The no-light skylights

It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation.
Herman Melville

My skylights in the Dormobile pop-top have been missing for ages. My Dad busted one off thirty-odd years ago by crashing it into a low-hanging fire extinguisher nozzle in a mall parking lot. I lost the other one on the motorway fifteen years ago on the way to a music festival in Heidelberg. I'd forgotten to close it properly. Sigh.

Since then I have used various odd plastic items such as Tupperware-type food containers and tea trays. I have been struggling to find an affordable substitute for the real thing, which is over three grand to import a pair of originals with the correct seals and fittings, gulp. The "proper" ones look like those in the pic below:

They are designed with an adjustable hinged tilting bracket that can open them and lock them in any stage between fully open and shut.

Here's a pic of my new substitute skylights:

If you think that they resemble catering dishes then you'd be right - that's exactly what they were designed for. The newspaper is my cutout template of the hole which I used as a sample. They are a perfect fit for the vacant spaces in the fibre-glass roof, placed here on a red wooden table:

Yeah yeah it's not ideal, I know, but the "proper" ones arrive from abroad with the respective seals and fittings for over R3000 for the pair. These are under R400 for the two, with another R150 for some nice screws and glues. So, on my budget that will have to be good enough.

So that's it for another step in the project, I am properly delighted to have found these at last. They are waterproof, weatherproof and should last for a very long time without much maintenance - proper result!


Thank you for reading, pop in again soon,
CooP