Campervan Conversion - Part 7 - Van Tour

It's been a very long time since my last update on the campervan, but I've continued to work on it and things started to come together quite quickly towards the end, if there ever is an end to converting a van, which I doubt.

I don't suppose this project will ever be completely finished, there'll always be things to repair, modify or add, but most of what was originally intended has now been done, along with several examples of 'scope creep' in the form of stuff I just kept adding to the workload as I went along.

We've already been away on two separate week-long trips in the van, and after each we made a few modifications to the vehicle, just to make life easier and more convenient.

So this post is by way of being a Van Tour.  Twenty weeks since I bought the van, the post shows what it looks like now.

on a campsite at Aldbrough in Yorkshire ...

The roll-out awning above the side door came from the courtyard of a restaurant in York.  Fitting it to the van was a major project in itself.  I first mounted a pair of unistrut channels to the body at the roof roll, using high-tensile bolts and picking up the strong points of the internal roof stiffening.  I designed, fabricated and welded steel brackets to fit the awning to the unistruts.  

awning as bought, filthy & neglected ...

The awning cover material needs replacing, it's stained and punctured in a few places and it's also bright orange (!) so we'll buy a new one - they're widely available in more subtle tones, and it's a simple replacement but not a high priority at the minute.

at Floors Castle, Kelso ...

The frilly end valance of the awning has gone, replaced by a cut-down length of uPVC square-section guttering which nicely hides the visible side of the awning cover when retracted.  I also bought a couple more long lengths of these gutters, and intend to use them to make a cassette to fully enclose the retracted awning, but again that's a project for the future.

Onto the van tour, opening the back doors reveals stowages and services :-

rear of toilet room, stowage of
ladder & hoses to the right

water tanks & services to the left,
central shelves with fridge on the top

The fridge is a very recent addition, replacing the electric coolbox we'd first installed.  The coolbox was OK but ran constantly and never became really cold inside, whereas a 'proper' compressor fridge only runs intermittently and can actually freeze items in the icebox, so great for keeping ice cream bars etc inside.  

Although the total energy consumed is about the same for both types (~300 Whr per day), the leisure batteries were never completely fully-charged because the coolbox was running constantly.  You might wonder why this is important, or even desirable, but it's so the charge controller occasionally has a chance to divert any excess solar energy to the vehicle start batteries, to keep them topped up too.

Here's the fridge location from the inside :-  

The mini fridge is bolted to the top shelf and the shelf is bolted to the van structure, but fixed in such a way that both shelves can be quickly removed if we ever wanted to carry large sheet materials in the van again, like the 8' x 4' plywood sheets we used for the van panelling.  By making these rear central shelves very easy to remove we retain much of the usefulness of owning a large van.

On the floor in the black bag is one of our folding bikes, the other will fit onto the first shelf. 

 

That's the toilet room on the left behind the sofa.  

The chemical toilet is prevented from moving around by the upstands fitted on the duckboard.  This room is not yet finished and needs painting (or tiling or waterproof panelling ?).  I've already bought some tanking membrane paint to waterpoof the room for when (if) we fit a shower, but the walls are bare for now.  There's a sliding door for the room but it's difficult to photograph - it's kept locked in the open position whenever the vehicle is moving.

Panning around slightly shows the rear of the sofa, control panel and overhead locker.

A couple of close-ups of the controls.  

The eagle-eyed among you can see the 1,000W inverter display (lower right) is showing 6A current draw from the batteries, because the fridge compressor was running at the time.  The solar controller is simply matching the fridge demand with energy from the panels, which indicates the batteries are fully charged - if they weren't, the controller would be pulling much more power from the solar panels on what was a very bright day.

Opposite the rear of the sofa is the kitchen area :-

The splashback and the cupboard doors are both covered in Fablon.  When I asked in the shop if they had any, the young shop assistant didn't know what Fablon was, but an older colleague pointed me in the right direction !  

From the side door, here's another view of the rear of the sofa.

and the storage area underneath ....

The open space where that plastic box is now was originally built for the electric coolbox.  Another reason for swapping it for a fridge is that the coolbox was top-opening, and therefore needed to be pulled out into the open every time we needed access.

