pmf is basically using canvas sheets or really any material you can scrounge glued to the surface and then you load it up with enough outdoor paint to make it waterproof of course the first thought you have is is that really actually waterproof and durable enough to use i looked around and i found a bunch of videos of people testing pmf and after watching through a few of those i felt reasonably comfortable to move forward with it also i looked at looking around at other options like if let's say i wanted to do aluminum that's easily going to make the entire trailer build cost 50 or 100 more just to do that exterior finish so the second question i had was am i gonna be able to actually make it look good because i've seen a few pmf trailers and i'm like a little bit questionable on how it looks and there's a lot of good looking campers on the internet but because you can't see them in person it's kind of difficult to get a good feel for the quality of the finish so while searching for an answer that question i did find one channel that stood out called the elwood by lucy lucy's videos cover multiple trailers and it showed me that it's definitely possible to make pmf look good so also she's done three or four trailers with this stuff so she's put in enough time on these trailers and had them for long enough and still thinks it's a viable option so that shows me that she if she's willing to put in the time and keep doing it then it's probably worth it so following as much of her advice as i could i decided to proceed with the pmf process for this trailer so before we even get to the canvas i wanted to check on all the gaps and the windows and door openings when you add the canvas you're going to add some thickness and you're also going to add some thickness with the paint so if your parts are fitting tightly now then they're probably not going to fit after you add the canvas in the paint so i took the time to reinstall all the parts and check to make sure the gaps that i had were enough all the way around for the thickness that i want to add i'm assuming about a quarter inch and i gave a little bit of extra wiggle room because it's not going to hurt but we don't really know because we don't at this point i didn't know how many coats of paint or how thick the paint was going to be or how thick the canvas itself was going to be so i just left about a quarter inch maybe a little bit more it was cool to see all the stuff mounted in the trailer and it like fully looked like a trailer body for the first time so i spent some time staring at that also at this point i wanted to make sure that we had all the holes in the trailer body that we needed before the pmf was applied just so that we didn't have to cut any holes in the pmf after so i made the required holes to mount the exterior lights that would come later along with mounting the butcher block countertop that we salvaged i mounted that countertop using uh like three inch screws through the walls so that there wouldn't you wouldn't be seeing any supporting material for that countertop inside the trailer you just look inside the trailer you see the countertop nothing under it nothing above it and it's just screwed in through the walls of the trailer with the pmf covering the screw heads i knew that at that time i wouldn't have time to build cabinets in there since we had already booked our first outing in the trailer for four weeks from this point also i didn't really know what i wanted to do with the cabinets yet so for the first trip we're just going to camp with the butcher block in there only to give the pmf the best chance of looking great when complete i wanted to make sure that all the surfaces were free of as many defects as possible i didn't know how detailed i should go but i assumed that any imperfection i could feel in the surface would probably be seen through the canvas and that it would probably only cover defects that were smaller than the texture of typical house paint house paint does have a pretty deep texture so you don't have to be super detailed but i wanted to just do the best i could and that way i wouldn't have to worry about it later so i bought a can of filler and just went for it i filled everything that i could find i filled all the screw heads all the screws were countersunk when they were installed so i just put a little dab of filler in there and then sanded each one flat and they're ready to go the biggest portion of filler that i had to use was the area where i had to edge glued the two pieces applied together there was a lot of waviness in that surface in the top layer of the ply which is a veneer is so thin and it just kept breaking out so i had to go around and pick a bunch of it out until i got to a point where it was adhered well and then just fill all of that with with filler the sanding did take a while but not not too long considering i was just using 80 grit the whole time you can use fairly rough sandpaper since it's just house paint being rolled on so there's going to be some texture no matter what on the recommendation of another channel i filled the panel gaps with construction adhesive and then i actually had to go back and trim that out with the razor blade and i probably wouldn't do that again it was pretty messy and i had to go back over it with filler anyways and then just trimming it out with a razor blade was kind of a pain so next time i probably would just shove some filler in there and sand it off and be done with it in some places i had to fill and sand twice or three times but it's kind of just how it goes with filler the belt sander makes pretty quick work of it but you have to be careful and there are some places you can't hit with that and you could totally do all this by hand you don't need power sanders or anything the power sanders just buy you some time all in all i think the filling