Thanks for all the suggestions folks... it will be 2 years this january that I began researching how I might one day replace the siding. With all the options and ideas I've been offered, today it all came down to making a decision on how best I thought to do it... and then just diving in.
Soooooo... here you go... Pics of my wife's and my first attempt at laminating a panel on the garage floor over top of foam board. If I sprayed the glue correctly, and let the solvent flash off for the right amount of time before putting the two materials together... then I'd say I'm off to a decent start.
Not a perfect start...
... but a decent one.
The adhesive is pretty tough to work with... it dries wicked fast, and you have to put the two substrates together just as the outer skin starts to tack up, but before the inside loses it's gooey-ness. If it dries too much, or too little... you don't get a good bond.
The problem we ran in to was that the dowel idea to separate the plywood from the aluminum while we positioned it, did not work. If you wait until the adhesive dries to where the dowels won't stick to it, it's actually too dry for laminating. So we had to wing it... which caused us to get the first sheet out of square by about an 1/8" over the length of the plywood. It is perfectly adjacent to the aluminum on one end of the sheet, and sticks out about an 1/8th on the other end. The critical edge is the one that runs down the center of the wall of the rv at the top of this panel, so on that edge I'll file the wood down 1/8" to match the aluminum. The bottom of the panel where the aluminum overhangs the wood by an 1/8th shouldn't be an issue since this all gets caulked and covered up just above the storage bay doors.
The rest of the sheets went great. We ended up setting each sheet down against the end of the previous sheet prior to putting any glue down to see if it would track square with the aluminum. Where necessary, we added a shim to (see the picture with the washer against the plywood) to square it up when we set the plywood in the glue. It worked pretty good and the rest of the plywood lines up within about 1/32 of the aluminum.
You can see in the pics that the glue covers pretty well. They give you a little black and white picture that kind of shows what the "splatter" is supposed to look like... I think I'm there. The spec says that 1 gallon covers 190 square feet... I did the math and it works out to about 22 ounces to cover 1 side of a 4X8 section... so I'd measure out 22 ounces and start spraying on a section until the pot was empty. Theoretically, the coverage should be perfect... notice too that i scuffed the aluminum, just to try and give the glue a little better grip. Probably not necessary...
After we set a sheet, I'd pull the lawn roller over it. This one weighs around 700 lbs... and then after I rolled it, I also used a hammer and a piece of wood to tap the plywood as stated in the instructions.
So, at this point... I've done everything I could have done to make this first lamination attempt a success. If the glue holds, we should be good.
Next step... hanging it... but I'm going to wait a while until the contact adhesive has reached it's maximum strength. This gives me time to do some thinking on just exactly how to pick this thing up...
There are also some things that need taken care of before the panel can go up anyways... removing the furnace and hot water tanks... mapping out all the studs so that if the glue would ever delaminate I could rivet the sides back on... etc etc etc...
all for now... Feeling fairly decent about this... for the moment anyways... still lots of hurdles to overcome. But maybe... just maybe... we'll get there....
-cheers