After recent discoveries of rotten wheel arches I decided to delve deeper this evening. I wish I hadn't. The floor is almost totally rotten underneath, although fairly sound above. Is this something that is even worth attempting to rectify or should I just give in?
Thanks, I've already been through the search. The floor is rotten from front to back including all the battens etc. It had just been covered with bitumen type paint and therefore sealed in all the damp! It's going to involve dismantling the whole van and rebuilding from the base up! Not convinced it's worth it.
Hi, it's not easy to get photos of the underside of the van (most of it's painted with a rubber solution too) but I've done my best... It appears that it has been (badly) repaired before with filler then sealed without removing the rotten wood! Here are a few photos for a flavour of the problem:
I've now removed the entire interior of the front half of the van and can at least see what I'm dealing with. It's been repaired in the past but without dealing with the rot. Hopefully it'll stop raining soon so I can get the rest emptied and see how bad that half is.
Wizards pages will have the answers and if you have the space and time you should be able to cope with it . I replaced the front and rear sections of my floor in an Australian Viscount caravan on a Al-Ko chassis with rotten sandwich construction flooring . I undid the through bolts from the chassis to the floor , cut the rotten front third through from side to side with a Gyprock saw and using timber to spread the weight , lifted the front of the body by the leading edge of the remaining good floor section with a trolley jack enough to wriggle out the remains of the bad section and slid in the new piece with made up battens glued in the sandwich all round . To fix the sides of the caravan to the battens , every down batten in the walls was joined to the floor via a `L` bracket and screwed through to another block of 2x1 under the new floor . All was sealed and coated with wood preservative . I then repeated the process at the rear third . Finally drilling up through the Al-Ko body brackets and inserting new carriage bolts , drilling new water and gas holes at the rear before replacing the interior furnishings . All furniture to floor battens including cupboards were screwed through the floor with extra screws and all furniture to wall battens were given extra screws to add strength to the wall to floor structure . A little extra weight was the penalty but that caravan had no play in any joint , was watertight and coped with the Aussie dirt roads with no loosening of any of the new joints . It can be done .