and sanding took me about four evenings after work to complete and here's some pictures of the completed bodywork [Music] so you can see here it's still not bolted to the trailer i wanted to make sure the canvas could fully wrap around the bottom and in case the shell before actually bolting it down also a better view of the 45 degree chamfered corners since that didn't show up very well in the last video and a little more detail on that transition from the roof down to the hatch hinge it turned out to have a pretty satisfying shape to it after the filler was all sanded out and at this point it's ready for the application of the canvas and glue so with the bodywork done we can move on to the canvas using some dangerous combination of jack's wood saw horses and an empty paint can i removed the body from the trailer alone not sure if i'd recommend that if you built it this heavy but i made it work the body is pretty heavy and awkward and trying to move it around off the trailer i'm guessing it's like 300 pounds or more my dad was there to help flip it for the first of the many times we'd have to flip it and i did smash my finger during one of the flips after that we never laid it flat on the ground we don't we always like put a 2x4 under the edge so that when you drop it down there's still a gap there and you can remove your fingers so i would recommend that i did iron out the canvases to get rid of the wrinkles the bottom surface of the camper makes a nice flat clean surface you can do a lot of ironing at this point if you want to just like you could iron all the canvases on the bottom of the trailer at that point and then just fold them and keep them out of the way and then you would only need minimal ironing when you go to put them on it seems like some people say you can iron after it's glued and that it might even help on shrinking it to the trailer my logic was that i just wanted it all as smooth as possible from the beginning and then i would be less worried about working it later especially when there's glue in it i don't know how the glue and the iron is going to mix and that seems to have worked out fine for the ironing i just moved out the canvas by hand and then just crank up the iron to 11 trying to pull everything out of the middle and avoid bunching it up anywhere and i ironed a little bit wider than the actual space i needed to glue to the trailer the ironing does take some time so just realize that put up put on a movie or a podcast or something and just zone out and spend however many hours you need to spend i did also throw the canvases in the wash before ironing put them through the wash once and then the dryer on medium heat the actual canvas i used was the ever built brand medium duty eight ounce drop cloth from home depot and before that i had tried the eight ounce drop cloth from lowe's i think it was intex brand which was the same type of thing but it had a seam sewn down the middle of the canvases where they had like joined two pieces of canvas to get to that final size uh but that doesn't work for this since we need to have like as smooth of a surface as possible so i returned those slows and went home depot and i tried that ever built brand and they that one was a good it didn't have any seams one thing i did notice is that like i think it was a couple inch shorter shorter than the stated dimensions so if it was a six foot by nine foot it was not fully six foot by nine foot but i was able to make it work on a couple spots it got so tight i had to like pick the threads out of the seams to get a couple extra inches but i made it work also if you want to see a list of materials i used on this build you can check out my materials spreadsheet i'll leave a link in the description and also at some point i'll do a video on the full cost of the build and go through that spreadsheet more in detail so once the ironing is done i can actually start with gluing some canvas down i started with the cheapest roller i could find in a tray full of glue and i quickly found out that it's a lot easier just to pour the glue onto the trailer surface and then roll it out from there but that's something you can't do if you're trying to glue it onto vertical walls so in order to do that you're to have to keep flipping the trailer around to keep those surfaces horizontal so that you can actually pour the glue onto them since i didn't prep the bottom surface of the trailer to be a perfectly smooth finish it didn't matter so much because nobody's going to see that side where the walls join the floor there's a little bit of a a gap or an edge uh a groove i guess that i'll have to push the canvas into when gluing it so i just pushed it in there with some popsicle sticks and once the glue became a little bit tacky the canvas stuck in there just fine and it stuck pretty well so for the seams um obviously you want to make it so that if water is coming down from the top it's coming off the roof and not trying to go down into a seam but actually coming off of the seam onto the wall and then from the wall it's coming off of a seam into the floor so that's why you would put the floor canvas on first then the wall canvas and then overlap the roof canvas onto the wall canvas so you're working from the bottom up essentially all right so we finished that bottom one we flipped it over i did one side and then we flipped it over again i did the other side and then flipped it back upright and we glued the top front piece on because we did this one last we're going to end up with a sharper seam on the top and the front right here so i would definitely recommend probably doing bottom first top front second so that seam goes onto the bottom and then the sides last because then you'll get a really minimal seam line all the way around the side with this how it is unfortunately i'm gonna have like a really good looking