When the RV vehicle design team of Frank Messano and Jim Teeter needed help to build one of the most advanced RVs in the world: the StreamLiner Trailer, they turned to NASA.

Teeter and Messano's company, TM Design Research, is best known for the much publicized SkyDeck line, which they had licensed to Airstream and to Thor America.

Although Messano may hold the most technology patents in the RV industry, his latest patent for a super-lightweight and highly styled "StreamLiner" travel trailer went well beyond the manufacturing technology in the RV industry. In fact, his lightweight one-piece molded body requirements went beyond the latest composite vehicle technology in the automotive industry.

Ultra-thin skin

The StreamLiner's patented Thin-Shell one-piece molded fiberglass body and composite chassis were far lighter and stronger than previously possible in the RV industry. But the StreamLiner's ultra thin fiberglass skin (about the same thickness as an Airstream trailer's aluminum skin) could only succeed if the injected structural-insulation rigid foam would bond the fiberglass skin to the StreamLiner's internal spaceframe and interior walls to make a one-piece composite body.

But after a few tests, some small areas of the injected foam continued to expand, causing slight imperfections in the exterior panel finish. While the imperfections were about the same as you find in most newly manufactured RVs, they were unacceptable to Teeter and Messano. If the StreamLiners were to be the Porsches of the RV industry, they had to be perfect in all respects. This meant creating a new structural foam process.

Messano had been designing major projects for aerospace companies and the military for years, so he turned to the world leaders in research, development, and manufacture of industrial adhesives and foams. After conferring with engineers at Dow Chemical, BASF, and GE, one of the firms rushed forward with prototyping of the StreamLiner molded body panel sections using a proprietary structural foam formulated exclusively for fast assembly line production.

From freezer to desert

Having solved the post-expansion of the rigid structural foam, the next concern was to be absolutely sure that the new StreamLiner one-piece body would perform flawlessly over long years of continued heat exposure in the desert sun, and in the stresses of cruel winter freezing conditions experienced in the Canadian Rockies.