Paris Exterior - SILVER LINER RESTORATIONS

1951 Silver Streak Clipper ("Paris")

Exterior

This particular Silver Streak Clipper has had a very hard life, spending decades in a junk yard missing a door and infested with rodents. This ultimately led to some critical corrosion of her exterior skin, and her reconstruction was well underway before we discovered that she could not be polished. You can read more about that here. For the record, we love polished trailers and consider ourselves masters of the craft, so this was a tough pill to swallow. But we couldn’t be happier with the end result. We had her professionally painted in an airstream-like silver to maintain the look of her vintage trailer exterior and have found the painted exterior much easier to maintain. No more fingerprints, smudges, and water spots to be polished out! And the paint adds an extra layer of security (against tried-and-true Captain Tolley’s) against leaks at rivets and seams.

Since the trailer was missing an entry door when we found her and we were unable to source a matching door, we also ended up make a door from scratch– and we’re pretty damn proud of the result!

Otherwise, our goal with the exterior was to preserve her original look, creatively making lemonade out of lemons, while sneaking in modern amenities. Here’s an outline of our process from the beginning:

Replaced the dented decorative nose piece

Replaced the mangled skin around the wheel wells

Installed a custom storage compartment to replace a crumpled section of the exterior skin

Installed a custom storage compartment and door to house a new pull-down step and exterior outlet

Cut in a new bathroom window on the street side.

Cut out and re-riveted a torn seam in the aluminum on the forward street side

Took apart, rehabbed, polished, reassembled and reinstalled the original Hehr window frames (as well as a matching antique Hehr window for the new bathroom); cut and installed new rubber gaskets to replace dried, cracked and missing original gaskets

Installed both new and re-habbed drip caps over Hehr side windows

Installed new side marker lights, brake lights, and reflectors

We replaced the electrical fixtures and faded plastic brake lights but of course kept the beautiful glass side marker “beehive” domes. On the Arizona Clipper, we were able to salvage the original steel bezels for both the brake and marker lights by sanding off the rust and painting them with black Rustoleum, but here the steel bezels were far too corroded to be saved. We replaced them with reproductions.

Installed city water connection, bathroom vent intake, and shore power connection on rear street side; installed outdoor shower on street side at location of original water fill intake

Installed backing camera over existing dent on rear crown

Fabricated and installed custom, insulated hatch door/tabletop for existing compartment opening in rear curb side

Installed range exhaust vent and plumbing vents for galley and bathroom; installed new Fan-tastic vents on roof

Removed original propane heater chimney assembly and installed double-wall chimney assembly for Newport P12000 Propane Fireplace; fabricated and installed custom chimney rain cap

This original chimney really bugged us—-it gave the impression of wood shack stove pipe, incongruent against the fuselage of a sleek aircraft. We fabricated this custom shroud as a replacement.