Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts
Showing posts with label projects. Show all posts

15 July 2021

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 ...

22 April 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 6 - Progress on Several Fronts

Following on from Part 5, I've been continuing with the project across several fronts.

One thing about this conversion is that it's very difficult to actually finish anything, because to complete X means that Y needs to be done beforehand and suitable provision made for Z to follow etc.

For example, it's been over a month now since we made our cabinet carcasses for the RH wall and we've now also built a similar unit to fit over the kitchen area on the LH side, but we couldn't install them permanently until we'd run all the necessary cables behind.  

We're still adding equipment to the design but I've now bought and installed all the cables I'll think we'll need, and I've also run a few extra lengths here & there for any additions we might want in the future.

So the RH wall cabinets are now fitted.  I've also been working on the control panel in the lower half of the rearmost cabinet.  It has two fascia sections, one side fixed and the other hinged for access to fuses and to be able to complete all the wiring etc.

RH wall cabinets with the control panel in blue ...

And we're making progress elsewhere, too.

29 March 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 5 - The Solar Panels & Major Electrical Items

This is number five in the series of posts about our campervan conversion, following on from Part 4.   

The solar panels arrived last weekend so it was time to fit them on the van roof.

I've bought 3-off identical 100W panels from Renogy.  Using monocrystalline cells, these are quite compact panels measuring just 1,074 x 498 mm.  This particular panel design is narrow enough to fit between our rooflights, and it also has a low open-circuit voltage which can be important when choosing controllers.  I'd considered 2-off at 150W or even a single 300W panel, but these layouts didn't fit properly on the roof space available and they also tend to operate at a higher voltage. 

the panels ...

panel nameplate data ...

So we've nominally 300 W of solar power available under bright sunlight conditions, although during standard rating test conditions the light source is positioned perpendicular to the panel surface, whereas on the van roof the panels will always be horizontal and therefore the actual available power is likely reduced by around a quarter, so let's say it's a maximum 225 W installation.

20 March 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 4 - Water Tanks & Shower Room Framing

In this post, we're initially looking at the water requirements for the van build.

We've bought a 75 litre tank for fresh water and a 85 litre tank for waste water, both of which will be installed inside the van.   Many people fit at least the waste tank under the vehicle, i.e. underslung from the floor beams and effectively located outside, but I wanted everything to be mounted inside the van and easily accessible for installation, piping & maintenance etc.

upright 85 litre and flat 75 litre tanks ...

There will also be a small hot water tank to design, build and install at some time in the future but that's not an urgent requirement - I can come back to it later when I've eventually figured out exactly how to provide a hot water system.  For now, we'll just concentrate on the main tanks, and I'm including the shower tray here because it's a deep unit and can hold more than 40 litres (see Post 3 in the series). 

The sink and shower greywater will collect in the 85 litre upright tank which sits on the floor up against the LH rear wheelarch.  The flat 75 litre fresh water tank is mounted directly above it.   This configuration minimises the amount of space required for the tank cabinet.  The top of the waste tank is low enough that the kitchen sink waste will flow to it under gravity, although water from the shower tray at floor level will be pumped into it.

13 March 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 3 - Sound Insulation & Shower Tray Installation

Following on from Part 2, the next step was to install some acoustic insulation.   

I applied proprietary butyl rubber sound-deadening panels of 2.5 mm thickness, although self-adhesive butyl roofing tape is basically the same thing and might work out much cheaper if you're on a strict budget.

The van body panels were locally cleaned using methylated spirits, and the acoustic insulation was cut to basic shapes as required and then simply pressed onto the painted surfaces, using a cloth and a small paint roller to smooth them out and ensure a good contact.

These butyl sheets are quite heavy and add mass to the thin body panels to act as vibration dampers.  Each insulation piece is fitted in the centre of every 'sub-panel', as are naturally formed between panel stiffeners and / or folds & creases in the metal.  You don't need anywhere near 100% coverage to kill noise due to panel resonance - even a relatively small piece in the correct location will be effective. 

acoustic insulation panels ...

