Camper Van Conversion

By now I thought I'd be posting about how I'd been finishing off a few bits of my van, however I'm not. The reason for this, is that the insurance company is still fixing my van. After 2 months and every form of incompetents known to man, including claiming my van did not have a skin or cooker thus was not a campervan. They claimed this despite their own engineer having photographed them. The van is still with the garage, it is now waiting on a small pipe so I am told, despite telling me last week it was only waiting to be painted.

At some point I hope to get it back, I would like to go camping in it.

By now I thought I'd be posting about how I'd been finishing off a few bits of my van, however I'm not. The reason for this, is that the insurance company is still fixing my van. After 2 months and every form of incompetents known to man, including claiming my van did not have a skin or cooker thus was not a campervan. They claimed this despite their own engineer having photographed them. The van is still with the garage, it is now waiting on a small pipe so I am told, despite telling me last week it was only waiting to be painted.

At some point I hope to get it back, I would like to go camping in it.

Well things when a little wrong with build day 25, on the way to my parents leaving the M62 an elderly gent pulled across in-front of me and slammed his breaks on.  Sadly the breaking distance of my van and his hatch back are not the same.  So the van took a bit of damage largely the radiator was the problem, so it had to be towed to my parents, while I waited for the insurance company to get back. 

The van has spent the last 3 weeks with the insurance company, finally I got the call from the engineer and the van is heading off to be repaired.  So day 25 was some what unproductive, but it will all be ok in the end.

Well the bathroom is now looking quite done (there a still a few things left todo but it looks very much like a bathroom). The toilet is now fitted and connected to the water supply (but it still needs it's own pump so you don't have to turn the main one on to flush), the shower basin is now sealed and water proof. All the shower curtains are fitted, and so is the towel rail and toilet roll holder. I am now a man who knows where his towel is.

We also cut all the lino to shape, and refitted and cut the kitchen carpet that was removed a few weeks ago. As I had a little time remaining before heading home I also fitted a bit more of the lining carpet on the walls.

Time to work on the bathroom again, well build it. Lots of progress was made, all the walls are up and joined together. The drain hole for the shower is in, as is the water supply pipe for the toilet, the shower basin is now fitted but not sealed as yet. Still lot work came to came together to make what looks like a bathroom.

I spent most of the morning trying to find some where to sell me the plastic sheeting that I needed to finish the bathroom. After quite a lot of phoning etc, I found a supplier and managed to pick up the sheets. By the time all this was sorted most the morning had gone, which was a shame but we ploughed on.

We cut an fitted the plastic sheeting on the the van wall, then glued down the lino, and started to fix all the plastic tracking in place. This final fit of the track that the walls will sit in, requires the final triming and shaping of the wood which takes a while. By the end of the day all the tracking was done, and I'd fitted the all walls in to check every thing worked, however we then removed the walls as there would not be time to fix them in-place correctly before I had to drive the van back home.

After a bit of a break on doing any work on the van I finally got back to it.  The first order of business was working on building the bathroom. First task was to take up the carpet in the area where the bathroom is going to be and put down the lino.  Next we shaped the wood we are using for the front and rear walls to the bathroom.  With the van having no right angles or straight lines this is but hard than you would think.  Also one of the walls must go over a wheel arch which does not help.  One of the side wall to the bathroom is the side of the van which is curved, to make that wall water proof I using plastic sheeting, it is not too bad to fit, however I don't have enough to finish the job which is a bit of a problem. So a shoping trip is needed tomorrow.

To fit all the walls together in a water tight manor, I'm planing on using some plastic track, so far it looks like this might work quite well and hide some of the rougher edges to the wooden walls.  By the end of the day most the walls where bit a we roughly fitted it together to check the fit, so far so good.   It's not fitted permanently together yet as I still need more plastic sheeting to finish one wall and the ceiling.

 

Having been planing to install the solar panel for a while now the day has finally come, all the bits arrived so I loaded up the van and headed to my parents to make use of the drive and garage once again. As the weather was expected to be changeable this weekend I started off by doing the bits that would make the van no longer water proof while it was still sunny.  I started by making the cable entry point where the supply from the panel would come into the van, this meant drilling a hole in the roof (I'm really glad it did not rain at this point) feeding the cable through the cable entry box then through the roof.  The cable entry box was then sealed to the roof using silicone sealant, once that had dried the van would be waether proof again.  Then came the job of fitting the mounting brackets to the panel, dragging the panel up on the the roof and gluing it in place.  Some of you may be thinking glue, that does not sound like a good plan, well honestly its the best idea, it will hold the panel more than securely (it's going nowhere) and with no bolts and thus no holes in the roof there is no chance of a leak.  Any old glue wont do the job, I'm not encouraging people to try this with an pritstitk or anything, the glue I used is a glue/sealant called sikaflex which starts to cure when it's exposed to UV very strong stuff, don't got get it on any thing you don't wish to be permanently stuck to something else. One that was fitted in place I then fitted a spoiler in front of the panel to reduce it drag factor whilst driving, then set about wiring it all up.  Fortunate the sun stayed out whilst I did my wring thus letting me test if the whole thing worked, and it did.

There where a few other wiring jobs on the slate for the day, mainly getting some power to the passenger side of the van, currently all the power was on the drivers side but as the bathroom will be on the passenger side so I need to get some power over there under the floor and behind the ply lining before I can start work on the bathroom, so I got all that done and tested.