In the photo above, you can see the hot air outet from the Eberspacher diesel heater.  The RH cupboard contains a few tools, so there's a simple cam lock fitted to deter opportunists, but the laptop and other more valuable items can be stored within the metal-lined strongbox incorporated below the LH cupboard ...

The strongbox is fitted with a Mauer safe lock, and the door is hingeless & flush mounted making it impossible to insert a pry bar to try and lever it off.   More on van security later ...

The sofa converts into a flat bed of 1,900 x 1,200 mm by pulling the secondary sofa frame outwards towards the sliding door and allowing the hinged panels underneath to fall fully open.  The three upholstered sofa cushions (one seat base & two backrests) are laid on the flat bed base to form the mattress.

We made the seat cushions ourselves from 100 mm thick firm upholstery foam with a 25 mm memory foam topper glued to it.  We bought the covering materials and long zips etc, and my wife cut and sewed them into removable covers.

The table leg fits into the special base flange set into the floor.

Our sofa is quite high off the floor, because all the batteries & electrical services are mounted underneath, so the table leg length was extended by cutting it in half and then rivetting both ends into a piece of close-fitting stainless steel tube.  Stainless steel tubes in many diameters and lengths are available from custom exhaust pipe suppliers - there's several of them on eBay.

And last, but not least, I changed out the fixed double passenger seat by buying another seat plinth plus another complete driver's seat, and in a trim to match the existing.  Not easy to find a Mk7 Transit seat in good condition, and quite expensive even from a breaker's yard.

Apart from the comfort aspects of having an adjustable seat, another advantage of replacing the standard dual passenger seat with a single seat is that it's now possible to walk through from the driver's cab, so there's no need to get out and enter the camper spacer via the side door.

And after our first trip, it was clear it would be much better if the passenger seat could be swung around into the camper space when we're parked up.

Seat swivel adaptors can be bought, but even the cheap ones are around £200, so I designed and built one myself.  I bought a heavy duty 14" swivel bearing and fitted it between upper and lower plates cut from materials I had lying around in the shed.

during trial assembly of the stator ...

In the travelling position, the seat is secured by four M10 handwheel screws that lock the rotor plate to the stator.  When parked up, these screws can be removed and the seat turned around, and one of the screws used to lock it into its inboard position.

Bearing and bolts etc were around £35 in total, so well worth making one myself.  Even if you needed to buy two 500x400 mm pieces of 4 or 5 mm steel plate, it would still only cost half the price of a proprietary swivel.

seat in its inboard positon

The table top might look an unusual shape, but it's cut like that to make it easier for us to move around inside the van.

As a last word, on security, I bought a pair of van lock kits for the side and rear doors.  These each comprise a pair of 5 mm steel brackets fixed with coach screws and locked together using a shackleless padlock.

brackets as supplied, suitable for rear barn doors

shackleless padlock - 73 mm diameter

The brackets as supplied fitted the rear barn doors on the van OK, but they're not suitable for the side sliding door without major modifications.

So I adapted the brackets, although 'adapted' is maybe too simple a word here.  In effect I cut off the circular upstands of the brackets and then just used the materials within a re-design.  If I'd had suitable 5 mm steel plate materials to hand, it would have been just as easy to start from scratch, but it didn't take too long to cut & weld something that would suit the side door.

new brackets made for the side door

The circumference and rear face of each padlock were wrapped with self-adhesive neoprene strips.  These make the locks a snug fit in the brackets and prevent them from rattling around if they're fitted when the vehicle is moving.

Just one piece of advice if you buy these proprietary padlock brackets, and that's to paint them properly before you fit them, because you'll find the so-called galvanising on them is totally crap and they'll start to show rust through after the first heavy rains.  So protect them beforehand using Hammerite's Special Metals Primer or similar and then a topcoat of your choice.

And finally, in the last month I've re-insured the vehicle as a 'modified van' with a company that specialises in camper conversions and many other types of bespoke vehicles.  This has also allowed me to insure it for a sum in excess of the value of the base vehicle, to take into account its increase in value after conversion.