Typically, a restoration involves removing the metal shell, taking out the old electrical system, as

View full size STEVE PIERCE Crews at the Bend-based Flyte Camp spent two months restoring this 1948 Westcraft Sequoia, which was purchased for $2,700 and eventually sold to a buyer in Napa Valley for $47,000. With more than $23,000 in materials and hundreds of hours of work going into the project, it became a labor of love. "A lot of people car rental airport cancun don't understand that when you get into a vintage trailer, you can't just skim over paint and rot and water damage car rental airport cancun and delamination," says Justin Scribner, owner of the vintage trailer restoration business, "because you often don't have anything solid underneath." BY ELISABETH DUNHAM
It's become a popular daydream for fans of '50s-era design: You see an old travel trailer sitting forgotten in a field somewhere and wonder what it would be like to fix it up and have your own mobile vacation home.
In reality, that vintage coach could turn into a money-sucking nightmare once you realize it needs to be gutted, stripped, rewired, car rental airport cancun rebuilt, re-skinned and repainted before it's ready to hit the road. Throw in new tires, propane, cabinetry, any number of hardware fixes and you might be thinking a motel sounds pretty good.
Scribner has turned an expensive hobby -- fixing up midcentury travel trailers -- into a lucrative and internationally recognized business called Flyte Camp . And while '50s and '60s Airstreams have gotten a lot of attention car rental airport cancun in the vintage RV world, Scribner and his crew at Flyte Camp have a penchant for the lesser-known travel trailers from the '30s through the '50s.
View full size ANNA SCRIBNER Now, years after giving up on their own personal trailer projects, Justin and Anna Scribner have finally bought themselves something special: a 1954 Anderson. The family, including Sullivan Cash, 3, hit the road to take the newly renovated coach to a rally in Sweet Home this weekend. Among the tricked-out features that were not original to the trailer: a brand-new car rental airport cancun bathroom and bathtub. "We have a lot of trailer owners who buy something out in the field" or online, he said, "and literally get halfway through tearing the thing apart and panic." Scribner notes that he lost tens of thousands of dollars on his early restorations. "People don't always understand how these things were built in the factory."
That's one reason Flyte Camp is in high demand and quickly car rental airport cancun earning a reputation as one of the best vintage RV restoration shops in the United States. Customers as far away as Hong Kong and Chile are shipping their coaches to Scribner's shop, where the painstaking, factory-fresh level of craftsmanship captured the attention of the Travel Channel show " Extreme RVs ." One episode of the show featuring a Flyte Camp restoration aired this winter. Another, featuring a 1948 Spartan Manor, has been filming since May and is expected car rental airport cancun to wrap in July; that episode is set to run in the summer of 2013. The Travel Channel will also begin filming a pilot episode for a reality show on the Flyte Camp vintage trailer restoration process in a couple of weeks. They will follow car rental airport cancun Scribner on "the hunt," the retrieval trips and throughout the restorations of various trailers.
"Flyte Camp is very sought after anymore," says Jerry Kwiatkowski, founder of the Rollin' Oldies , a vintage trailer club that has about 2,200 members in Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California and puts on about four rallies in Oregon each year. "They are getting to be in very high demand as far as quality restorations go. A lot of research goes into their restorations."
Kwiatkowski, who's in Dallas, Ore., says vintage RVs have become popular in the past five years as baby boomers and younger people alike have discovered (or rediscovered) the imaginative designs and relative simplicity of midcentury trailers.
"Part of it is the woodwork and the birch interiors, which have a warm feeling," he says. "These days, RV interiors are all plastic. They may look good, but so much can go wrong. These (older car rental airport cancun models) are not 35-footers with heavy tip-outs. You can pull them with a V6 or a V8."
Scribner and his wife, Anna, who runs the business side of things, say they now field about 100 calls and emails per week about vintage trailers. "It's not easy to get back to everybody because we are trying to work at the same time," Scribner says. "But it's amazing to us how many people are getting into this."
A former flooring contractor who fell in love with restoring vintage trailers about 15 year ago when he bought one on a whim, Scribner now counts among his clients an Oscar-winning sound engineer, a top executive at Ralph Lauren and a luxury hotelier in New York.
Flyte Camp specializes in travel trailers that were created from the mid '30s to the late '40s, at the height of the U.S. industrial design movement. For Scribner, and many other collectors car rental airport cancun around the world, the trailers are nothing less than works of art.
