Category: Conversion

Diary Of A Camper Conversion 

Today I finished off the baltica system wiring back to the control panel. This started with running a 10 core cable from under the sink back to the fuse board. This is far more cores than needed but will give me a lot of flexibility in future. This allowed me to extend the baltica control panel wiring.

Diary Of A Camper Conversion 

Today started with beautiful clear skies after not raining all night. The floor was dry and while it was super cold it was a good day to do stuff under the van. So I took this opportunity to finally install the burner.

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

Today’s the day we find out if our attempted lamination worked out. It’s had a whole week to set and so I find myself back at Jord’s workshop shifting half a ton of sand and cement off the boards. And on first impressions it seems to have gone very well! It is certainly stuck very securely to the plywood. 

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

Previously I ran the hot water pipes run from the engine bay back to under the van. Now my rivnut tool has arrived I can make this installation more permanent. No matter how high temperature the zip ties claim to be I’m much prefer to have metal pipe brackets holding them in place. 

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

Today was all about the electrics. I actually started by slightly redoing a couple of the cables from yesterday. There is no point running loads of ground cables all the way back to the fuseboard for every circuit when I can just share local ground.

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

For this job I needed help. 

I’m using the worktop edge as the load path for the drawbridge bed. With close to 200kg resting right on the edge, standard kitchen cupboard worktop want going to cut it so I’m using 25mm thick plywood. But this is not waterproof or very durable. I could stain and wax or varnish it, but it would still look like plywood. My last van was built from bits of wood found in skips, but for this one I’d like to class it up a bit. So I’m going to laminate the worktop to get as close as I can to a factory looking finish. 

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

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.

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

I put the green end of the bed cabinet on a while ago, and I cut out the door but I didn’t have any hinges at the time. Well now they have arrived that was the first job. I have some really nice black flush catches and for some reason I didn’t use it on this door. Oh well one random latch it is!

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

Having settled on the position and orientation of the main tank, I could start connecting up pipes. In the process of figuring out its position I did start cutting and connecting pipes yesterday, but having changed my mind, they will need re-doing. Luckily the pipes I already cut are only short, and I need to order 1 more length of hose anyway due to the length of my system. 

Diary Of A Camper Conversion

This morning was devoted to installing the gas hob in the work surface by the sliding door. This was one of those jobs that was measure 5 times, get ready to cut, and then measure again just to make sure. But once it was in I had a real burst of motivation as it’s one of the first visible appliances installed. As a side bonus it also meant one of the cardboard boxes in my shed could now go in the bin!

But back to the heating system…