Camper Van Conversion

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.

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.

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.

I've been doing a bit of work over the last few days, the part of the kitchen unit that hold the gas bottle now has a door.  I've also started tiling the kitchen wall, it turns out tiling is a bit harder than I thought but it seams to be going well. 

The door was a bit of a pain to sort out, it might not sound like it would be tricky but there is one thing about the van I bought that is not obvious. There are no straight lines in the back of the van, it gently slopes towards the front, and is slightly wider at the back than the front. This means if you install something that is exactly level, or square, it just looks wrong. So we built all the units in such away that they mach the slope of the van. So this means the doors can't be exactly square, hence making them takes longer than you would think. I can now see why a camper van normally has a square body.

This was the last day so it was time to make good the work done so far, It was time to glue down the now flatter carpet.  The carpet glue absolutely stank, we had to open all the doors and windows and still the fumes where quite strong.  We did not glue down all the carpet, as we've not exactly worked out where the bathroom walls will be, so the carpet in that rough area got tacked down.  I also glued the first bit of wall lining fabric in place on one of the wall, as my dad pointed out it would be very difficult to put the lining fabric on in one place when the seats where back in place. We then fitted the seats back in place.

With only two days left and this day not being a full day, I decided not to work on the bathroom as there is no way it would get finished before I left.  So we started to fit the carpet, so first we had to remove all the seats.  Then most of the day was spent cutting the carpet to the right size and shape, but as it had been sitting in a role in the garage for 5 months it was not laying flat, so we put some weights on it and left it over night.  We also fitted all the locker doors on the kitchen locker and started work on the cover for the water boiler, also all the fire safety stuff got fitted as the gas is now connected.

The day started by me working on the water tank filler pipe again.  The next stage was to get a hole in the side of the van for the filler cap.  There are proper hole cutting tools but they are very expensive so I don't have one, instead I had to do it the slow way.  I drilled a collection of holes in a circle, then used a side cutter to cut through the thin bits of metal between the holes, I then filed out the hole to the correct size.  This whole process took about 2.5 hours, but once it was done I fitted the filler cap, then connected the hose to the tank.  Then all that was left to do was connect up a pipe between the tank and the pump. Once that was done I had a fully working water system.   Work was finally completed on the second locker, and we fitted it into the van.

I spent most the day working on the plumbing, started off with fitting the filler pipe for the water tank.  The plan is to get a filler cap on the out side of the van then run the filler pipe through the inside of the van though the floor to the tank.  I started by cutting the hole in the floor, basically I drilled a number of holes in at circle the used the dremal to cut between the holes, the once again used the dremel to grind away the ruff edges.  Unfortunately that's when the shaft of the dremal snapped stopping me from cutting the hole in the outside of the van.  With that plan down the spout, I set to working on the rest of the plumbing a few hours later the plumbing was done.  I then tested it by putting the supply pipe in the bucket full of water, put the drain pipe in the waste water tank then switch on the pump.  Much to my surprise water did not come shooting out of every pipe, there was in fact only one small leek, where the pipe connected to the water heater.  All it need was to replace the jubilee clip with a less rubbish one and all was water tight.  While I was doing the plumbing Dad pressed on with building the second lock cabinet doing quite a professional job.  The last part in the day was spent varnishing again, and putting an edging strip on the counter.

Well I've taken some time off work and I'm back at my parents working on the van.  Looking back on the day a lot has been done, but some how it feels like I should have done more.  The first half of the day was taken with traveling, but after that I got down to work.  I spent most the day insulating the exposed bit of metal in the van (rust is bad).  I also got all the holes cut out in the ply wood for the switches, and plug sockets etc, and got them all fitted and wired in.  The wiring took quite a bit longer than though it would.   When my Dad got home from work (he as a new part time job doing accounts for a carpet firm) he set to building the frame work for the second locker cabinet, and clad the bottom of it.  We both spent a while varnishing it, and left it to dry over night.

Today was the day the van was going to the gas fitter to get the gas appliances connected.  There was however a small problem in that plan, for those of you who have been reading the blog you will know that the van's battery has gone flat at an inopportune moment before. Well it went flat gain this morning, meaning I had to wait for National Breakdown to come out and jump start the van. The problem is I'm not driving the van very often, so it sits there for quite a few weeks in freezing weather with out me driving it round and the battery goes flat. The obvious solution is for me to simply drive round more often, but it's not the most fuel efficient van in the world so I rather not drive it round for the sake of it. So I'm going to get a solar powered trickle charger to keep the battery topped up while it's parked, so hopefully this will be the last time I post about a flat battery.