Hi - PVC Questions

[Deleted member]

Looking good. I expect that A pillar cladding just unclips. Please keep posting lots of pics. Geoff.

 

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Thanks
Hopefully. Google will no doubt have the answer.

Please keep posting lots of pics. Geoff.

I will. Took a couple of videos as well, just need to render them at a higher speed, and then upload them.

 

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Glad the forum is back. I'll update this when I get a chance. Not as much progress as I'd like, but ramping up a bit now.

 

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Let's get this up to date.

The A Pillar trim did just pop off.

Spent most of today on it. Progress...

We've fitted the rear camera, run the wiring for it, removed the OEM radio, and fitted most of the wiring for it all.
I still need to add the power for the camera, and connect up a switch to turn on the rear camera.
I'm not going to bother fitting it to the reverse light, as I'll just have an override, and can turn it on at any time as I'll be towing a fair bit.
I just need to find a DPST switch that fits in the hole I've got from removing one of the others.

I found out why the rear LED lights don't work. Someone cut the wire.
I've also removed a fair amount of unused gubbins, but there's more to go. Found this beauty when removing stuff:

I'm now comfortable the wiring is mostly sorted, so I can move on to the interior design.

Also removed more of the panels in the rear:

Taught my 8 year old how to use a drill, and she drilled all the pop rivet heads off. Only minor issue when she managed to reverse the direction of the electric screwdriver, so was struggling a bit. Fixed that, and she was able to finish them all herself. That's what this is all about.

I also realised how big this is, when I had to use a ladder INSIDE the van to reach the high level brake light.

 

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On to the beginning of December.

I bought a Sony XAV-AX100 for this (and one for my Subaru as there was a good deal on eBay).
Fitted the Subaru one first as that was easier. Nothing exciting, but had to trim some of the fascias to make it fit.

I then moved on to fitting one to the van the following weekend.
It took a couple of mornings to fit all the brackets, trim the dash, and get it wired in nicely. Tested a few times, removed and replaced a few times to tidy things up, and it started to look decent. Seemed to work just fine, nothing unusual.

Tidied everything up, left it on while I was doing something else. A few minutes later it all went quiet.
After that, it refused to make any sound. There was power, but apart from a bit of static at start up, there was no sound at all.

I spent three full days in October swapping radios, wiring, everything. Both the Sony's would work in the Subaru, neither in the van. The original radio would work. After a few days of this, I realised the drivers door speaker had stopped working. I then checked continuity and all the wires checked out.
In desperation I went to Halfords and bought another radio.
This behaved the same as the Sony's with one exception. After a couple of minutes it threw up a message about an amplifier error. This suggested a wiring issue somewhere.

This was at the end of October, and I was driving to Cologne, Germany in a week. I was getting desperate so tracked down an automotive electrician who could look at it in a few days.
Perfect. I could put it back together, tidy up the other wiring, then leave it with him for a day.

I refitted the radio, and tried it hopefully. Nothing.
So I set about repairing the wiring, which was simply a 12v feed and ground that had been used for the plethora of other stuff I'd removed.
Refitted the dash parts, and turned everything on to make sure it would work. Started the van, and the ****ing radio worked!!!

I have no idea what I fixed, but the radio has now been working perfectly since the beginning of November.
To Germany and back, a few wiring changes, it hasn't given a moments problems.

November was a write off in terms of progressing. I was away for a week (in this), then had a member of staff off for two weeks paternity, then I was away for a week at another show.

This brings us to the middle of December.

 

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I'd used the reversing camera just by navigating the radio, as I'd run out of time with all the issues, and just wanted to leave it for a bit.
However, this was a pain, and there were no indicator lines to show how far away you were from the van.

This needed a simple switch wiring in, but it mean a chunk of the dash coming out again.
At the same time, I wanted to move the radio to the permanent live, as the van doesn't have an ACC position.

I sorted this out all at the same time.

However, I made a mistake, as the camera power was connected to the radio power. Even though the radio was off, the camera wasn't, so the battery would drain.

I've swapped the radio back, and will fix this at some point in the future.

The top switch is for the internal LED lights:

We can now work in the back whenever.

 

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Time to work out where everything is going to fit.

First attempt:

Kitchen on the right, seats on the left (as looking at the picture) means getting through to the back would be tricky.

After some head scratching and thinking, we decided to only put a single seat in the back, as we're keeping the 3 in the front anyway.

After some fettling, we've settled on this as a starting point:

That's sleeping area at the back with bunk beds, and a small cupboard against the rear bulkhead.
Currently we're not able to fit in a rear storage area, but we may be able to finesse that in, depending on what we use the are between the beds and front seat.
We may need to use that as storage, but we'd like to squeeze a toilet in as well.

We now need to decide on kitchen layout. This will be simple, as all we require is a hob, sink and fridge. We probably won't fit an oven.

We've also bought one window, as that was all that was in stock. The others will be here at the end of January.

Plan for the Christmas break is to fit the wall ply, mark out window locations, and hopefully fit the first window in the sliding door.
We'll also be making a detailed list of everything we want in there, so we can work out what will be stored where, how many lights we need, sockets, etc.

 

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Over Christmas, I spent some time in SketchUp playing around, and getting a basic layout sorted.

