WINDOW framing in a Canned Ham

I like the method you already use. I guess you could beef it up by making the frames wider and/or by adding more verticals above and below the window... But even with that, one person with a good pair of boots can still kick any one of these trailers into matchsticks... You can only do so much to strengthen an inch-thick wall without exterior bracing coming from a different plane.

I can kinda "swallow" there being a benefit to having the window, its frame and the surrounding skin flex in respect to the rest of the structure. After all, in shipbuilding, a "rigid" ship won't survive long because of the constant forces applied to it from every direction. Same with skyscrapers and wind/earthquakes. But small buildings and small boats can be made rigid, and can just "ride out" the storm because they're small enough to "fit between the waves", so to speak. They aren't big enough to have one half trying to wrench itself away from the other half, because the forces on them are pretty much the same from end to end at any one particular moment (barring extreme circumstances). They aren't getting twisted clockwise in the bow while being twisted counter-clockwise in the stern.

I think trailers are closer to small boats than ships. Their light construction and short steel frames means that one section is unlikely to have significant momentum in a different direction than another section (unlike a 500-foot oil tanker that spans a dozen waves). But without being able to ask the head of Shasta from 1960 what his construction philosophy was, we end up back into the old speculation on whether they built these things intentionally to allow the whole thing to flex, or just built them cheap and quick (and sloppy)... I think I fall on the "they built it cheaply, let's fix it right" side of the line. I suspect any flexing they might have intentionally built into them (and it's a big "might have") would have been more to keep the weight of the windows from pulling the skin off the cheap frame when they hit potholes than out of any sophisticated stress-design philosophy.

Did the original method make the skin pucker on either end of the window by forcing the curved skin to lay flat?

So far, the windows have looked good; this is the same trailer with the window installed:



I did get some ripples on one of the canned hams, but that was due to new skin rather than the window mount. (and maybe me over tightening the screws a bit)

Thanks for sharing.. That window looks great. I would have thought that the "contact: area would have been just flat enough to bend and tweak the window frame to form.
The rough “unfinished” work picture that you have really shows the curve. Or exaggerates it.. Cool beans

I meant the way Shasta built it, with the aluminum.

I've tried a few different methods of building the window frames in the radii and I still like using the metal patch method. No leaks so far. And splitting the panels at the top and bottom of the window inside works very well for the curve.