It was quite cold on the day I added the sound insulation, so I borrowed the oil-filled radiator from our conservatory and used it to pre-heat the van before fitting the butyl panels, to ensure good adhesion.  After I'd fixed the insulation, I also left the radiator switched on during the following night.

06 March 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 2 - Stripping out, Rooflights and Partial Framing

Since the first post, I've been clearing out the van load space.  I'd originally thought of keeping some of the previous panelling but after I'd seen how the battens were fixed I decided to change the whole framing arrangement to provide additional support in some areas to suit my design.

It was quite a task and took several days to demolish the existing panelling and fitments to bring the vehicle load space almost back to the condition it was in when it left the factory.  Many of the panel and flooring screw heads snapped off when I tried to remove them so there was a lot of cursing and a fair amount of drilling & grinding required.

I didn't remove the floor panels at the front of the load space - there is a solid aluminium plate over this location covered with a rubber matting.  At the rear however, there was a thick plywood base which I stripped out to expose the steel floor of the van body.  

steel floor exposed at the rear

27 February 2021

Campervan Conversion - Part 1 - The Original Vehicle

We've decided to build ourselves a camper van, or rather to buy a van we could then fit-out as a camper.   

The initial idea is to retain much of the very useful functionality of a large van and so any major camper items in the load space (e.g. the bed) can be removed if required.

A couple of weeks ago, I looked at a few vans to get an idea of what we wanted for a base vehicle - one of our neighbours has a relatively new Transit but it's of standard height so immediately we climbed in the back we knew we needed a high-roof version.

In the end we bought a 2007 Ford Transit Mk 7 350 medium wheelbase (MWB) high-roof model, or the L3H3 version (length code = 3 and height code = 3) - many van configurations from other manufacturers are also described in this same way. 

That's what we think is our van specification - there are many references online for transit van layouts, but having measured ours we still can't quite reconcile the actual dimensions with the information we found.  In particular, the length of the load floor is around 3,200 mm but in the references this should be matched to a shorter wheelbase than the 3,750 mm we also measured.   

Anyway, we've now just about surveyed the vehicle to find out exactly what we have to work with ...

So this is 'definitely' the medium wheelbase version, although at just under 6.0 m only the jumbo vans are longer.  It's rear wheel drive and fitted with a 2.4 litre turbo diesel engine.

28 October 2020

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 4 - Finishing Works & Fit-out

With the building structurally complete and weathertight, finishing works could continue inside the conservatory at our leisure, and any remaining exterior jobs can be done as and when the weather permits.

Continuing with the diary from Part 3 ... 


laying carpet tiles on top of XPS insulation boards.  In this
picture, all the easy ones are down - the rest needed cutting to fit

08 October 2020

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 3 - The Building Structure

The long-awaited doors and windows duly arrived, and on the scheduled date too, so it was time to assemble and erect the building.   

The delivery coincided with a short spell of fine weather, with no rain forecast for at least three days, so the intention was to complete the basic build and make the conservatory weathertight within this timescale.

The photo diary continues from Part 2 ...

the windows and door on the north face were pre-assembled
and in position within a few hours after delivery !

04 September 2020

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 2 - Enabling Works

Following on directly from our Part 1 post, we've been continuing with the enabling works for the new conservatory.

The photo diary continues ...

the old guttering arrangement above my office door, 
also fed with a downpipe from the main roof

the new arrangement - a galvanised C-section purlin now carries the water to 
a tundish at the RH end. A second length of purlin below makes a face
 between them to add a board.   This board and the timber post structure on 
the right will provide a flat interface for the end of the conservatory to butt up against.


17 August 2020

Conservatory Design & Build - Part 1 - Enabling Works

We'd previously thought about erecting a conservatory, but the difficulties to be overcome at our location seemed too complex to address without a lot of time to spare.

But we're currently spending much more time at home - I'm not sure if our usual autumn holiday will even be possible this year - and of course we also haven't been spending money on travelling, so now seems as good a time as any to look at a conservatory.

We began exploring options a month or so ago.  A DIY conservatory kit was first considered, but the companies I approached were not very responsive to non-standard layout queries and technical requirements.  So I very soon lost patience with them.

