After examining and working on the Airstream for a few months I quickly realized the work neccessary was beyond my abilities. In particular the floor had many soft spots and would need to be replaced and the majority of the systems (plumbing, furnace, etc) did not work.

Having listend to all of the the Vintage Airstream Podcast (VAP) episodes I was pretty impressed with Colin Hyde,one of the restoration experts on the show. Colin owns GSM Vehicles, one of the best known Airstream Restorers in the country. Remarkably, GSM is located in Plattsburg NY and is only about 5 hours from Rochester. Made a call to Colin and we spoke about for about an hour; I was convinced GSM was the outfit to restore this trailer. I mailed Colin a $1,000 deposit to secure a spot in his work queue. 3 months later Colin informed me that the time had come to deliver the trailer.

Coincidentally Airstream Life Magazine had been running a promotion looking for and individual that wanted to hire GSM vehicles to restore their trailer while they documented the restoration. The ad stated that this would be an all-out full scale restoration and estimated that the restoration would cost $70K. Interesting but *way* out of our range. Luckily for them, it was not out of range of actor Mathew McConaughey. Our trailer and Mathew’s will be restored side-by-side.

Loaded up the trailer and filled it with all of the parts and made the trek to GSM.  Met Colin and his wife/business partner Susan; both were very personable and we felt that our trailer was in very good hands. One of the best parts of going to GSM was seeing the huge (about 25 trailers of various vintages) number of Airstreams (and some other brands; know an SOBs by Airstreamers).

Colin Hyde at GSM Vehicles

Colin gave us a tour of many of these trailers including Mathew McConaughey’s 1958 trailer (directly behind Colin in the photo above) which was in extremely bad shape. Basically it was completely gutted and the frame was totally rotted out (parts of the frame had actually been scabbed together with wood 2 * 4’s). There were mouse and snake stains on virtually every panel on the inside of the trailer. Colin explained that the trailed was virtually a self contained eco-system where the snakes ate the mice.