Amidst the flurry of activity that is a new farm in the beginning of spring, we have managed to get our hands on a new trailer.
It’s a pretty basic 6’x10′ enclosed trailer, and it ought to work just fine for our purposes. Unfortunately, they don’t exactly sell them all done up in a way that’ll pass muster with the MDA. We’ve got a bit of work to do to get the trailer up to snuff.
The inside walls are finished in Luan, with some little luan strips covering up the gaps where the panels meet. That’s all well and good, but the MDA requires a non-porous easily-cleaned surface.
In order to get this new non-porous surface to go on smoothly, I promptly broke out some tools and proceeded to tear up the nice new trailer.
With all the luan strips out of the way, the FSB (or dairyboard) can go on a bit easier. We’re installing the diaryboard over the luan panels with plenty of construction adhesive and several stainless-steel screws per panel. I bought several packages of the pound-in plastic rivets for fastening dairyboard, but quickly decided that it’d be a pain in the butt to have to drill a hole for every fastener I wanted to put in. Stainless self-tapping sheet metal screws go in much faster, and being stainless, are just dandy for a food facility.
It’s less than halfway done, but we’ve got the bulk of the ceiling done, which is the hard part. Dairyboard is a real pain to work with, because it’s relatively heavy for something so thin. That means that if you ever try to pick it up above your head, it does it’s best to curl down around you from all 4 corners. Putting dairyboard up on a ceiling is most certainly a two-man job. Cutting diaryboard isn’t much easier. It has too much fiber (FRP stands for Fiber Reinforced Plastic) to score and snap easily, and cutting thin plastic with a circular saw is always a crap shoot. I quickly settled on the electric power shears, which cut through the stuff like butter.
So, that’s some stuff I’ve been doing.
Now we’ve just got to finish up the diaryboard, put linoleum on the floor, get it wired up with a 110v outlet and light, get a generator, and get it all inspected.
No sweat.
