Prototype Honeycomb Floor

Think about the last time you traveled in a plywood vehicle. Have you flown on a plywood plane recently, or driven a plywood car? No. Because plywood is a shit material for vehicles. It's heavy and it rots, and it gets even heavier when you try to stop it rotting by soaking it in waterproofing material.

A vintage Airstream has a semi-structural plywood floor. It bolts on to the ladder frame chassis, then the shell bolts on to a U-shaped channel that in turn is attached to the floor. So understandably, when people restore an Airstream trailer, what do they do about the floor? They replace it with marine-grade plywood and call it a day. This is pretty easy to do. It's been done thousands of times and there are tutorials on how to do it all over the place.

But is it the best solution? I don't think so, or a Boeing airliner would have a plywood floor. Instead they use composite sandwich panels, so I decided I'd do the same. Not only is this material under half the weight, it cannot rot, it provides better insulation properties and is phenomenally strong.

I don't think anyone has done this in an Airstream before — fairly extensive research has yielded no examples — so I had to work it all out for myself, which meant building a prototype.

The first problem I ran into was finding the actual sandwich material. Not because it's rare, but because it tends to be ordered in industrial quantities. Eventually I found a supplier who did small orders, and sent me a test panel to make my prototype.

The next problem was figuring out how to attach stuff to the panel. You can't just drill holes in it because it's a honeycomb. You need something called a "potted-in insert" — a mounting point that is glued into the panel by injecting epoxy into a small cavity around it. When the glue has set you can then bolt things onto or through the panel.

I bought some aluminum C-channel that the airstream shell attaches to, as well as a spare chassis outrigger and made a full prototype. You can see the result in the photos. It feels totally indestructible.