We can now start working out where the lights, sockets, wiring, plumbing and many other bits will go.

 

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New Years, started on the interior plywood lining.

Dug out the original walls to use as templates:

The van originally had load bearing mounts along the wall, which we don't need, so the new lining will be slightly different.
The good news is that the NS wall is almost exactly 2.4m, so a single piece of ply will span from the rear bulkhead to the door.
I can also re-use most of the mounting holes, so no need to drill extra holes anywhere.

The offside is obviously longer, so will require an extra piece.

Hoping to fit all the ply on Saturday and pull up the old floor so I can work out the last measurements I need.

 

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5th January, I tried to do some more panels today, but after one panel my fingers were numb.

Instead I've done some more interior planning. As the Audi has sold, I now have some funds to move this forward a bit more quickly.

I've started making a list of all the electrical items, and where they need to go. This is so I can run all the wires before the insulation is done, and bring them through the wall panels.

I realised that the awning needs to be mounted before doing the insulation. Fortunately the brackets are sold separately from the awning, so I've ordered those.
I'll order the heater next, as I need to get that in fairly soon.

I want underslung water and gas tanks, so need to check if these go through the floor before finishing that.

Really feel like we're making progress now.

 

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Jump forward to March, and some progress. We now have all the wall panels made, as well as most of the window frames. We would have had all the window frames, but it turns out I can't count....

Wall panels going in.

One of the best parts about this particular van is the aluminium channel that was run to mount the wall panels to.
You can see in the first picture above where the top panel bows in. This is where I've cut the channels as the window will fit there.
Below that, the panel stays much truer.
It will all line up once the window frame is made and the wall attached to that.

Window frames being checked for size:

And glued:

My wife appears to have intentionally taken photos of me not working.... :lol:

Proper workmen pose:

Ed (the carpenter) reckons about two days for stud work, then a couple more for the cladding as that needs to be done carefully.
All the measurements are done and load points have been identified, so we now need to fit the windows, and get the insulation done.
Then we can run the wiring and plumbing, and then we'll be ready to fit the stud work.

 

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Yesterday, we started fitting the windows.
No going back now...

Not the straightest cuts, but acceptable for a first attempt. The second was much straighter.

We cut both the NS window holes, tweaked the frames to fit, and bonded on the frames. I've gone with pulling the van walls flat, rather than cutting the frames to match the van.

Clamped on using the other two frames to pull everything properly flat.

Will have to use some cut offs on the other side.

Back at it today.

 

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As we only have space for a single seat in the rear, I'd been wondering about fitting a seat belt. Then this popped up on eBay:

That will need to be fitted quite soon, as the brackets will need to be fitted before the floor insulation and flooring.

It's surprisingly comfortable too.

 

[david.c.hall]

Sparrow.
VERY SCARY seeing you use an angle grinder without EVERY bit of paintwork covered up!!
All those spark are minute hot metal pieces that will stick to the paintwork (mainly too small to see) and then rust.
David

 

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That's just cleaning up the edges.
Also, most of it's going to be covered in vinyl.

 

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We've done a few more bits since then.

After fitting the windows, we spent a whole day making window surrounds. No pictures that I can find.

Then it was insulation time. I weighed up the cost of getting it done, and the time taken, and decided to pay the guys at One Insulation to do the job. They were great.







The whole process only took an hour or so, it was amazing.

I can't recommend them highly enough.

 

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We then decided to take the van away for the bank holiday weekend. We have nothing in it, so simply chucked a few mattresses and blankets in, and went down to Weston-Super-Mare as we knew we could park on the beach.


The girls had great fun making their beds.

We thought we could sleep on the beach, but you can't unfortunately, so we found a local car park and stayed there.

This is why we're doing this:

 

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Lack of time has meant not as much progress as we would have liked, but we're getting on with things a bit now.
I had planned to do all the wiring next, but we'd like to use it a bit more, so tweaking things around.

I've got the wood batons for the floor, and the kingspan arrives this week. I'll make a start on that next week.
Once the floor is down, we're going to fit the rear lower wall panels, and make the lower bunks.
I can then fit the batteries under the bed, and start the wiring.

This will make it easier to fit us all in for more impromptu weekends away.

 

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Last weekend I carved out a couple of hours to fit the batons:

Seems I only took this one picture. Slack. I finished them all.

 

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I had a full day at it yesterday.

We have the brackets for a Fiamma awning, but when we tried to fit them, the rear bracket on the roof was missing. It looks like someone had managed to reverse under something high enough to miss the roof, but low enough to rip of the post! That was some going.
Needless to say we didn't spot that until we were on the roof.

Fortunately the spare part was only £7 from Citroen. While I was there, I asked them to reset the service indicator, as the mileage was flashing constantly. I'd had it serviced earlier this year when I noticed this, and worked out that this was what the flashing meant.
However, it was flashing because I'd removed a unit under the radio I thought was redundant. Turns out the CAN bus needs it.

I booked in to a local repair place yesterday morning to have it repaired.


While they were doing that, I stripped the dash to fit the unit I'd accidentally removed.

Then it was on to fitting the floor insulation. Progress shots.


I then started to fit the floor back down, but the screws I had weren't long enough. I've got some ready to fit the floor back down today.