Design and Project Management is actually my business, so I decided that by designing and sourcing everything myself, we would get exactly what we wanted and it would likely be much less costly too, without a middleman taking a cut.

Anyway, finalising the required layout and design was the first objective.  We looked at several possibilities from a double-ended lean-to layout of just 3.5 metres length, then a similar arrangement at 5.0 metres, before finally electing to bring the new building right up against the face of the existing extension, making it single-ended and 7.4 metres long in total.   There are a few challenges in connecting the buildings together, as will be seen in the photo diary commencing below.

For the basic conservatory layout, we considered either dwarf walls or full height glass all around, but in the end I designed a hybrid version with a dwarf wall on the northern aspect that's visible to passers-by, and using full height glass for the long western elevation which can't be seen from anyone outside the garden, so privacy is not an issue here.


basic drawing of the design ...

We looked into the planning requirements and concluded that this design met all the criteria to be considered 'permitted development', e.g. additional side width not greater than half the width of the original house, nothing protruding forward of the principal elevation fronting the road, single-storey conservatory with total height < 4 metres, total built area less than 50% of the total curtilage, etc.

Unlike house extensions for which planning permission is required, conservatories are a special case and are exempt from having to use materials of a similar type, style and colour as the original house, although we'll try to make the front elevation blend in as sympathetically as possibe.  Additionally, Building Regulations are not applicable to conservatories provided a few very simple rules are followed.

But if you're looking to build something similar, then you'll need to do your own research on planning requirements and regulations depending on the design, location and size of the conservatory.


16 May 2020

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 3 - Six on Saturday

This is the final instalment of our major project to demolish the old greenhouse, clear the space to make a paved courtyard area and build a new greenhouse alongside, re-using the glass panels.

Since the last post, I've terminated the incoming power cable from the mast, although I haven't yet ran an internal cable from the isolator and installed a socket point.  We've no pressing need for electricity in the greenhouse at this time of year, but in the autumn we'll likely install some LED lighting and the sockets can also be used for heated propagators etc next year. 

The aluminium louvre covers for the rear upper vents arrived, and these were fitted in five minutes.

isolator switch, and vent louvre from the inside ...


09 May 2020

Building Raised Beds - Six on Saturday ...

Yet another lockdown garden landscaping project ...

Inspired by some new raised beds I saw during a review of the Six-on-Saturday submissions recently, I decided to re-configure our main vegetable growing space, referred to as the 'side bed' in our garden layout

We have several types of vegetable seeds germinating in cells in the greenhouse, and our trays of leeks and onions sown earlier in the year are too small for planting out yet, so we've still plenty of time to prepare these particular vegetable beds.  We've already planted out garlic in the front bed, and sown radishes and spring onions in the cold frame.

Here's the 'before' picture of the space, although this was actually taken after I'd already relocated our large stainless steel table, which itself took a couple of hours what with first moving our quince tree (it's in a large planter), putting down a weed membrane, repositioning a few paving stones to fit under the table legs, emptying the shelf of all the bags of compost & stones, then shifting the table and replacing everything.


the side bed - that's our cold frame on the right, with the glass removed ...

To make the new raised beds, I still had a lot of pieces of unused wood lying around after the new greenhouse build, most of them offcuts of various lengths but also four full-length timbers.  I'd intended to use this wood to re-make the garden gate, but that job can now wait until later in the year at which time, hopefully, the timber yards will be open again.


02 May 2020

"Is this some kind of bust ?"


"Well, it's very impressive, yes, but we need to ask you a few questions".

In memory of the actress Gina Mastrogiacomo, who died in 2001 aged 39 ...  I first saw this film in a cinema in San Diego when visiting a friend who worked in the shipyards.


Anyway, at the end of a business trip to the Netherlands in early February of this year, my wife and I stayed in a hotel on the seafront at Scheveningen for our last night. 

