Stronger Draw Construction for A'vans

The A'van has some excellent joinery work and overall is well above average, but it is let down badly with the cabinet draws, as they are the pre-fabricated chip board style that really aren't designed for caravan use. Most other RV manufacturers have phased them out. All is not lost though as you can easily beef them up to give years of service. They usually fail at the rear and some have the fronts fall off. This can be fixed by carefully inserting screws into the rear together with copious quantities of the best glue you can lay your hands on. When they fail at the front the best repair is to re-glue then use two small aluminium angle brackets or use the small zinc plated angle brackets made by Zenith about $3.75 a pair. Best not to use bigger than 75mm. The screws supplied are too long so you will have to buy shorter ones. By all means use the longer ones at the front and screw into the front cover as well. We favour the aluminium approach and you can get 25 X 25 X 3mm aluminium angle from Hardwarehouse or Bunnings. Usually you have to buy a metre, but the bit left over is handy for other camper jobs! 

Alternatively you could bite the bullet and turn a simple repair into a major project - after all isn't this what retirement is for? We saw the draws below at a Brisbane Caravan Show and could see this system being easily adapted to suit our A'van. Basically the draws are 100% plywood using steel runners. The existing A'van draw fronts could still be used. These are held on with two small aluminium brackets. We liked the cross brace idea right along the front and the moulding put along the tops of the two sides - really made a beautiful job. We found them on a Winnebago by the way - take a peek as there are lots of good ideas in there just waiting to be adapted to our A-frame campers! Whilst doing this job it could be a good move to extend the overall length to regain some of the lost space behind the existing draws. You do need a cutout on the top draw if you have a power point mounted there. Moving the power point to the sink side could be a good move as this then allows you to use the full length gaining 200 mm of extra room. Don't forget this must be done by an electrician. You can legally move the 12 volt socket though. If you look through the archives at the bottom of this page there are several really good examples of other approaches to this problem. None of the above applies to Chalet owners as their draws are fine and go right to the outside wall. Maybe one day A'van will get around to doing it this way as well. You will fi8nd more pictures on this project in the Do It Yourself section under the same heading.

Bob & Chrissy Eustace