the van.... again

Well, it's back to more fun with van conversions. It starts with an idea. You move some stuff out of the way and begin the process of throwing in some miscellaneous tools, doing some measurements and thinking about how you want/need things to work.

This time she's gettin' a wall with access door between the cargo area and drivers compartment. To start, we'll build a framed wall out of punched angle steel right behind the seats. The wall is similar to something you probably have in your house complete w/ a bottom plate, studs and top plate.... kinda.

Layout marks for anchoring the bottom plate.

My dad takes over in an attempt at, what I started to call, "the bastard screw". No, my dad's not wearing a headband. That's a headlight. You really want to have a headlight when your doing van conversions at night. After anchoring the top and bottom plates we frame in the door and call it quits for the day/night.

The next day, my help heads to the coast as I soldier on. I really believe in positive thinking but as much as I tried, when I opened the doors in the morning the wall didn't automatically build itself overnight. Moving on, it's a new day. I'm well hydrated with coffee, well rested and best of all.... I have daylight!

After getting all the studs in the wall, I built another shelving unit, re-routed the compressor line and anchored an existing set of shelves in place where the compressor previously lived.

I'll give it a "test drive" for a few days before we commit to sheeting the wall with peg board and installing a door. The framework is all bolted together making it easy to tweak things slightly if need be.