Author: PowderHunds

Today was a productive day test fitting and installing some larger items.

The refrigerator cabinet, the very first thing I built, went in today and we don’t even have any plans to remove it. This step required screwing it on to its base and then making sure the base was ready to install. We added some more insulation around where the heater will be and also on the other side where there is a vent for the refrigerator coils. I ended up making two trips to Ace to get one length of dryer vent as I got the wrong size initially. (I did buy what I wanted the first time because I thought it was going to be the right size, but it was not so I turned right around and went back! They were not very surprised to see me.)

The cabinet is bolted to the walls, but it is not screwed into the floor yet. Still, at this point it is likely to stay. We have often installed something and then removed it to work on one thing or another in the past, but this one might stick. We even put the refrigerator in and made a few final adjustments to the insulation and venting so it will be ready to go when the cabinet is in.

While we worked this morning we helped both dogs up on the bed. They didn’t move for hours.

We also test fit the new electrical cabinet to make sure it all came out right. It seems fine so it went back to the finishing shop to get polyurethane.

With the refrigerator cabinet in I started looking at the last steps to install the microwave cabinet. On this cabinet I decided to make one significant change. I had purposely cut the floor short so I could inlay some cool trim on one side, but the short edge was going to make it very difficult to install. I decided to forgo the fancy trim in favor of a secure install so I had to cut and sand a new piece. I got very lucky as I found an almost perfect size piece in our scrap pile so it was fairly quick to get ready. It is now in the finishing shop with Sara.

During the day we also cut and sanded a few pieces for drawer faces and a cover for the heater. All of this gets cleaned up, sanded, and then into the gear room, which we have taken over for a finishing shop. It helps that we can run an electric heater in there and keep it warm enough for all these things to dry quickly. It is also separate from the garage, which gets super dusty when we can’t work outside.

Today was the day to rebuild my electrical cabinet. As I mentioned yesterday, we decided version 1 was a little too small. Somehow I think I have now made it too big, but we will get it in the van tomorrow to test. I don’t know what we are going to do with the first one. Let us know if you want it!

Building this size cabinet is pretty much an all-day project for me. If I had a larger table saw it might be easier, but any cut over 23 1/2″ I have to make with a circular saw and it takes a lot more time to set up and try to get it square and straight. This box is probably the least square thing in the van but I just didn’t care any more. Nothing I cut seemed to come out quite right but even with some extra trimming it wasn’t getting much better. We can figure out a way to clean up or disguise the edges if they are not quite flush. It just needed to get done.

It is the same stair-step design as before and it will have a lid that hinges from the back. The batteries will sit on the right side and everything else will get arranged on the left and/or above the batteries. It takes a few days to finish the cabinet with stain and poly so I won’t be able to start putting things in for at least a couple more days. Plus, a lot of the install has to be done in the van because so many of the pieces are fixed in place.

We also spent a little time on other projects. I cleaned up the galley cabinet under-sink doors and started to put them in. The galley extends well into the sliding door opening so we have designed the outer door to fold down so it can act as a small outside counter when we are camping in good weather.

This evening we also watched the women’s half pipe at the X Games. Those ladies absolutely rock! It would have been nice to have the van done so we could be in the audience at Aspen, but it still feeds our stoke to get out there and start snowboarding full time. As my best trick in the half pipe was forgetting my name for 5 hours, I guess I will have to pass on any half pipes we encounter on our travels.

Today was not much of a day for me in terms of van building. I worked out with a personal trainer in the morning and was exhausted the rest of the day. Not enough sleep earlier this week and a solid day of snowboarding yesterday must be catching up to me.

The only van decision I made today was that I wanted to rebuild the electrical cabinet because I want to make it larger/higher. The electronics might all fit inside the current version, but I don’t want everything crammed too tight. Sara and I spent a bunch of time with the components moving things this way and that in the current cabinet and it doesn’t make sense to force it in there when we can fix it now. I knew going in to the first build that I might change it, but it was still frustrating to feel like I have wasted the time.

Sara did get some other work done while I took a nap. She worked on curtains for the van that will hang under the bed in front and over the bed in back. She also finished installing screws in the drawer slides and prepping more boards for finishing.