seam on the bottom and a slightly sharper seam on the top and front so the side is not gonna look all uniform but i think i would prefer to have the side look all the same and then the top front look the same but at least it's getting done basically i just glued the big flat pieces on here and the next step from here is to just get my straight edge just using a piece of angle aluminum scrap that i found all this is about an inch and a half angle aluminum using an angle piece instead of just like if you just had a flat piece you'd have to kind of line it up with your fingers every time if you have an angle you can just set it right on top repeatable all the way down the side isn't glued down yet so i'm just coming with my angle and i'm drawing a guideline this is going to be my cut line for the seam you can do a rough cut before that just to make it easier to deal with but then mark out that final cut and make sure you have a really nice pair of scissors the sharper your scissors are the less fraying you're going to get and the less fraying you get the better it's gonna look that is like the fraying is one of the the things you're really fighting on it to get the look to be nice in the end any threads that you can see are going to be visible later after you paint over them even under all the layers of paint and glue you're going to see those threads so it's worth it to spend some time to minimize the fraying so after you get a good cut you can move on to gluing the edges so i also marked a glue line with a pencil and then just brushed glue in there and then pressed the edge down into it and depending on your level of fraying and how much the edge is lifting you can go back with the with the brush and glue later to lay it down as smooth as possible for the corners just cut them super careful like you're wrapping a christmas present really nice and make sure there's overlap where you can but it's not going to be possible right down in the corner sometimes so just load it with as much glue as you can and it should be okay you should most likely be overlapping that with your next layer of canvas anyway so anywhere where you can't get the canvas to overlap in when you're putting a corner together the next layer of canvas whether it's the wall or roof should cover that also to give you that to give you that full extra layer all right so for glue i figured out if you just take a container and put it in a ziploc bag it stays it stays good so like i've been using this glue and this little bucket for the last week or so uh just keep putting in a ziploc bag when i'm not using it and then i'm using just the acid brush you can get a bunch of these brushes for pretty cheap it's called an acid brush and you can throw them away when you're done with them but i've only had to use one and i just have it in a old oil container same also works actually for your roller so i just use a disposable pan liner and then i put the roller in there and then put it on the trash bag and it stays good i mean i've been using this for a week and it stays good uh if it does dry out a little bit you just put a little bit of water on it wakes it right back up but that's how i've minimized my roller usage so i've only used one roller and actually one acid brush and just minimize waste on the glue itself you can do the same thing with paint so in the end i should only use three rollers total on this whole thing because one for glue and in my case i'm doing a couple different colors of paint but if i only had one color of paint then i'd only use one roller so for me uh one glue roller and two paint rollers and that's it so one aspect of the pmf that you'll get different views on when you're watching videos is whether or not to completely saturate the canvas with glue i'd say it's more common that people do saturate it but lucy said in her video that she doesn't saturate it instead just uses that porosity of the canvas to suck the paint into it to make sure the paint saturates that canvas fully instead of the glue since the paint is what's doing the waterproofing so since she's done multiple trailers i took her word for it and applied mine in the same manner it's only at the seams where i wanted the seams to lay down perfectly without fraying that i did go over it twice with glue so i went back over with a little brush and some glue to get those threads to lay down and in those spots it did fully saturate with glue so for reference here's some close-up shots after the seams dried they're not perfect but i'm aiming for like maybe a five to ten foot paint job and i think i'm still on track to hit that you do still have a chance to clean up the seams after they dry i was able to remove some of the stragglers with a razor blade and then you can smooth out some of the fraying and the more saturated portions with sandpaper it's just going to get sealed later with paint anyways so on those hard edges in the galley area where the canvas just folds over and then abruptly ends i was planning to shave that off and then cover that with an aluminum angle to for a trim but it turns out like once it's glued down and i razor blade that edge off it razor bladed so well that i don't even think we need an aluminum trim if we're just gonna paint the interior of the trailer paint the exterior of the trailer and it's gonna be it's gonna be such a nice sharp line that we probably won't even need trim if you get any areas like that that aren't laying down with the canvas and they dry and they just haven't stuck if you come back and peel it up a little bit use a little brush put some more glue in there pull it down and then come back once it's dried it'll it'll totally dry and you won't even notice if you do shave the edge off with a razor blade just make sure you've got fresh razor blades so once you've got all the canvas done and the edges glued down you can