El Nino 2010

Digging out the van last night was fun.

Skiing 4ft of winters' offerings is great....

..... but digging out after such a storm is a different story.

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.

The Van

Well, it happened. I did my last job in the truck and took a step back to get one last look at the "old girl" before pulling all the tools off the wall. Within' minutes, all the tools were in boxes and I was lying underneath the truck unbolting the bracket that holds the tool board in place. We had a good run ole' girl, but it's time to move on.


Welding inside the van is both scary and exciting. Scary with sparks and smoke but exciting as things progress and ideas come to reality. The bracket that held the tool board in the truck was modified to work in the van. It also got "beefed up" a little bit as the tool board is going to be a bit bigger/heavier. After the welding, it was time to get some sleep as the next two days would be "full on" trying to get things in order so I could actually fix some bikes out of the thing. After a 10 hour day Wednesday and a 15 hour day on Thursday, the van was good enough to work out of. Completely done.... not even close, but workable.

Faze 3

OK, so there have been WAY more that 3 phases of working on the van, but I think that the majority of the work has happened on 3 days. Yesterday was one of those days.



The piano hinge was installed on the work bench. The hinge is 56" long with 56 screws to hold it in place. I'm glad to have experience mounting ski bindings as I'm sure it helped with the successful layout and installation of the hinge. Well, that and some advice from my dad who runs a successful home repair business on the east coast.


Next was making some access holes in the bench for the support cables and installing a latch to keep the bench up when in drivin' instead of wrenchin'.


The empty beer bottles on the previous photo were the result of getting these bolts in place. Getting this bolt fed through the side of the door frame was no easy task... trust me. The access hole for the bolt is around the right side (where you can't see) and up a tad. There is very, very limited room inside the door frame where the bolts need to go and they just loved to slip out of my fingers and fall down to the bottom of the door frame which just happens to be 20" deep and fully enclosed. The only way to retrieve the bolts was with a telescoping magnet... a super lucky impulse buy at the hardware store. I probably dropped that bolt down into the confines of the door frame no fewer than 15 times.

Once the support bolts were in place it was time to put them into action and run the cables. With a 750lb load limit the bench is ready to take on some frozen bolts, stuck pivot pins or anything else that needs some serious "elbow grease" behind it.

Then it was time for more layout work. This is the finalest of final places that the tool board will pivot.... or at least it's damn close.

That's it....

.... new rule! No more working on the van without drawings! I've wasted an incredibly huge amount of time installing, removing and re-installing misc. things into, out of and back into the van. Thought I could shortcut. Thought I could save some time. Thought I'd just "pull it off". Well..... I thought wrong.

I've also realized (and remembered from doing my truck) that the project of converting the van into a rolling bike shop isn't something that's going to happen quickly. It takes time to make things right. Make things efficient. Make things work for the long haul.

On a positive note... things are happening. I took the time to clean up a bit inside and install some shelving. Interesting project. Drilling lots of holes to tie in the shelving into the sides of the van. Gotta keep things in check while in "mobile mode" on the highways and byways of the greater Truckee area ya know. Also, got some great ideas on how to support the workbench, my next undertaking, from a customer the other day. We did some heavy duty brainstorming on how to make things work and I'm ready to apply some of them.... after yet another trip to the hardware store of course.

The Van... Part 1

It starts with an idea. You stand at the back of that van and ponder the possibilities.... sometimes for way too long.

Things start to happen. Ideas come to light. You measure. Make marks. Theorize. Erase marks. Re-measure. Re-mark. Re-theorize..... sometimes for way too long. To the curious bystander, this process must look incredibly boring and painfully nonproductive.

Aah. The pivot. Designers of full suspension bikes aren't the only ones loosing sleep over just EXACTLY where the pivot point should be. It's equally as important on a 100lb wall of tools that will swing into or out of the work space.

At the end of the day, you have little to show for your efforts. The pile of reciepts on my desk would indicate one of the greatest undertakings of mankind. The inside of the van, however, looks like someone merely left some wood in the back and dropped a toolbox in the front, kicking its contents around before leaving at end of a very long day.