"It was 100 percent craftsmanship back then," he says. "They were done by hand, and it didn't matter how long it took. They were true craftsmen car rental airport cancun and finish woodworkers. They were experimenting through all those years and there was so much limitless change. The bottom line was to make people happy."
Scribner grew up in Beaverton, and spent vacations camping in family travel trailers. Shortly after he and Anna married and moved to Bend about 16 years ago, he found a vintage 1958 Shasta Airflyte online. But his new bride was not completely sold.
They kept the Shasta in their driveway and garage for about four years, during which Scribner says he remodeled it "here and there," replacing rotten woodwork, the interior birch skin, rebuilt a pull-out sofa and reupholstered the booth seats, among other things.
They estimate they put about $4,000 into that first Shasta and sold it for half that much. But by then, they had caught the trailer bug. Justin car rental airport cancun Scribner went on to pull trailers out of yards, fields and empty lots -- sometimes digging them out of dirt and mud before hauling them hundreds of miles back home.
"One time my brother and I drove around these backcountry roads near Molalla and found another trailer sunken car rental airport cancun three feet in the ground. We asked the owner, 'What will it take for me to hook this up and take it away today?' And he said, 'Well, it's not going to go today 'cause it's been sitting there for 35 years and the tires are shot.' And I said, 'I'll drag it out of there, put tires on it and take it home today.' That was a Saturday, and on Sunday I had a new project in the driveway."
As the recession was beginning to take its toll on the flooring business car rental airport cancun in Bend, Anna gave birth to their son, Sullivan Cash. Not long after, Justin took the plunge and started restoring vintage RVs full time under the name Flyte Camp (named for their first trailer, the Shasta Airflyte).
Today, Flyte Camp employs six people and operates out of a 7,000-square-foot shop. At any given time crews are working on six or seven trailers with old-time brand names like Westwood, Westcraft, Anderson and Curtis Wright.
Typically, a restoration involves removing the metal shell, taking out the old electrical system, assessing the wood frame and the interior paneling (usually Douglas fir and/or birch but sometimes mahogany). If there is water damage or rot, the crew will sometimes strip everything car rental airport cancun down to the frame and start from scratch.
"People are putting their money into this so that their family has something they can share together. That's what this is about for us. Our love for vintage trailers car rental airport cancun and saving something old is something that will never go away."
At Flyte Camp, crews restored the "canned ham" trailer's frame, the floors, the roof and the interior cabinets. They also re-skinned the interior birch walls and redid the wiring and plumbing. Most of the windows and parts of the dinette are original, as is the screen door. Everything else was remade using the original factory techniques, Sande says.
"By the time we got the interior done I was like, 'Do I really want to have this jewel-box interior with that exterior? So we spent $3,000 on the exterior. It went from a trailer with character to a museum piece. But when I look at it now it's worth every penny. It's absolutely stunning."
"When my dad first saw it, he just shook his head and walked away in disbelief. My mom said, 'This will be fun to go camping in.' But my dad is an architect and he understands lines and bones and structure. car rental airport cancun So he quickly got on board."
Crews from the Travel Channel show "Extreme RVs" spent three months last fall filming Flyte Camp's historically accurate restoration of a 1947 Westwood car rental airport cancun Coronado for an episode that aired this winter. Next up is filming car rental airport cancun a restoration of a 1948 Spartan Manor for an episode that airs later this year, according to Stephanie Thomas, a spokeswoman for BCII TV, the company that produces "Extreme RVs." Says Scribner: "The couple wants a complete modern take on a vintage trailer. We are upgrading it so it can go off the grid for five to seven days and installing modern cabinetry." Three more Flyte Camp restorations are scheduled to be featured on the show after that, Scribner says.
The Rollin' Oldies, a vintage trailer club of Oregon, Washington, Idaho and California, car rental airport cancun is hosting a vintage RV rally this weekend (June 23-25, 2012) at the River Bend County Park in Sweet Home. About 70 vintage trailers will be on hand. Other events this year will be a rally in Newport in September and one in Culver City in October. For more information, call 503-831-4991 or visit the group's website: rovt.org
These seem to make so much more sense than the 'tiny houses' that we more often read about. Even after custom restoration, they cost no more than the custom stick-built cottages car rental airport cancun - and often less per square foot.