Floor Preparation for Sheet Vinyl

One of the first refurb criteria established was the installation of a smooth floor. Wood floors look great, but don’t care much for the uncontrolled temperature environment an Airstream sees most of the time. Plus, any un-cleaned up water spills stand a good chance of buckling the floor.

Square asphalt-type tiles are more durable, but they too don’t weather too well with wide temperature swings. The tiles will shrink in an uncontrolled environment leaving gaps.

Sheet vinyl appeared to be the perfect solution. However one noted Airstream authority claimed the vinyl would split at the seams between each 4X8 sheet of plywood floor decking due to the normal flexing an Airstream experiences while being towed through a variety of road conditions.

The commonly accepted solution to this problem is to scab new 1/8 or 1/4 inch Luan plywood over the existing seams. Problem is this adds weight. Additionally, in my case, I was planning to install wall-to-wall flooring, and the additional floor thickness would not allow everything sitting on the floor to be reinstalled in the existing rivet/screw holes.

My two part solution is, as far as I know, unique. The first part, as documented on this page involves strengthening the joints with ¼ inch dowels bonded in place. Then, after the vinyl was fitted & allowed to rest for a week, it was only glued around the perimeter of the installation. After three seasons & six trips, I see no signs of distress, and the vinyl still looks great. Details on the vinyl installation can be found on another page.

As always seems to be the case, building the jig to accomplish the task took almost as much time as the task itself! Built out of scrap OSB, and designed to fit my plunge router, it features a sliding fence held in place by a concrete block. Although there are equidistant hack marks on the jig for uniformly spacing the dowels, I found that Airstream did not space the decking’s elevator bolts according to a decipherable plan.

Operation was simple: Simply align the jig with the floor seam, set the fence at the desired location & clamp it with the block, and route the dado. After all dados were cut, the floor was vacuumed, and each dado was filled with fiberglass resin and a dowel.

My original plan was to use ¼-20 steel all-thread for the dowels. But after much consideration, I decided it was overkill, and there was an excellent possibility of the different expansion/contraction rate of steel popping the seam apart on its own. So I used ¼ inch hardwood dowels in everywhere but the forward/aft seam in the bathroom. That particular seam will be covered on another page.

Oh, the patched water line seen in one of the pictures was replaced before we ever hit a campground.