The Tear Jerk Journal - The Adventure Is Just Beginning

The day finally came when we could pull the teardrop out of the garage. I was a little nervous hitching it up for the first time.



I was even more nervous about pulling out of the driveway. The thing had never been out of the garage before, so we had no idea what to expect. It could hit the curb at the end of the driveway and all the pieces could topple over. Anything could happen at that point.



Thankfully, it turned out to be road worthy. I will keep you all posted on the adventures we have this summer.



Bye, we'll see you when we return.

The Tear Jerk Journal - THE NEW PHONE BOOKS ARE HERE! THE NEW PHONE BOOKS ARE HERE!

...or at least the new Teardrop Building Plans are.

Apparently I am a simpleton when it comes to posting documents on the internet. I had originally planned on posting pdf files to the side bar of this blog, but the add-on I was going to use turned out to be totally useless. So I ended up just uploading them in jpeg form to the picasa account connected to this blog.

So check them out by clicking on the link in the the side bar, or if you are really serious about building a teardrop camper, then shoot me an e-mail and I will send you the original pdf files that can be easily printed.

The Tear Jerk Journal - This Is Dope!

So I get this wood filler from the same people that make Elmer's Glue because it says it's "stainable". I figure I can putty over the screw heads in the roof with it and then match up the color so that the screw heads don't stand out like a sore thumb.




Apparently those Elmer's people are FILTHY LIARS!




Oh well, what's another set back in THIS project? This definitely isn't the worst thing I have come across in advertising. Besides, I wasn't that positive about making our Good Friday deadline anyways.

The Tear Jerk Journal - This and That

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Hey Kids! I know it’s been a long time since I rapped at ya, but my computer died, and I was surprised to find out that my replacement from Dell was going to take 6 weeks to get here. Good grief dude! 6 weeks! So, basically I am forced to use the wife’s laptop since I don’t really have the time to wait before this next blog post.

“We gotta long way to go, and a short time to get there” – Jerry Reed

I looked at the calendar yesterday and realized that time is quickly running out. We only got 2 more weekends until the self-imposed deadline of April 2nd. So, if we are going to have the teardrop done in time for the first camping trip, we are going to have to get crack-a-lackin’.

Let me bring everybody up to speed. Since I last posted here, we put a counter top on the footboard wall, put in the studs that make up the wall between the galley and cabin where we plan to put all the electrical wiring, and we put the entire roof consisting of 1/8 inch panel inside and 3/8 inch “wacky board” outside with all the foam insulation between those 2 layers. We also got the hatch door built and ready to hang on the back. Now all we gotta do is put wood filler over the screw heads on the roof, then sand, stain, and urethane the entire camper before we can get started hanging the doors and attaching the trim.













Building a Better Mouse Trap…err…Teardrop Camper

A few months ago I got fed up with all the mistakes and half ass stuff from the teardrop building instructions we got from the internet and I decided to scrap those plans and go with my own. That was clearly the best decision I made during this entire project. Luckily, I figured this out in time before the whole project was scrap. Unfortunately, there was a lot of additional effort and wasted time as a result of this company’s apparent ploy to sabotage any home builder’s project as a way to acquire more sales of their finished campers. As a service to every homebuilder out there that is thinking of getting plans from a company whose primary business is selling campers, I am going to provide a free set of my beginner level plans here at this site in hopes that people will get these instead of buying the worthless ones. These will, hands down, be the best teardrop building plans anyone has ever seen.

The Tear Jerk Journal - Excuses

Hey kids! I'm back! And working on the Teardrop as well.

Well anyways, we would be farther along in this project except it's been an unusually cold winter for Cincinnati. And as it turns out, the polyurethane coating goes 'all whack' when it has to dry in colder temperatures. So, the best we can do is continue on without staining things, and then just stain everything all at once this spring when it warms up again.

So anyways, we going to get back to work, but we decided on having the family to our house for Thanksgiving. In all the preparations for that, we ended up neglecting the teardrop. And then Christmas season came around again. We were so busy with all the usually stuff at Christmas, that the teardrop sat there through the whole month of December.

So then we figured we'd get back to work after the start of the new year, but then were distracted with a small snowstorm.

Well, finally we got back working on it last weekend, and we able to get the main components assembled.