Ceiling Installation – Lateral Supports

The Challenges

Another challenge in the ceiling saga is how to support the ceiling panels laterally. The trailer is nominally 8 feet wide. The plan is to rip the 4 x 8 sheets into panels for ease of installation. That means our first panel is about 29 3/4 x 96 inches. Securing the panel to the cross-member rib will be done with the aluminum carpet transitioning strip, as mentioned in my last post.

However, that leaves the ends of the 96 inch panel as a problem. The way the trailer is configured, as you can seen from the banner picture, the builders put up a rounded strip to give a “finished look” to the wall panels. The gap between the top of that strip and the rib is too small for the 0.20 thickness of our plywood ceiling panels.

Possible Fixes

So, the options seem to be, 1) pull off the original strips and re-gap them for the 0.20 ceiling panels, or 2) attach a different support lateral support structure. I’m leaning toward attaching aluminum angle iron (1/2 x 1/2 x 1/16) to the existing strips with a nominal 0.20 inch gap to support the panel ends.

If everything is painted white, it shouldn’t look too bad. I hope.