Instead of productive van pictures, here are a couple hund pictures.

Finally, if you have made it this far on a boring post today, you deserve a little treat. Here are four seconds of interesting video from yesterday!

As I mentioned yesterday, I have been thinking too much about the electrical cabinet without actually building anything. Today I built the cabinet. If it doesn’t work, I guess I can build a new one!

The considerations that have gone into this cabinet include: the batteries, the inverter, the other electrical pieces, how the driver’s seat swivels when the cabinet is installed, and how to access the parts inside when needed. All of those factors led me to build a cabinet that looks like a stair step. If I just build a large box, I won’t be able to swivel the driver’s seat and sit comfortable. Given that the front seats are really the only seats, making them functional is pretty critical!

Here is what I ended up building today.

Sara worked on a few different projects today, including starting her boot rack. The goal is to build a boot/glove rack that can sit in the bottom of our wardrobe. The piece de resistance is that we are going to tap it into the heater blower so that when we open the valve it will blow hot air into our gear! The Powderhunds need to start each day with warm, dry boots!

That’s it for tonight. We have to pack up because it looks like tomorrow and Friday might be a powder day! The area circled on the left is Anthony Lakes. The area on the right is Brundage, in McCall, ID where we hope to end up after the season. It might be a cold night in the van without the electrical system finished (to run the heater), but it also might be time to hit the road for a couple days!

Lots of small projects today and more thinking about the electrical cabinet.

Sara continued staining and applying polyurethane to all our finished pieces while I started turning my attention again to electrical things. One aspect of the van wiring has been bugging me and so I convinced Sara to help me work on it. Facing an annoying project is always better with a partner!

In one place the wiring has to pass through a pre-existing hole in the van. The hole is a decent size – probably 1 1/2″ – but the edges are abrupt. Not exactly sharp, but I could see the wiring getting worn over the life of the vehicle. Unfortunately, the only way to address it was to pull most of the wiring back out. I had ordered a piece of large, 2″ split conduit from O’Reilly’s so the goal was to get that conduit into the hole and get the wires back through. As I had already zip-tied and taped a bunch of the wire together, we had to undo that as well. It was not as bad as I feared and Sara’s help made it much better.

In the afternoon I went back to thinking about the layout in the electrical cabinet. I cut a piece of cardboard to the size of the cabinet and started arranging the batteries and the inverter and trying to visualize all the other parts and wiring that would complete the system. Because the cabinet is going directly behind the driver’s seat, I also need to think about leaving space for the seat to rotate. I probably spend too much time thinking. At this point I think I just need to start building it out and see how everything fits.

Late in the afternoon we hit the movies. Having no jobs and living with my retired parents means semi-regular Tuesday trips (half-price days) to the movie. We saw The Post, which is excellent, though I wonder if the themes of the movie would resonate as much in a different political climate.

This evening we kept working on small projects. Sara did some more staining while I added some final insulation to the refrigerator base.

Finally, we installed the drawer slide into the microwave cabinet.

Today we continued working on various projects relating to the galley cabinet and the wardrobe. First, I added an electrical box to the back of the cabinet where we have decided to add another outlet.

After adding that box I started working on the drawer facings. All the drawers will have a cover of 1/4″ Baltic birch with some cool trim. We have designed the cabinet so that all the drawers sit flush with the face of the cabinet. The drawers do not stick out beyond the cabinet at all.

While I was doing that, Sara was working on her dog food drawer. She has an idea to make a top that will sit in/on the large drawer on the end of the galley cabinet with holes in it for dog food bowls. She didn’t take any pictures, but I’m sure we will have more later.

Over lunch we probably spent nearly an hour searching for drawer pulls. Our goal is to have something as unobtrusive as possible so we are looking at some type of flush pull or a knob that pops out. There seem to be a fair number of options, though the pop out knobs all ship from Hong Kong/China/Korea and would arrive between February 7 and March 11! That’s not terribly helpful.

