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Hey everybody, I've been using this forum as a resource a lot so I figured I would start a thread on my project in the hopes that you folks have some suggestions and maybe it will help somebody else out down the road.

I bought this 1976 Chinook about a month ago from the third owner. Body is straight, looks to be well taken care of and claims to have a rebuilt engine. Odometer says 880000.

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Trucks running great so aside from some regular maintenance I'm gonna jump right into remodeling the cab. The cabin is water tight aside from a small leak under the cabover windows and where the seal between the cab and cabin is coming apart. The original seal between the cab and camper on the exterior which I understand was made from a garden hose is also missing and the flashing down the side is starting to degrade.

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The guy I bought it from did a lot of the work getting the thing stripped out as well as throwing in some hastily constructed benches and doing some questionable floor repair.

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Here is the mating between the cab and camper that needs to be resealed. I'm not sure how I'm going to do this, it looks like the fiberglass was sandwiched in between the cab of the truck and a steel band with a strip of butyl or maybe some sort of sulfur based sealant tape in between. I would be hard to get a new strip of tape in there so something that oozes out of a gun is probably more likely to work.

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The camper is stripped now and I'm just doing dealing with the rust on the steel frame and getting ready to wire and insulate it after fixing the leaky seals. Still deciding on what I'll use for insulation and flooring and designing the interior. Pretty exciting project though!

Oh here is the stupid thing I did today. This is the floor of the camper when you step into it. There is exposed sheet metal under a loose piece of plywood I took out to clean under it. I forgot to put the wood back and then stepped on it getting out of the camper.

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I'm sure you mean 88,000! Nice Chinook. That's exactly where the worst of my floor rot is...right where that "repair" is on yours.

I'm ignoring it for now...

Ah, I remember when mine was almost as gutted as yours. Feels great to have all that old, musty rotting crap out of there, I'll bet. Also scary, if you're like me and had never done anything like this before....

I'll be interested to see what you do with yours!

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So I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to reseal where the fiberglass meets the steel cab of the truck. It looks like it most likely used to be riveted in with the fiberglass sandwiched between the cab and a thin band of steel. There is a strip of some sort of tape in between. My best idea is to clean it up as best as possible, shoot it full of polyurethane, drill out the rivets and re-rivet it. I'm worried it's not tightly sealed to allow the camper to flex away from the cab though and if I rivet it on to tight the fiberglass might crack. Does anyone else have experience with this?

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