Scheveningen - photo by CEphoto, Uwe Aranas

On the morning of the Sunday, before we drove to catch the overnight ferry departing from Ijmuiden to Newcastle, we visited a large and popular fleamarket in the centre of The Hague and one of the things we bought was a large plaster bust, for 20 euros.

It's a good size, around 550 mm (22") tall.  I thought it might be a copy of some famous sculpture, but if so then I couldn't find any reference to the original during an internet search after we'd brought it home.   I also researched the subject matter to see if I could identify a particular Greek or Roman goddess, but that also failed due to a lack of iconography - the girl in the bust is simply holding a shawl around her shoulders, and is not carrying anything.

We thought the bust would look good on a plinth as the centrepiece within our new circle in the front garden.

The only problem being, of course, that it's cast in plaster and not resin or concrete, so if it was left outside unprotected it would likely dissolve into a puddle of gypsum slurry after the first heavy rains.

Back in February we'd bought some specialist stone-effect spray paint and clear lacquer to protect it - the paints actually cost more than we'd paid for the bust - but it was too cold and wet for painting at that time.

The paint was to turn it back into its original colour, because it had been hand-painted by a previous owner and they hadn't made a very good job of it.  The lacquer is required so that the bust will shed water without it soaking in to the surface of the plaster and causing damage.

So, during a recent spell of fine weather, it was time to tackle this mini-project.

04 April 2020

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 2 - Six on Saturday

Following on from our Part 1 post last week, this is where we left the project.


The first post described the process up to completion of the basic timber framework. 

28 March 2020

Building a new Greenhouse - Part 1 - Six-on-Saturday

In the early spring of 2013, we built our large greenhouse using 14 shower panels we'd picked up on the cheap.   

This 12' x 6' 6" (3.6 x 2.0 m) building has served us extremely well for the last seven years, but during the winter we made a decision to demolish it and re-use the glass panels to make a similar smaller greenhouse in a slightly different location.  There were a few reasons for this :-
  • some of the greenhouse roof beams are suffering from rot which may soon become a structural problem, so they'd have needed replacing anyway.
  • we want to reclaim the corner of the garden where the larger greenhouse is currently sited.  With the greenhouse removed, it's a large paved area surrounded by a concrete plinth, so it's an ideal place to plant some shrubs either in large pots and / or by selectively removing a few of the paving slabs and planting directly into the ground.
  • by building a smaller greenhouse than the original, we can re-use all of the glass panels and make it glass-sided all around - at present, the back (north) wall is made from timber, and although we'd faced the panelling with reflective aluminium foil insulation, the back side of the greenhouse is still a little dark. 
I could have removed all the glass panels, and then just modified the existing carcass to make a smaller greenhouse, repairing the roof in the process, but I think that's actually much more work than building a new framework from scratch.  It would also have been very heavy to move, even though it's not far to drag it over to its new position.


So, before our recent holiday, I'd drawn up plans for a new 8' x 6' (2.4 x 1.8 m) greenhouse and prepared a base using paving stones I'd recovered from elsewhere in the garden.  

new greenhouse base area cleared and levelled ...

08 February 2020

Hard Landscaping in the Front Bed - Six on Saturday

Back in 2017, our neighbours gave us the outer ring sector stones from a brand new 2.7 metre (9') diameter paving circle - they'd only laid the two inner rings themselves in their back garden.  

I spotted the pieces being loaded into the boot of their car and asked what they intended to do with them, and they were actually going to take them to the tip !   These are cut from stone, not mould-formed in concrete, so I bet the full circle kit was very expensive and, of course, it being the outer ring they were discarding, they were throwing away around three-quarters of the weight of all the stone they'd paid for ...

Anyway, we managed to rescue them, and for the last couple of years these 24 sectors have formed a winding path across the length of the side bed (see also the satellite image on our garden layout post).

As with almost all our paving, the stones were simply laid loose onto levelled and compacted soil - no hardcore foundations or mortar bed fixings - because it's not the first time we've decided to relocate sections of paving.

the long and winding road, to the left...

And last week, we decided to move all these paving stones to the front bed and reconfigure them to their intended purpose, i.e. as a ring.  

