Lucky for me, although I didn't have much of the wood pieces to use as templates to make new front, back and sides, I did have the aluminum pieces that I could use.  Without these I would have been toast!  So I spent a few days cutting new wood, shaping, gluing and attaching these pieces to the roof.  See the results below. My plan was to use the old aluminum sides, but after finishing the box frame and holding these old, bruised, painted sides up to the new wood, it seemed just wrong.  So now I am on the hunt for aluminum sides.  This may take a few days to find and acquire.  I may not be doing much to the project for the next few days.

Once the roof was in the garage, I went to work removing the aluminum channels and skin to find out what I was working with.  OMG!  One side wall was completely gone.  I mean gone.  There was nothing between the two pieces of aluminum but sawdust and rotten fragments of wood.  The ants had had a feast while the camper had been parked for the year. There is a wood frame around the outside of the roof.  The inner core looks like rigid insulation.  This wood frame was also gone on one side and so wet on the back, front and other side, I decided I would remove all of this also.  Actually, I had no choice with the one side, as that was missing as much of the roof wall above it was. Note the orange can of ant spray.  That was my main weapon against the ants that just kept on coming. So this is what I was facing after a day of removing all the metal.  A roof with the rigid insulation sandwiched between the top and bottom pieces ...

Prologue A few years ago I purchased a 1981 Palomino pop-up camper from a 1st grade teacher.  It was an impulse buy.  I know nothing about pop up campers. But now I know I paid a bit too much for the unit.  We have used it for 5 years without much maintenance.  But we still paid too much. The picture above is a few years ago with the camper set up.  It is rough but functional What I knew was that the wood on the roof was a bit sketchy...and when the lift arms cables broke after the season in 2010, it was time to undertake fixing the roof.  Due to a few circumstances beyond my control, I couldn't fix the roof in 2011.  So this May (2012) we began the project. The Roof Repair With the help of reading posts on www.popupportal.com and obsessing about this for a year in my head, I began the process.  The first trick was how to remove the roof.  The external lift arms had to be removed to repair the spring / cable mechanism anyhow. Th...