So, when I last left you we had gotten the first three SIP panels up on our trailer, and the next step was to prepare the next sections of wall to go over our curved sill plate above the wheel well of the trailer.
We started by cutting out a stensil we had preppared for ealier (before we put the flexible sill plate over the wheel well) by holding a scrap of OSB flush against the subfloor sheating and tracing the wheel wells onto it. We had two stensils, one for the right wheel well and one for the left. We were careful to lable which was which, as well as lableing front and back on each one. Sam used our jig saw to cut along the tracing, which then gave us a peice of wood with a curve that perfectly mirrored the curve of the wheel well. We could use this to mark where we would have to cut our SIP panel skin so that the panel will slide over the wheel well nicely.
Now, it actually turns out that there were two panels on each side (so a total of four) which we would need to cut curves from: a 12-inch long panel and an 8-foot long panel. (The long walls of the SIP panels were designed this way so that no individual peice would be wider than 8'6" when flat packed onto our trailers since loads wider than 8'6" need an oversized load permit to drive on the roads). We started working on a 12-inch panel first. We measured out how far from the start of the panel the wheel well started, marked that distance on the bottom of our panel, and then lined up our stensil with the bottom of the panel at that mark. We scribed a line along the edge of the stensil onto the skin of the OSB and cut along that mark with the jig saw. We then did a rough foam removal, below Sam is using a chisel to clear away some of the foam.
We only cut through one side of the SIP because the inside skin will slide along the inside of the wheel well sill plate and rest on the subfloor sheathing. From the inside, you won't even be able to see where the wheel well is.
The next step was to fur out 1.5" of foam in from the cut end of the outside SIP skin. (This opens up the space that the wheel well sill plate will occupy). Professionals use a Foam Cutting Tool for this job, which is a peice of electrically heated wire (like you see on an electric stovetop) in the shape of a rectangle, the width of a 2x4, with an adjustable depth stop. This device will melt away the foam insulation from a SIP perfectly to the depth you set it to. But we're not professionals, and we didn't really want to by a tool that would really only be useful working with SIPs. So, instead we improvised with a hand weeder and a blow torch.
It worked great! We didn't get the same kind of precision that you could expect with the proper tool, but we're planning on drilling into the OSB all around the wheel wells and injecting spray foam in there to fill the gaps up anyway, so this doesn't bother us too much.
Having found a system that worked, we repeated the process on the larger panels.
Now we've just got to reassemble our lifting force and get these panels up! We plan on raising them exactly as we did the last two.
***EDIT***
One very important mistake that we made and didn't realize until we were trying to set this panel can be seen in this photo clearly: You can see that we furred out the foam an inch and a half in from the cut skin, but we left the 2x4 at the same length as the skin instead of cutting it down the 1.5" to match the foam. BIG MISTAKE! We tried to set the panel like this, and were wondering why we couldn't get it to rest on the sill plate properly... well, once we realized that it was because there was this inch and a half to 2x4 in the way we felt pretty dumb. Cutting it down was a mess (we had already put construction adhesive over every thing) and bent one of our jigsaw blades. Fortuantely, our lifting crew was SUPER AWESOME, and put up with all of our ridiculous mistakes even though it was a cold and rainy day our and they all wanted to go inside and get some lunch (as did we). The good news is that eventually we got the 2x4 cut to the right place and got the panel on properly.
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