Day 48: Rooflight

Saturday 24 April 2010

One of the problems with Saturdays is that half the day is lost to the weekly shop, and today was no exception, though we did combine today's trip with a run to pickup my mother's extending ladder. The original plan was to use our tall step ladder to get onto the roof of the van, but trails on Friday proved it to be too short. The thought then was to flip the ladder into extending mode and put it up the side of the van but we didn't want to damage the side panels.

In the end we opted to borrow an extending ladder and to split it. With the van pulled slightly forward, bottom was placed up against the house wall, and the upper section was laid on the roof on mats in order to spread the loading and minimise the risk of any damage.

The process of fitting the rooflight was similar to the windows though the sequence was different. With the windows the holes were cut first, however with the rooflight this was one of the last jobs.
Having spent the week fitting the frame and ceiling panel, the first job was route out the ceiling panel the match the frame using a trimming bit; I made the cutout under size when fitting the ceiling panel to allow for alignment issues. Then working from the inside the four corners were cutout using a hole saw. the operation then shifted onto the roof of the van. As with the windows the area to be cut was plastered with masking tape in order to reduce the risk of marking the paint work, then lines were drawn join the corner holes and the dimensions checked.
The hole was cut using the jigsaw, once again borrowed from work, the masking tape removed and the edge tidied up with a file before dropping the rooflight in for a test fit.

The whole area was cleaned and degreased before sealing the cut edges with anti-rust primer. With the primer dry and using copious amounts of non-setting bedding mastic the roof light was dropped in and the the inner section screwed in place puling the whole unit in tight to the roof. 
Any large amounts of mastic were then cleaned off with paint thinners, and the area masked up to that the voids caused by the roof ribs could be filled with bedding mastic and the edges profiled with out getting the mastic all over the roof.

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