move on to cutting out the window and door holes and stuff like that for these i just cut an x and then i trimmed everything down about half an inch from the window edge and glued that down to the window sill to try to provide some waterproofing there if water ever gets behind the window itself basically i just brush glue in behind that edge and push the fabric into it i did end up having the brush glue over the top of it to get it to stick down well so i'm going to start with painting on the bottom of the trailer this is some leftover paint we had when we painted our deck so it's actually deck paint says storm coat exterior paint so it should be really good for this application we have a couple other gallons but i don't want to use them on the whole thing because we want it white and i don't want to paint the whole trailer brown and then try to paint it white again so we're just going to use it on the bottom and then that will help us learn how much paint we need to buy for the sides and the top so i'm going to learn how to paint the canvas with this and then we'll move on to the side from top deck paint is probably pretty good it's one of the more durable outdoor paints you can get but this stuff was free didn't really care about the color too much since it's going on the bottom of the trailer so i wanted to use as much of that as i possibly could started with a cup of coats on the floor and then i moved on to applying the canvas to the hatch while i was waiting for the paint to dry on the hatch i folded the canvas around the edge of the hatch and then cut it just into that first corner so all the points on the hatch have canvas coming inside past the point where there would be a water seal so after about six coats of paint i was fairly happy with the finish on the floor of the camper body and i decided to try some spray undercoat to see if that would look nice i just sprayed that down one coat took a whole can and i just want to see if the texture was going to be improved with that and i did one more coat of paint on top of that undercoating so the first six coats took one gallon of paint and that last thick coat was a little bit more so it's a bit more than one gallon i have on the bottom i don't actually think the undercoat made of enough difference in the texture to warrant the cost so i think it's about eight dollars a can at harbor freight and you need a little more than one can for every side of the trailer i think it might be worth spending some time testing different variations of this if it's something you're worried about or you want to try but i decided just to move forward on this build without undercoat or any sort of bed liner so once the floor was painted i need i needed to make sure the holes were there for the carriage bolts that are going to hold the body to the frame and i had already drilled pilot holes in the floor before i put the canvas on so i just used something sharp from the inside to poke holes up through the canvas and then i just drilled them out with the final drill bit from the outside so onto the rest of the paint and again taking direction from lucy i started with a 50 paint water mix i'm undecided on whether or not i would do that again because i think it would still absorb if it wasn't mixed but having it so thin made it kind of a pain to roll it on and see where it was and it was kind of bubbling and frothy it's like trying to roll on foam and yeah it was just kind of difficult to apply so my plan was to mix just one gallon of paint in the 50 50 mixture and then just put all of that into the trailer no matter how many coats it took me before switching over to the straight paint but i got fed up with the thin paint and i switched about halfway through using that so i think i got about three full coats of the 50 50 mix done before switching to straight paint so right now i've got three coats of the 50 50 paint with water and it's actually like surprisingly frustrating because it feels like it feels too liquid it feels like i'm trying to roll on foam or something because it just bubbles so much it like foams up a lot and it's hard to see where you've been i i mixed up a whole gallon i probably shouldn't have done a whole gallon i think i may be like 50 or 60 of the way through the gallon with three coats on the whole trailer the only thing i haven't done is the underside of the gate just because it's hard to get to so i'll just do it last i wanted to go through that whole gallon but i i don't think i can handle it so i'm just going to start with some start on the next gallon with some straight paint and i'm just going to hit this as 150 grit real quick because it's a little rough and i'm hoping i can smooth it out i don't know how it's going to turn out yet but i'm just going to give it a shot and see what happens i don't think you can quite see the texture difference on camera but it's definitely a lot smoother down where i haven't sanded there's just a lot of sharp peaks of like just little tufts of canvas that that has absorbed the paint and we just shaved all the peaks off uh this worked a lot better than when i was trying to shave when i was trying to sand the bottom but this time there's 50 50 paint glue mix in here so to me this texture is looking a lot better than it was on the bottom already and it seems to be just due to the 50 50 paint water mix so that may have helped a lot all right so i'm done with the 50 50 so i'm going to straight paint here this is the cheapest outdoor paint i could get at lowe's it's valspar storm coat exterior semi gloss in high hide white i wanted gloss but semi gloss is all they have so that's what we got it was weird to me that this turned out like chalky looking not glossy at all so we'll see what what this does just straight out of the can and then i can buy something else based off whatever this does for the final