After those projects we started working on the walls of the wardrobe. The wardrobe will be a floor to ceiling closet on the driver’s side in front of the refrigerator. We expect to hang ski clothes and store our boots in there most of the time. It is 18″ deep, 75″ high, and will be around 33″ wide. This project has been somewhat daunting because, like the microwave cabinet, the back of the wardrobe walls have to fit the curve of the van. We only have one sheet of 3/4″ plywood and I don’t want to screw it up! Fortunately, having fit the microwave cabinet I was now more confident that we could get the curves right. We went slow in our trimming and I’m very happy with how it turned out.

We also worked on a practice counter top today. Sara cut a piece of scrap plywood to size and then measured out the hole for the sink. She previously made a cardboard template for the hole and it worked perfectly.

This stainless steel Dometic sink is very cool. The glass lid folds down so it sits nearly flush with counter. Inside is a folding faucet that you can rotate up when the lid is open. The one, not insignificant flaw in the product, is the documentation. Dometic is a Swedish company and apparently the Swedes don’t care about comprehensible instructions. There is a line drawing with tons of unhelpful measurements that are not explained at all. Fortunately, Sara did not even see the drawings before she made her template so she just made a nice, easy circle. The circle appears to work just fine and it is unlikely we will try to use anything in the ridiculous drawing.

 

Our trip snowboarding yesterday was the final step so we could continue working on the heater. Plumbing the fuel lines for the heater required the tank to be virtually empty so we have been driving around for a while to use up the tank. We were actually low enough yesterday that we took an extra gallon of gas in case we ran out. We did not, but we used the extra gallon!

It was a fairly cold day here so we went down to our friend’s RV garage so we could be indoors. Unheated, but at least indoors and out of the wind. We drove the van up on some blocks to give us a little more working room underneath, then we started taking out the bolts that hold up the tank. I wasn’t 100% sure where the auxiliary port was, but I had a general idea. We took out the rear and middle brackets and blocked it up slightly before taking out the front bracket. The fuel lines and hoses near the front have sufficient flex that we could lower the tank a few inches there without hurting anything. When it is empty the tank is remarkably light.

I located the  area with the main fuel lines and started looking for the extra port by taking a picture of the top and then inspecting the picture. This method allowed me to confirm the auxiliary port was there.

I recognized the port because it looks almost exactly like the part I got from Ford to insert into the port. The only difference is that the piece currently in the tank is plugged and the piece supplied by Ford has a barbed fitting. Otherwise they are identical. A little toying with it revealed that it was just a matter of sliding back the cover and pinching the middle of the piece to pull it off.

The auxiliary port has a 1/4″ fitting, but the fuel line that comes with the heater is much smaller. I had to run to O’Reilly’s to pick up a bit of 5/16″ fuel line, which fits the 1/4″ fitting and also, fortunately, fits over the smaller fuel line provided with the heater. With that setup I could prep the port and just snap it on.

With the fuel line attached to the tank it was time to route the fuel line to the heater pump. Sara put in a couple plus nuts under the van so we could attach cable guides to hold the fuel line.

With the location we installed the heater, it was really quite simple. The fuel line is only about 3′ total from the tank to the fuel pump.

When I earlier installed the heater in the van I left the fuel line that enters the heater hanging down. The two fuel lines, the one from the heater and the one from the tank, meet at a small fuel pump. The instructions say the pump should be mounted between 15 deg. and 35 deg. and the fuel line after the pump should continuously rise so I built a bracket to hold the pump in a workable position. (From the installs I have seen, a lot of people get by just fine without following those instructions very closely.) The bracket just bolts into an already threaded hole in the frame.

The final step was to hook up the wiring to the pump. I also slipped a heat shield sleeve over the fuel line because it is comes close to the exhaust and I don’t want to die in what my parent’s would call a tragic van fire and my friend’s would call the obvious result of installing my own heater.

So, what’s next? The physical installation is almost complete. The only remaining step is the exhaust pipe has to be routed in some acceptable fashion. I am trying to get another length of exhaust pipe because  the kit only included 3′ and I want to run it either across the van or behind the tire. Either way I need another few feet of exhaust pipe. Unfortunately the 1″ pipe I got from O’Reilly’s is too rigid so I need to call the company and see if they can send a longer piece of the pipe they supply (and I keep forgetting to call or I would already have it).

After that is done it is just a matter of hooking up a battery and giving it a try! The heater is obviously a mission critical component for winter travel so having it installed puts us one step closer to on the road!