in Hot Water!

 

The new water heater is now installed securely, plumbed to the new PEX water lines, and connected to both 12v and 120v power. Some of the propane propane lines are only roughed in at this point, but theoretically we have hot water when plugged into shore power now. The new Dometic/Atwood heater fit very well into the old hole, I only needed to make a custom shaped sill piece for the bottom edge for a clean installation. I'm really glad to have that ugly patch gone and the giant hole left behind finally closed up! I had planned on getting a propane only model, but they are no longer in production and I could not find an old stock one for a price that made sense. Taping into the 120v AC line was pretty easy because there was an existing 120v outlet in the wall just above the heaters location. At some point I'll spray paint new door silver so it looks more like it belongs. 

Avion Fridge Vent Cap & Cabinet prep

 

We purchased a new Dometic 3-way refrigerator and I did a bunch of work to prep the cabinet and repair the roof vent. I rebuilt the back-side of the interior cabinet that’s above the fridge to have a proper ventilation shaft that matches the specs for the new Dometic fridge, this will help the fridge performance as the old shaft was quite a bit oversize per the new specs. As a bonus the cabinet over the fridge is now almost 4” deeper giving us more storage space, it can even fit a box a cereal. For the roof-top vent I decided to use an Airstream part instead of the boxy style that was standard on Avions.  Our original vent cap had a major impact with something long ago and had an old repair to make it functional, but it was looking very rough and not tight to the weather. I’ve notice in photos of other Avion truck campers that a lot of the vent caps seem to have had this issue, something to keep in mind when we are on the road. The vintage Airstream style cap is more rounded on the ends and looks like it will tend to deflect things that it runs into instead of grabbing and tearing. As part of the repair I ended up also rebuilding part the collar that extends up between the roof and cap and added a bug screen before installing the cap.