One of my goals this year is to give back more through writing and knowledge. It is laughable that I haven’t published my 2025 blog post yet, but there has been a lot going on, and I’m not quite there yet. A post will come.
In the meantime, I’m preparing to take a road trip to California, and part of that is preparing my van to drive across the country. When I got ready for the journey, I found the van had a water leak around the fan area. The work around this was done six years ago, and the fact that it has held up this long is beyond impressive. Still, this work needs to be fixed before I head out.
In taking apart the upper roof section of the fan, I found that part of the roof had developed rust, which meant I needed to take everything apart, repair it, and re-seal it. All of this was new work to me. After roping in several co-conspirators, we began tackling the job. We removed all the existing caulk and molding. Sanded down the rust and applied about 1.5 coats of a product called POR 15 and an upper coat of Rostoleum Satin.
Now, we are at the re-caulking stage and have run into a serious issue: the weather is about 33 degrees F, and the recommended caulk requires at least 40 degrees to work. The van is too tall for most garages in the area. The solution is to find a silicon caulk that works in -30 degrees weather. The problem is that silicon is hard to seal on top.
The current solution is to caulk with the Silicon, use some of the RV tape I bought, and use that to cover the silicon until I can get to warmer weather, where I can apply the suggested self-leveling caulk and let that heal.
Worse comes to worse, so I’ll re-do the work in the summer when the weather is more cooperative.
This has been a learning experience but also very stressful.