TOWEL BARS FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

Like many Class B motorhomes and conversion vans, our 2007 Airstream Interstate came with a teeny tiny wet bath in which there is absolutely no room to install typical conveniences such as soap dish, shower caddy, and conventional towel racks.

What Airstream did to create a hyper-small-space towel rack, in a stroke of pure genius, is take a 14-inch drawer handle pull and rivet on a large washer that had been drilled out with two additional holes.  This way, the pull could be screw-mounted from the front side rather than the back as originally designed, thus creating a towel rack that projected just over one inch from the inside of the wet bath door.  Conventional towel bars protrude about four inches, which is out of the question for this application.  The excerpt above shows part numbers from the 2007 parts book published by Airstream, and photos are of our OEM towel bar removed from the wet bath door.  

No need to reinvent that wheel in expanding to better utilize the full potential of this hanging space - we followed suit.  I couldn't find the original drawer pulls that Airstream had used, but I did find this:

Cosmas 161 Series Satin Nickel European Bar Pulls, 12-5/8" hole spacing, and just about 14" total length, making them the same width as the OEM.  This is a screengrab of the Houzz sales listing.  They were three times this price on Amazon (as offered to me, understanding that, like many merchants, Amazon employs variable pricing).   

Here's the irony of this situation - these bar pulls were actually better quality than I wanted.  They are solid stainless steel, and as thick around as my index finger, making them heavier than idea for this adaptation - especially given that we were installing three of them.

I didn't really want to put that much weight on the back of the wet bath door, but who knows what will show up when you order products sight unseen off the internet?  For that low price, I assumed they'd be more cheaply made than this.  If I were doing this project over again, I'd look for lighter hardware.  But we had received these, so we decided to give them a go. 

My husband used our drill press to drill top and bottom holes in a stack of steel washers that he picked up at the hardware store.

It's a simple two-step process of affixing the washers to the existing threaded holes...

...and then mounting the finished assembly onto the back of the door.  Well, perhaps I should call it a three-step process, because it is necessary to divet out the door where the washer mounting screws protrude, so that it sits flush.  

Some caveats on the mounting, however.  Apparently Airstream's wet bath ingenuity extended beyond the original towel rack and into the door design itself.  To save weight, the door is hollow, with just a thin melamine sheet on the back.  We assumed it would be the standard low-density melamine-faced fiber board from top to bottom, which it was not.  EXCEPT, that is, for a solid interior strip installed (you guessed it) right at the level where the OEM towel bar had been mounted, so that it would be well-secured.  We didn't have that benefit, so we basically had to screw these three heavy pieces of hardware into a substrate that is not the strongest.  It seemed to work out OK and they are on there securely, but I wouldn't want to yank on the new bars as a means of shutting the door behind me (use the OEM finger-pull instead), and I wouldn't want to forcibly cram a thick textile between the racks and the door such that pressure was put on the screw mounts.  We will be treating these gently moving forward.

And now for the money shot:

It's a VAST improvement.  I had 14 inches of hanging space here previously and how I have almost 38 inches across three bars.  This is particularly important for us, as we spend most of our time in a subtropical environment with chronic sky-high humidity.  Nothing dries here.  Everything must be spread out as thinly as possible to keep from moldering and getting stinky.