02 November 2019

Building a Garden Composter ...

This year, as is fairly typical, we've bought in excess of 700 litres of multi-purpose compost for the garden, usually when there were 3-for-2 or other special offers on large bags at the DIY chains or garden centres.  Even on offer, the costs add up over the year for such a large quantity. 

If 700 litres seems a lot, then to put it into perspective I've just started off next year's garlic crop, with each seed clove in its own 2-litre pot until the spring, and there's 25 of them so there's 50 litres for a start ...

So we use the compost for starting off seeds, filling tubs & planters for flowers, shrubs & trees (generally mixed with topsoil and or / grit and pearlite) and for the tomatoes, cucumbers, sweet peppers and aubergines etc which we grow in large pots in the greenhouses.  When the greenhouse crops are finished in the autumn, we empty the compost from these pots onto the beds and borders as a mulch and to improve the soil structure.  The bed at the front of the garden sits on particularly heavy clay, and so every year we try to add more organic material.

But every year, we also need to dispose of large quantities of green and brown garden waste in the form of grass cuttings, hedge clippings, prunings, deadheaded flowers, fallen leaves and other dead plant material from all the vegetables and annuals.   We already have a small, upright plastic compost bin which can contain a couple of hundred litres of material, but it's certainly not sufficient for a season's worth of waste.

So, we decided to build a new two-bay composter in front of the large shed.

After looking over the location and producing an outline drawing, the first job was to lift some of the paving stones in this area into which the composter could be placed.   These are 450 x 450 mm flags, and we removed eight of them and cut another four almost in half to create a sunken composter base area of around 1,800 x 1,100 mm.


paving slabs lifted ....

20 October 2019

Cloning a Laptop Hard Disk Drive - Part 2

In the summer of 2016 I described how I cloned a failing HDD on my main laptop.

Three years later and I've repeated the process on the same machine, not because the HDD was failing again, but I wanted to increase the drive storage capacity.  Otherwise, the laptop is still fine, being a high-spec machine when it was bought more than six years ago now - checking current prices for a similar brand new laptop, I would still have needed to spend close to four figures to replace it.   

However, I was getting very close to the 1 TB capacity of the old hard disk, mainly because of the accumulation of an extra three years' worth of work projects.  Additionally, some of the engineering analysis software I use needs a lot of virtual memory space to write temporary files, literally many tens of gigabytes for larger models, so I couldn't allow the file storage to get too close to the disk capacity.

I suppose I could have archived some of the oldest projects to an external HDD to free up some space, but I find it very useful to have the data from these previous projects easily to hand.

I also decided to change the HDD to a solid-state storage device (SSD).  They've come on in leaps and bounds over the last few years, with available capacities now up to 4 TB or so, and the prices have been falling.  My laptop system architecture also allows data transfer at the maximum speed of the SSD - many older laptops will still work with a new SSD, but the data transfer rate may be limited by the motherboard design.


WD solid-state drive - there were other brands available,
 e.g. Samsung, but this was the best deal at the time ...

02 June 2019

Making a Garden Water Feature - Cascade

Hot on the heels of our waterwheel, we've now built another water feature to sit under the Cypress tree in the south-east corner of the rear garden.

This was an unusual project for me, in that there were no plans drawn up or even preliminary sketches - I had the idea for it one evening, made a start immediately and then everything was just built on the fly over the next few days.

We had five large stepping stones in the front garden bed, of irregular shapes, which I lifted and then hauled them around to the back.  I laid them out in a rough curve around and between some existing plants, overlapping the ends of the stones to establish the required start and finish points of the cascade.

I had some lengths of 2"x2" timber behind the shed, reclaimed from the old rabbit enclosures, and I used these plus other timber offcuts to make a simple carcass with five levels to carry the stepping stones.  I made the first drop much larger than the subsequent ones, to form a waterfall which pours onto the second stone down.   Each stone feeds the one below.  The fifth and lowest stone overflows directly into an underground sump from where it is recirculated back to the top using a pump.

The carcass tower was framed with offcuts of fence boards from our front fence build last year.  


carcass during construction