Saturday, April 30, 2016

Travato 59K Shower Curtain & Medicine Cabinet Mod

OK, this is the last of the mods for awhile.  Got thru my list, so now the rest of the year is for traveling and adventures.

A long while back, I bought these stainless eye hooks to make tie-down points on my boat.   Every time I move the van, I forget to open the medicine cabinet carefully and usually all the contents come falling out onto the floor.    So to secure things a bit better, I installed these hooks so a small bungee could be used to hold items in place.   All you need to do is drill some small pilot holes in the wood frame of the cabinet, and then screw them in.   Hook the bungee on them and you are done.



Could I have used smaller hooks?  Most definitely, but I had these laying in my toolbox.

The last project on my list was to do something with the shower curtain.  All the snaps get tiresome eventually, and there is an issue of storing it while traveling and being able to air dry it after use.

So after seeing a few mods owners have done, and seeing this Adjustable Curtain Track on Amazon, I decided to go ahead and do this mod.    This track is a plastic coated curtain track with a flexible metal inside it.  It comes rolled up and you need to straighten it out.   You cut it to length with a heavy duty pair of scissors.   The kit comes with the hangers, screws and the rolling trucks to attach your curtain.    I had some clip hangers left over from the cab curtain project, but you can easily buy those anywhere.

The track brackets look like they are intended to be screwed to the ceiling.   What I wanted to do was take advantage of as many existing screw holes as possible - the ones for the snaps would work fine, but they are on the walls, not the ceiling - so what to do?

Well a trip to the hardware store of course.  I found some small L brackets and got some #10 1/2" machine screws, nuts and lock washers.



As you can see here,  I simply bolted these parts onto the track's ceiling brackets.  Note they have plastic spring clips to hold on to the track.  Here is one assembled in the orientation that they will be installed in.



Here it is all put together.  I did have to drill 3 new holes for some brackets - one on each end of the track, and one along the wardrobe cabinet wall.   It seems solidly mounted, as all the snaps were screwed into solid wood and not cardboard.  Who knows what the ceiling is made out of, so I was leary about drilling into it.


Here you can see the trucks on the track, and you can see the end cap at the end of the track.  It has a nice loop to secure the curtain at a fixed point.


By sheer luck, all the screw holes appear to be at the same height, so the track looks straight.


I put on all my clips on the trucks.   Another coincidence was the number of each was exactly the same - no leftovers.


To make sure they stay on, I used a pliers to crimp the hooks.


I clipped onto the curtain about every 3 inches.   My tieback loops over the end of the towel bar perfectly.


There's a strange fat man in my shower!



I'll probably still use the magnets to hold the curtain back against the back doors to get alittle elbow room - just as you would using the snaps.

Another plus to mounting this way is that you can leave the aluminum doors to the shower cubicle open for more ventilation.

The downsides?   The way I did this leaves the toilet and the medicine cabinet exposed.  Great if you need to place things like shampoo on the toilet lid.  Also great if you want to shave immediately after your shower.  Or if you need something out of the medicine cabinet.  If getting the toilet wet is a deal-breaker for you, then don't do this mod the way that I did.  I could care less if the toilet gets wet.




5 comments:

  1. Great mod. Going to do it. How did you get the nice radius curves?

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  2. can you please verify that your shower curtain track still goes to the product you ordered and installed please. I was about to order but the mounting brackets looked different than what you attached your L brackets to. Thanks, looking forward to doing this mod. Just ordered the front curtain rod.

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