Extra hands -painting

Sunday 23rd July

Only a week and a half until planned departure, so getting a bit worried now...

Alan has volunteered to help with painting, so the plan is to clean and paint all the white sections of the exterior wall, finish the bed, and finish as much as possible with the electrics. I will restrict this post to the painting, can't get it all done this weekend.

Cleaning
First job, clean. This goes quite easily. I bought some stuff called 'Caravan Cleaner' from Aldi, it smells nice and does the job. Needs thorough rinsing though as it does leave a residue.

Windows
Second job, get the windows out. This is why I had not properly installed the frames, this was quite straightforward I tried my best not to damage the rubber seals. These all came home with me for cleaning.

Rails
Third job, remove rails. This is a bit messy, as involves removing mastic. I am an expert now (chisel, white sprit, meths) but this is not fun.

Primer and first coat
Now ready for primer. I bought Tekaloid paint, the primer is a greeny grey colour. It goes on well with a roller, but is really sticky and hard to get off hands. The instructions say leave for 4 hours, in the end Alan starts the top coat probably about 2-3 hours later with no trouble.
Topcoat is Tekloid T318 coach enamel. It is obvious 1 coat is not enough, and Alan manages 2 by end of play. We left the front panel.

Hometime
The weather forecast had been dodgy all day but we got away with it, dark clouds start gathering at about 7pm though. We try to protect as best as possible, but the windows have to stay out overnight! I cut up and use masking tape to attach plastic sheeting, don't have enough so use a waterproof blanket on the back. At least its not windy.
Go home and at about 10pm it starts hammering down with rain. Nothing can be done, just fingers crossed.
In the morning I find the blanket fell down, but the rest is OK, and no evidence of water ingress 😅

Topcoat
Quite straightforward to finish off the paint now with a second coat.

Windows
I cleaned up all the rubber seals in the morning, and reattaching them goes well with the staple gun. The top rails need to go back on before hanging the windows, and the weather has turned against us. Cleaning up the rails is just the pits. Anyway, I put them up without mastic and minimal screws, this will need redoing when the weather is more cooperative!
The cleaned up windows and fittings all then go back in fairly easily, only problem was me chipping a corner off the bathroom window - I manage to get a good seal with Gorrilla glue.

I have left the lower rails off, this joins the section that will be blue, so no point doing this yet.

Saturday 29th July
A few days to go...
The white looks good, this time we want to get the roof and the front panel done.
Same routine, apart from using the ladder this is easier than last time, as there aren't many rails involved.
The primer goes on easy, prioritise the front panel as this requires the window to come out. Bought some cheap rollers, unfortunately a bit of fluff comes away - another 'feature'. Late in the day, on to the topcoat. Today this is really attracting flying insects! Quite a few fail to get away.
Nice to open the blue paint at last.

Sunday 30th July
Weather forecast is showery. By the end of the day, the roof and all the light blue are done.

Nearing the end

A burst of good weather inspires me to paint the front box, and lower panel 9except on the damaged left side.



Finishing the electrics

I have a few better crimp terminals, so I tidy up the connections made last time, and wire in the energy meter. A bit worried to turn on after what happened last time, but all goes well. I fit a 20A socket in the kitchen, and a 10A double socket near the battery box. I also wire in a new pushon light for the bathroom.
I complete the wiring of the energy meter, ths involves a shunt. It works but needs calibrating (voltage seems right, but it says about 7A current draw when nothing is connected) but I leave it for now.

Bed building

So I take my work from Sheffield to the van, and the install goes OK. Slow and steady as I have to bond plywood to timber framing and leave each one for hours to dry.

Here you see the general appoach, pile heavy stuff on to get a good seal.
I made a video at the end.

But my phone battery died before I finished.

Bed - 2nd side

I toyed with various ideas for this part of the bed. First I thought of a fixed bench with storage underneath, but the measurement did not work. The other part of the bed is 80cm wide, and with the pullout reaches about 137cm. The width of the van is 197cm, and a standard double bed is 190cm.

Then I thought to repeat the design on the facing side, but with a height of 35cm and depth about the same this did not seem practical.

Then I happened upon this image on pinterest, but I could not find any accompanying information and it did not seem finished. In any case I used this as a template.

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/46/4a/51/464a51ed4ac5f839ea1fb1e7b80d8926.jpg

The top is made of 3.6mm plywood and has a hinge to a slightly smaller piece of plywood. I used a piano hinge, problem is evident that the screws I used protrude from the plywood, I needed to attach an extra strip of plywood and to chisel a hollow to allow this to lie flat. 

