With only a few hours and some good weather today I snuck out and started roughing out the shelf idea I’ve had to solve a few problems.
Special, made to fit, blinds for the windows in Movano (Ducato) shape vans work really well but they are £800+ for a set. Thats just way too much for me, especially because they offer no insulation, they are just blackout blinds.
So I have a plan to get a set of curtains with sun reflecting fabric on one side and dark grey/black on the other. Hopefully I can find some with some wooly insulation too. I want to hang these from the top edge of the front window so they hang to the floor just infront of the steering wheel and dash. This will mean we can spin the seats around and still use them.
I’ve also got myself a security/reversing camera system that I want to see while driving and also while parked up. So the curtain will need to be between the camera screen and the wind screen to be useful.
But…
There is nothing along the top edge of the windscreen to attach to. Either the camera screen or the curtains. So I’ve come up with an idea to create a small shelf screwed into the grab handles and somehow up into the roof structure.
I started by holding up some off-cut bits of ply to get the rough width right and settled on 24cm x 165cm. I then carefully measured and trimmed till I ended up with the shape needed for the shelf. I cut back a rectangle to get the screen to see as close to the windscreen as possible and curved the edges to make it a little nicer.
Its a strange shape with a potentially thin weaker bit near the middle but its not going to be holding anything heavy. So now I have the shape i can cut it out of the expensive green ply.
But before i do that, i need to get the brackets right which meant taking down the head lining temporarily. With this down i could see where the roof stucture could be connected to. But it still requires a bit of guesswork on the angles needed.
The bracket to connect to the grab handles was easier to prototype with cardboard as it was visible and easy to rapidly iterate the design. I’ll CAD these up and use test bits to see how close to a perfect fit i get before the final prints.
