Day 71: Back to the grindstone

After a weekend off it was back to the van conversion this evening, and had I not run out of PSE timber I would have completed the boxing in of the offside wheel arch and the gas filler pipe. Still barring four PSE cross pieces the boxing in is done and I have the top pieces cut and ready to screw in place.


I have put a partition in the box separating the wheel arch section from the gas filler section so that I can stuff the wheel arch section with insulating material.

Whilst we we away at the weekend we noticed a small water stain on the ceiling by the corner of the rooflight indicating a leak. So it was a case of scrambling up onto the roof to investigate, interestingly the non-seating bedding compound has skinned over but is still soft underneath. Anyway having inspected the rooflight I hopefully managed to locate the source of the leak a small 5mm section in one corner which appeared to be devoid of bedding compound. Slipping the mastic tube nozzle into existing compound and pumping material in until it oozed out should have solved the problem, though to be on the safe side I ran an additional bead around the whole perimeter of the rooflight. 

Tallying up we have now had the van for 71 days, of that I have physically worked on it for 39 days and put in about 150 hours of work. Somewhere I recall reading that commercial panel van conversions take about 400 man hours and they have all the drawings, dimensions and cutting patterns already done so at the moment I don't feel that I am doing too badly.

Having sold a Polar Bear at the weekend, I have ordered the electrical managment and distribution system for the van. It wasn't cheap but when I looked at putting an equivalent system together out of piece parts it became glaringly obvious that buying a complete system was more cost effective and easier to install. I found a motorhome converter who advertise the systems on ebay at a significant saving to all the other suppliers I could find plus they include the water tank probe which many don't.