I can't explain why, I just knew. I made the trip to Indiana where she was on a small car lot, took her for a test drive, now completely convinced, and I bought her on the spot...
She had 116,000 on the odometer, 5.9L engine, very clean and not too many exterior dents or dings. She has some rust, and that will be something I'll be working on as we travel, but nothing too severe...
When I got her home I cleaned up the cargo area, stripped out the headliner, all plastic cover panels, the sun visors, and started construction...
First the floor... I opted for a very basic floor design for one main reason, to limit the loss of height in the van to a minimum. I am 6'2"and I wanted to squeeze every fraction of an inch I could out of it. So I installed a layer of Reflectix over the entire floor, and then cut 22/32" OSB tongue and groove boards and attached them to the van floor around the edges...
I used three pieces of OSB in order to keep the seams running across the length of the floor surface and to utilize the strength of the tongue and groove feature of the board, rather than to run them lengthwise. I felt that seams running along the length of the traffic areas could be problematic, and I was well pleased with the results after the build...
I used cardboard and thick paper templates to cut all of the boards to fit around the vertical ribs, fuel filler box, wheel wells, etc...
If there's one thing I learned from this build is that nothing in the van is straight. I had originally thought years ago that I would build a tiny house on a trailer, which would have been much simpler working with definitive dimensions, but when you are working on a cargo van, every dimension changes from front to back, side to side, top to bottom, and rib to rib...
Next project, the walls...
I was so confused about what type of insulation to use. I had seen so many different methods and materials used that I was really struggling. I must have batted this around in m y head for weeks before I finally decided to do it my way , based on what I would need, and just move forward...
I knew that Reflectix would be good to keep the radiant heat out of the van and from what I read about it's properties, it works best when you allow an air gap between the wall itself and the Reflectix, but how to achieve that air gap was a bit challenging...
Here was my solution...
I cut small polyurethane blocks from some smaller foam panels I purchased and used Great Stuff to glue them to the inside walls of the van...
By the way , I wanted to say that I used the gap and crack filler type of Great Stuff (orange in color), not the cans with straws. If you are going to use very much at all, I highly recommend purchasing the gun to go with it. It worked really well, you can control the amount and flow, and you can leave the can attached for as long as a month without having to worry about it setting up and ruining the gun. When you're ready to clean it, they have a can of cleaner that you screw on and spray it though the gun. I used it man y times and had no problems...
I also had to create two vertical ribs, one for each side of the van in order to attach the stringer boards to so I added them at this point. I found that using four 2X2 boards side b y side allowed me to get the proper curvature and width I needed without too much trouble. I created a cardboard template for the ribs, then transferred the dimensions to the four boards, cut each board separately, then reassembled them with wood screws and adhesive. They worked really well...
 |
I saw many, many videos of people who used Great Stuff to fill all of the vertical ribs and any gaps at the floor or ceiling. I didn't think this was a good idea. It may give you more of an insulation R value, but the trade off was the potential trapping of moisture in areas that were intended to breathe, have some airflow, so I always worked with the concept that she was going to be able to breath, even if I lost R value...
After I had the Reflectix in place, I cut 2" foam insulation boards to fit inside the Reflectix and kept it a tight fit...
Initially I only added one stringer board per side to hold it all in place. I was still unsure of exactly where the wall cabinets were going to need to be attached and I'm really glad I did that. I ended up moving the configuration of the stringers before I was done...
You can see in the photo above that I didn't add the foam boards to the extended cab area of the van. I treated that area very differently to try and optimize space and to create an anchor point to stabilize the cabinets. I will get into that later...
I had also been working to create a virtual model of what I thought I wanted the van to be. This ended up being a very critical element in the process. I used the free version of Google's Sketch-Up and many of the existing models for things like propane tanks, batteries, solar panels, and 5 gallon buckets which helped me to get the real scale of the project. Here are a couple of snapshots of my drawing...
The final build ended up different, but very close to what I had sketched out. The drawing helped me to keep in mind the things like the electrical wiring, solar panels and controls, and cabinet design during he build process. Sketch Up allows you to rotate the image in 3D so you can really get a feel for the space. It was really helpful and not that difficult to do, there's a slight learning curve but you'll really benefit from some type of scaled drawing of the space you want to create...
I decided that I wanted to put some type of flooring in underneath the cabinets and all even if I decided later to change it. Flooring, like insulation, caused a lot of head scratching. Still undecided I just happened upon a remnant of vinyl flooring at the local Lowe's store and bought it. I really wanted wood flooring, but I thought that after the build I could install wood in the traffic areas and the vinyl would be good to keep in the cabinet areas. However I ended up leaving the vinyl and not installing the wood flooring, and it worked good for me...
It was now time to add the stringers since I had a pretty good idea of how the cabinets were going to be built. I used self-drilling wood to metal screws which attached directly to the metal ribs, and they held really well. The two ribs I made for the front two supports were attached to the existing ribs with heavy duty self-drilling screws as well...
Now it's time to build the cabinets...
Continue on to Part II...
No comments:
Post a Comment