coats but i think this was like 35 a gallon or something like that all right so i had initially bought two gallons of this uh the valspar storm coat high hide white first gallon we 50 50 water paint mix didn't quite put the whole gallon on but i did do three whole coats of that on the trailer then this gallon no 50 50 mix just straight paint i got two whole coats out of one gallon so everything on the trailer and the gate except that gate the jams on the gate i haven't done yet because they're facing down i'll do those later but one gallon gave me two whole coats and then next we're gonna go to that's five coats total three of fifty fifty two of straight paint next we're gonna go to this valspar duramax exterior paint primer in semi-gloss and that is mixed to a color that my wife chose and so hopefully we'll get two coats out of this and then at that point we'll evaluate what the paint looks like and if we want to go any further right now the texture i did sand between the 5050 and the straight paint that helped the texture a little bit right now i think i'm going to sand it again before i do these other two coats and see what it's looking like but it's a little rough and let me pull a camera in here um you can see where their the glue was heavily impregnated in the canvas you get a smoother finish obviously so i mean i haven't done the testing but it seems like if if that's what you want is a smoother finish it might actually be worth going over the canvas again with the glue to make sure it's like fully saturated then you'll get a smoother finish but i noticed on the bottom that once you get enough coats of paint on here you'll stop seeing the difference between the paint and with paint on the bare canvas or the paint on the glued canvas as far as actual like sheen but even this is semi-gloss paint and it looks almost flat so i think once this builds up enough we should see more of a semi-gloss type finish but i think that the canvas just isn't filled enough at this point so we just got to keep putting more coats on it i'm going to sand it one more time and then more coats i don't know if you can see this texture but like there's some little high spots hot like little things sticking out just gotta hit it with sandpaper real quick that's it a lot smoother now all right so i think the paint is done i think it actually could be better uh but i'm kind of out of time a little bit of a time crunch it's it had total uh three coats of the 50 50 paint water then four more coats of paint on top of that and sanding between every couple coats really helped a lot and then having a clean roller that doesn't leave lint helped a lot and i'm fairly happy with the ending texture of it i would say it's probably i would say it's somewhere between a 5 and 10 foot paint job meaning if you stand 10 feet away it looks great once you get up closer you start to see some of the small things but if if you're not expecting perfection then it's great it's totally good i said there's just a couple things sticking out honestly you could probably sand and buff this out a little bit and it would look even better but i don't have time to do that um we're going camping in like let's see today's tuesday wednesday thursday friday so three days we're going camping and uh i need to get all this done as fast as i can so i'm not going to spend time buffing it making it perfect but i think it could be a little bit better but at this point it's good enough for me so i'm happy so you can see each little piece of lint here is off the roller so if you had a really nice roller that probably wouldn't happen this is a piece of paint like a dried piece of paint from the tray so cleaning the tray out perfectly every time would prevent that i think where the texture is more deep this could actually benefit from maybe a couple more coats but i but i think it's fairly waterproof as it is so worst case we can come back and paint it again at another time the joints end up looking fairly good i think uh we're we've yet to see how the door is going to fit with all the build up of paint and glue so hopefully i left enough wiggle room there for it all to fit and not bind so if i was going to do anything differently next time i would probably like i said just do the the floor and the roof first and then glue this the canvas on the sides just to make that seam look uniform on the side of the trailer but that doesn't matter so much as more of a visual preference and then one thing i would i would probably do is instead of rolling i would try to get a paint sprayer and you can get paint sprayers pretty cheap at lowe's in home depot now but that caused me to have to go back and sand a lot and i think it actually detracted from the end finish so either a really high quality roller and you don't need to buy more than one roller you can get away with the whole thing with one roller if you're just using one color of paint so i would pay more to get a nice roller that's not going to leave any lint and then try to use a paint sprayer and see if i can get just a much smoother finish and i think if i had the money in time i might even go back and try to spray it again over what i've done already to see if i could improve it a little bit but i think the ending finish is totally acceptable and i'm happy with it for now [Music] so hit subscribe if you want to see the rest of the trailer go together and check out the links in the description check out lucy's channel and materials list and check out my instagram and i will do a video also on how much the build cost total thanks for watching

Channel: MOTHERLODE MOTORS

Views: 92,943

Keywords: teardrop, overland, offroad, trailer, camping, camper, rv, build, diy, squaredrop, harbor freight, princess auto, hatch, pmf, poor mans fiberglass

Id: y41TXsl4eRA

Length: 30min 17sec (1817 seconds)

Published: Fri May 06 2022