1977 Airstream 31' Sovereign Rebuild

By the time we got our new to us Airstream home we already had a pretty good idea of what we wanted to do with it. We had spent countless hours discussing and drawing up floorplans for our new home on wheels. Our plan was to completely gut the trailer and rebuild it fully customized. Because of this, we kept almost nothing from the interior. I gutted the entire trailer right down to the subfloor and interior wall skins. To my surprise, this took way less time than I had expected. Over the course of one weekend our trailer went from a stock 1977 Airstream to an aluminum shell on wheels. After all of the inside fixtures were out it was time to get the subfloor up and wall skins down so we could see what sort of shape the structural components of our trailer were in. I removed the inner wheel wells and began to cut out the sub-floor. It was during this process that I started to realize that some of my worst fear may be coming true. Removing the bolts that held the sub-floor down to the frame was much more difficult than I had hoped. My plan of backing the bolts out with a drill proved overly optimistic to say the least. My drill snapped one bolt head after another as I quickly realized that hiding beneath the sub-floor was a great deal of rust. I decided to take more drastic measures so I could assess the severity of the issue. Using a circular saw I cut around the entire perimeter of the trailer and then resorted to brute strength, prying up the individual sheets of sub-flooring. Over the next hour I watched my biggest fear about this whole process materialize before my eyes. My frame was shot. 30 years of Canadian winters had left the frame of my new Airstream in less than poor condition. After seeing the broken welds, deep pitting and a buffet of metal chips laying in the underbelly, I knew that I would now be forced to remove the body of the Airstream from the frame. Something I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do.

Removing the body would add weeks, if not months, to my rebuild. It meant that I had no chance of finishing the trailer before the harsh Canadian winter arrived and that it would be at least another year before Lesley and I would be taking off on our full-time adventure. Never the less, I was determined to get straight to work. I spent a week watching multiple YouTube videos from other people who had removed the body of their Airstreams. I made notes and formulated a game plan. In the majority of the videos I watched, one of two methods was used to remove the body of an Airstream. Either a trellis was built to lift the body from above or a series of jacks were used to lift the body from below. Since my biggest concern was time, I choose to use the later method. Both methods required the inside of the body to be braced with wood supports to ensure that the body held its original form and since I already had several jacks and I figured not having to build a trellis would save me a considerable amount of time, I went with the jack method. Sitting here today, I wish I had gone with the trellis method. While building a trellis would have taken some time, it would have made placing the body back down onto the frame much, much easier. Especially since I took the frame out from under the body to work on it. Once the body had been lifted and set on saw horses that I built specifically to hold the weight of the aluminum frame and skins, I rolled the frame out from underneath and took it to Lesley’s grandfather’s house where he and I would do all the required work. Over the course of the next month we added close to 500lbs of new steel to my old frame.

It was at this point that I realized that this extra weight plus the weight from the materials I intended to use on the interior rebuild was going to significantly overload the trailer’s current axles. This created major delay #2. It would take nearly 6 weeks to get new axles and there was virtually nothing I could do with the frame or the body until they arrived. Summer was drawing to a close and my Airstream was in pieces, literally. While waiting for the axles to arrive I was able to pull all the windows from the body and begin to disassemble them. During the trailer’s 30 year life, the tint between the window panes had dried, cracked and yellowed. Every window in the trailer would need to be either replaced or restored. New windows ranged from $400-$900 and there were 16 total windows. This, along with the time I had while waiting for axles, made the decision to restore my windows easy. I began taking the windows out and disassembling them. By the time I got the call that my axles were ready and sitting a few short hours away in New York State, the summer was drawing to a close. It was early September and I was running out of time. Once I had the axles, replacing them was pretty straight forward. My frame was now sitting on two 4500lb axles, a significant upgrade form the 3000lbs stock axles.

After almost 2 months I took the trailer home and prepared to install new fresh and grey water tanks. I was lucky enough to find suitable tanks on a Canadian parts site which saved me the hassle and costs of importing tanks from the US. By the beginning of October, my frame had new water tanks and a whole new marine grade subfloor coated in epoxy. I was ready to roll the frame back under the body; however, there was one major issue. Between the custom 3” lift I had installed and the new axles, my frame was considerably higher then when I had rolled it our from under the body. I now had to figure out a way to lift the body of the Airstream a few inches before I could get the frame back under. To make matters worse, it was autumn in Canada and the nights we becoming cool and humid.

This meant my newly painted frame and brand new subfloor were coated in a significant amount of dew each and every morning. I was running out of time. Luckily lifting the frame ended up being considerably easier than I thought it would be and by late October my frame was back underneath the body. I was pretty happy with my progress thus far, it looked as though I was going to get the trailer put back together before the snow started to fall, which would allow me to get interior work done over the winter. My plan, unfortunately, was foiled again. When I originally took the body off the frame I deemed the “c” channel, the aluminum channel that attached the body to the frame, to be in decent shape. Now, however, I wasn’t willing to using the old, questionable “c” channel on my practically brand new frame. I would need to order new channel from the US and I had no idea how long that was going to take. It was at this point that I decided to prepare my trailer to weather a Canadian winter in it’s current condition and head south to warmer climates for the season. I secured the body to the saw horses it was sitting on and tarped the entire unit with enough bungie cords and ratchet straps to keep everything in place. Once I felt I had done everything I could to ensure I would not have any water damage, Lesley and I loaded into our truck and headed for Arizona for the winter of 2019. This decision would ultimately be the beginning of the end of our Airstream plans.

Check out our YouTube channel to see all the work we did on our Airstream.