This will fold and rest on 3 doors, the remaining problem is supporting the length of plywood at the far edge. For this I constructed 2 rectangles of wood to be braced between the 3 doors. The doors need catches to hold them closed, and wooden stops to hold the wooden rectangles. I find the door on 1 end can move slightly past the normal but this has not yet caused a problem.

I have been storing the wooden rectangles (not shown) inside this bench, but this is not a good use of the space as they are at an angle wasting space. Next step is to face them with plywood and have them form a 'back' to the bench, this can have the double purpose of filling the gap at the edge of the mattress and the space available (190 vs. 197cm).

If doing this again I would have the foldout plywood rest on the edge of the pullout on the facing side, then the supports would not be needed.

Electricity is an honest teacher!

A few mishaps setting up the electrics, but nearly there now. Pleased to have this sorted with no help, sharing this to help others, I quite realise my first error was potentially pretty serious...

Problem 1- connecting the battery
So having realised my plan to put all the switches and breakers on the negative line failed (last electrics post), I set about undoing that setup. First I disconnected the wires from the battery and solar controller so there was no input.

Original setup
I moved all the negative outputs from the circuit breakers to the common negative connection bank. I swapped these out with the positive outputs now attached to the circuit breaker outputs.
I then disconnected the wire from the positive battery terminal from the negative input and connected to the earth block. I added a short brown wire from here to the main positive input of the main circuit breaker (bottom left of big block).
I also changed the colour of the wire looping between the individual circuit breakers positive after the main one (accross the top).
Can you spot what I missed?
Well I didn't and it was low down so out of sight. I should have moved the negative battery input to the common negative block.
So I connected the battery and the wires from the battery fried! As they were not designed for high current (27 A thankfully) the red wire quickly melted breaking the circuit and saving my bacon! Below is the evidence:

 Frazzled red wire😟

Here you can't really see but the red input wire goes to the earth block and a short brown wire is just seen correctly attached as the main input (bottom left of big block), but unnoticed is the black wire behind. This should have been connected to the negative block. 😓😖

So the red and black wires cooled down and were removed, I opened all the windows to get rid of smoke, and had a coffee break... So that was alarming but easily fixed.

A new blue wire goes to the negative block from the battery negative, and a new brown one to the earth block from the battery positive. Switched on and all is good 😅.

Problem 2- lighting
You may recall my test of the led strip lights had them weirdly dimmng along a 5m run. The cause of this became obvious with the 1.9m run I cut to attach to the wall. I saw the same thing, but this time the whole setup got worryingly hot and a small buzzing came from the dimmer switch. If you look at the earlier video you can maybe spot the error.
I had foolishly connected the red and black wires at the other end of the strip, no idea why I did this, I suppose it seemed strange to leave it unconnected.
So actually I had set up a gradual short circuit again, and the voltage ramped down along the now 3.8m length explaining why the bulbs near the end failed, and why it got hot. The current was not high enough to trip the circuit though.

Hindsight is 2020, so now I clearly see that all the bulbs are in parallel, the circuit is complete and each bulb draws very little current. I have setup 2 identical strips controlled by a single dimmer switch, the extent of the dimming seems useful but not seen dark here yet!

I have mostly installed an energy meter to monitor voltage/ current/  enrgy and power with a shunt, but this is not yet connected.

Bed

I started building a pullout double bed in my room in Sheffield last week. I am taking inspiration from the Deep Red motorhome blog, http://www.deepredmotorhome.com/bed.php  and the Amazing Odyssey youtube channel, https://youtu.be/l_g6XLDA2i8

Basically it will span the width of the van with pullout sections that join in the middle. One side will be bigger and form a sofa, the other side will be just a bench.
The main timber I am using is 44x18mm softwood, I have bought 30m of this from Wickes. I am doing simple butt joints on the pullout sections using wood screws. I will try to do the 'sofa' first. Depth cut to 81cm, and width, standard double 137cm. The width is divided in 2 for the pullouts.

 This is the full closed size, you can see the longer wood in the centre braces the structure.

This is the fully pulled out size.
I repeat this process to make the other half. Now for the base. These slats will be on hinges at the back to access storage and will sit square on a frame which will be 35cm high. I do a different kind of wood joint on the verticals so that they will be less visible and detachable in situ. Wooden dowels, 6mm, but I find this requires a 5.5mm drill.

The back is not closed as it will attach to the van wall, and the wheel arch isin the way. The sides will be braced with ply, I plan to get some nice veneered stuff.

I haven't attached the hinges yet, but it all seems to sit and slide well.

Tbc