Remove and Replacing Heat Insulation and Moving on…

Prior to leaving the Space Coast area I performed a chore which we needed which had not been done while we were at the Cummins Facility. They had informed us a piece of the heat shield (insulation) had fallen out and needed to be replaced. They would do this for one hours labor at their rate but this is something I could do so I certainly didn’t need to pay a certified Cummins mechanic to do it.

The insulation was mailed from the Cummins dealer in Jacksonville to us. As you may remember although they didn’t get it in time, they wanted us to pay to have it shipped from there to here. After confronting the service manager with a threat to have my credit card cancel the payment for the insulation they grudgingly agreed to send the insulation to us in Mims Florida.

The insulation basically covered the inside of the dog house area which houses our engine. It is designed to keep the heat from the engine from coming through the floor and heating us up. The insulation we bought had a self adhesive side and a very shiny aluminum foil side. After reading on-line I discovered that the inside of the doghouse should be sprayed with a 3-M spray adhesive before placing the new insulation after peeling off any old insulation.

Once the inside had been sprayed I measured to figure out what size pieces of insulation to cut. This insulation was easy to cut with scissors so after cutting the pieces I contorted myself in such a fashion as the adhere the new insulation (shiny side out) to the inside of the dog house.

There is a little trick to getting the insulation on smoothly. What I did was peel back about two inches of the paper on the adhesive side to expose the self adhesive sticky side. I positioned this part and stuck it down by pressuring it to the surface with my hand. Once the two inch piece was stuck I slowly pulled back more of the paper to expose the self adhesive and pressed down more of the insulation.

Doing it this way a little at a time made it pretty easy to stick the paper on without having it stick to itself creating a mess. Keeping in mind that the inside of the doghouse will never be seen,  the job didn't have to be perfect!  I also cut several pieces to overlap seams and laid down two layers of the insulation since I had more than enough to do so. With the job done we are looking forward to see what (if any) changes we will notice with regard to heat coming through the floor.

Before leaving this area we took one last hike through Titusville’s Enchanted forest and one more drive to the Black Point Wildlife Drive on Merritt Island Wildlife Refuge. We saw mostly the same birds but a few were different. Some of this blog's photos are from these two trips. Our last evening was spent at Happy Hour and 50 cent wing night at the Orleans Bistro in Titusville as we head out for Melbourne Florida next…

NOTE: We are at Wickham Park in Melbourne Florida until Tuesday when we move south to Vero Beach for two nights to visit Sharon’s cousin and his wife…