Today was not a great day.
The heater location is causing some challenges that I have not yet solved and it was frustrating to think about it today. The primary problems are: 1) access to the heater under the refrigerator cabinet is very limited. If something goes wrong I’m not sure we will be able to access the heater, and 2) the area under the van is so constricted I’m not sure how I can safely route the exhaust away from the fuel line. The fuel line enters the pump within 1″ of the exhaust so it is not as if I need to maintain a huge distance, but I’m just not sure how it will play out when things get permanently mounted.
After getting thoroughly frustrated by the situation, I decided to just rebuild part of the refrigerator cabinet. Originally the cabinet sat 6 3/4″ off the floor and that lower area was filled with a large drawer.
The drawer took us a ton of time to build because it had to fit around the wheel well (and it was our first one).
But if the heater is going in there, I want more room than 6 3/4″, though that would be enough to clear the heater body itself.
Anyway, I ripped off the base of the refrigerator cabinet and made a new one. I eventually realized that if I just made it a foot high, I could still have a drawer above the heater. Because the drawer can be removed, I will have a full 12″ to mess with the heater if necessary. That means I am only wasting a little space while still giving me plenty of room to access the heater. This made me feel a lot better than either limiting my access or wasting a large amount of space.
Making the base was relatively easy. Remaking part of the base after it fell off the table and broke was also relatively easy, though maddening as you can imagine.
As we have learned much more about building drawers now, the drawer was also reasonably quick to build.
I will also be going to bed a on a slightly positive note because I think I solved part of the problem under the van. I figured out how to make a bracket to hold the fuel pump that I think will keep the fuel line away from the exhaust. I ordered some additional exhaust tubing from the auto parts store today and it should arrive tomorrow so I will be able to see how it all fits together. The last major step will be to drop the fuel tank in order to access the auxiliary port. For that I am just waiting for a part from Ford for the fuel tank fitting.