I been planing to add a solar panel of some description to the van to charge the batteries since I first started planning to do the van. Today after much reading planing etc, I finally selected and bought a panel and charger. I ended up going for a 130w panel, as that would provide the kind of power I need without costing to much. I also got a MPPT solar regulator to charge the batteries from the panel. The regulator basically stops the panel from over charging the batteries, and acts a dc-dc transformer to take the voltage from the solar panel and adjusted it to be most efficacy voltage for charging the batteries. Now all I need to do it fit it, and get it working, I will let you all know how well that all works out.

Well it seamed like quite a busy day today, to be-honest I was flagging a little.  It was a lovely sunny day very hot, in some ways ideal weather but rather tiring working in the heat. We started working on the bathroom walls to start with, cutting a number of the wall panels. This takes longer than you would think as all the vans walls are curved, as is the roof. This mean when producing the bathroom walls they must be shaped to fit flush with the vans walls. I also finally added the roof vent for the bathroom, and just like the hole for the filler pipe for the water tank, making the hole in the roof was a major pain. It probably took 2 hours to get the hole in the roof, and only 10mins to fit and seal the vent in place. We also made a small box to hide for the filler pipe for the water tank that comes into the van. 　 We also did more work on the enclosure for the water heater. So we got quite a few small jobs done, but no major new things where added. It was mostly a day of prep work and making good and finishing off previous work.

 

Back to working on the van again after a bit of a break, it's nice to be making some progress again.  Firstly we have finally have all the cupboard doors on the kitchen units, so the electrics and batteries are no longer on display.  Which means that the bin I bought finally is attached to a door.  I also ran the power for the little tv I got for the van, and got it fitted to it's bracket and mounted to the underside of the cabinet.  The aerial also got fitted to the roof, and was sealed to keep the rain out.  So I got to finish off this evening while watching a little bit of tv.

 

We decided to have a weekend away, and have a bit of break.  The plan was to see a few sights get a bit of walking in and generally relax.  We picked Tenby in south whales, and found a nice campsite for the weekend called Well Park.  We had a good time there, lots to see, and there where some good walks, I probably could have stayed there a bit longer, but there was too much on at work for that to happen. 

The draft proofing work I did really seamed to pay off as the van stayed warm all night with the heater off, we did bring the duvet this time, and to be honest I was a little too warm during the night, so kicked it off. One thing I did notice is after a really busy day doing lots of stuff it would have been nice to have a TV in the van, as we did not want to go out every night.  So I am going to look into getting a little 12v lcd tv that can play dvd's, so as we can have the odd night in.  The only bad thing was on the way back the brakes started making an unhealthy sound noise.  So I spent part of the day at the garage getting my brakes fixed.

 

Having discovered on my last trip that there are one or two drafts coming from the doors, I starting planning on how to block them.  The problem is some of the gaps are surprisingly large, and non of the draft excluder products available from DIY places would do the job.  So I needed to find something to fit the bill.  Those who have been following this blog will know I've got lots of industrial rubber backed water proof carpet for doing the floor, and after doing the floor there was quite a lot left over, so i decided to use this to act as a daft excluder.  The back door was the biggest problem, where the two doors meet (or rather don't exactly) and a the bottom.   Firstly I could one long and wide strip of carpet and attached that to one the the back doors where the two doors meet.  Now when both doors are closed the carpet sits over the gap between the two doors and stops and drafts.  At the bottom again I cut a long strip and attached that rubber side up to the floor, so when the doors close this carpet blocks the drafts at the bottom.

We took a trip to the lakes for easter with a few of our friends, the idea was todo a lot of walking.  I think we did quite a lot of walking, including climbing a mountain, and a good time was had by all.  When we first got to the campsite it had been raining for a few days (not surprising for the lake district), so the site was rather boggy.  We had also been unable to get a pitch with electric, so I got a chance to see how long the batteries last, the answer is 3 days with switching the fridge on to battery over night. Some of the nights where rather cold, some of our friends who where sleeping in tents got very cold.  We where not exactly warm either, firstly we should brought the duvet as well as the sleeping bag (my other half kept telling me I told you so), but also there are quite a few drats that kept letting all the heat out the van. When the van's batteries stated the go flat and the heater would not startup, then it got really cold.

 The vans doors (back doors, and side door) are only really designed to keep people and the rain out, so when they close there is a bit of an air gap.  Initially I thought it was quite a small gap and would not make much difference, I was wrong.  You could realy feel the cold air rushing in though this smalll gap reducing the heat in the van quite a bit.  I am going to have to come up with a plan to block/fill or otherwise deal with this gap as it's getting really cold at night.

We took our first trip in the van this weekend, camping near Scarborough, and going walking in the North Yorkshire moors.  The Van is still not finished however, but enough of it is now done that a lot of bits now work.  So how did in go I hear you all cry, well quite well.  All the systems I've fitted gas/water/electric all did what they where supposed to-do, and did it well.  There where some small inconveniences, but they where all of the category of things I did not pack, like no tea towels for dry dishes etc.  So I've got a number of small things to buy for the kitchen to keep permanently in the Van. The idea being that when we want to go some where, the only things we need to pack is some food, and clothes, not have to remember to pack things like pans, tin openers, wooden spoon etc. 

The only big problem was that the bed is just not very comfy.  The odd thing is, as seats they are very comfy, but when the form a bed they are not completely flat, all the little raised areas force you to lie in odd positions, so you don't sleep that well.  I think it can be worked round by using the odd pillow, and a mattress topper.  I guess I'll soon see as we are going to the lakes for a few days walking, so I'd best get it fixed by then, or my other half won't be pleased.