Door Cladding

A small job that I completed a few days ago was the insulation and cladding of the side door.

The insulation in Jim is pretty weak generally; there are cold bridges everywhere and the fibreglass insulation that the original coachbuilder fitted between the inner and outer skins has sagged to the bottom of the walls. Nevertheless, the 18mm plywood/GRP doors are an obvious weak point as far the insulation goes. I am pretty much resigned to having to run the heating continuously in cold weather, but there is no point passing opportunities to improve the insulation where I can, and so I decided to add 50mm of Celotex to the doors to make them less likely to leak heat.

I started by battening out the side door to 50mm, to hold the insulation in place and hide the edges of the insulation board. This part took the longest as I had to box around the window, door handle, and night latch, and cut recesses for the three lock bolts, and the mechanism tube. I held the 50mm strips of plywood in place using angle brackets screwed into the door, and more Sikaflex 221.

With the door boxed out to a depth of 50mm, I fitted a quadrant trim around all edges.

Over-Seat Console

The next job on my list was to build a console unit to reside over the nearside bench seat that I recently finished. The area that I intended to fit it in was filled with an ugly aluminium box that was left over from Jim's previous life, but it housed the controller and one of the monitors for the reversing and side cameras, and so the new console had to accommodate these too. The photo below shows the area before I started work.

The first job was to remove the existing box. Taking the box off the wall was a fairly quick process, just requiring the removal of eight M6 security bolts (used throughout the truck), but this left me with two pieces of steel angle which supported the box. Drilling the steel at the front of the truck is almost impossible and so, like me, the coachbuilders had taken the easy route of welding the steel supports to the walls. With all of the cables for the cameras running so close, and with both supports being close to the corner, wielding an angle grinder was difficult. I managed to grind most of the welds back, but I still had to spend more than an hour delicately manoeuvring a four foot long crowbar and 4 lb lump hammer getting the steel off the wall. This will probably be the last bit of demolition I have to do in Jim and so there some satisfaction when I had cleaned off the welds and prepared the wall for something prettier.

As you can see on the photo, there is an angled section where both walls meet the ceiling, making a simple box design out of the question. The angled section was fitted by the original coachbuilder to run the cables for the lighting and security equipment, and has now been repurposed by me to run additional cables for high level equipment. Sadly the angled section was not fitted at 45 degrees (actually closer to 50/40), which shouldn't really have surprised me, given that the walls aren't perpendicular to each other, and the walls and ceiling aren't square. The console will largely be held in place with Sikaflex, and so I needed a close fit to all surfaces, this made building the frame for the console a slow process.

At each stage of the build, the console was offered up to the wall and template was made of the next piece, this was the cut and trial fitted, and if it worked, the console was then taken back to the bench and the new piece was fitted. When the bulk of the frame had been built, I could then start preparing the three sections for the respective purposes: the left compartment being for storage, the centre housing the monitor and video controller, and the right being for a new CD/Radio headunit.

Unemployment... Not as Relaxing as One Might Expect

Blogging has been a bit scant lately, but that is due to change as I am now employed full time in the services of His Majesty Jim. Working on Jim in the evenings and weekends outside of the 9-5 of a full-time job, was tiring and fairly unproductive. It's difficult to get stuck into a job when you only get a couple of hours at a time to work on it, and so when I handed in my notice at work, I immediately lost motivation to work on Jim. I found it hard to summon any enthusiasm, knowing that working every free minute of my time would only gain me the equivalent of a few days full-time work. Consequently, not much has been achieved on Jim in the last 4 or 5 months, except for during the last few days.

It's been over a week since I became unemployed, and not one morning has started with a special brew or a trip to the betting shop. In fact, I have been starting work earlier and finishing later than I did previously, such is the burden of being supported by a generous but growingly impatient spouse.

The first job I started,was to finish populating the roof rack. Some time ago I finished installing the last three of the BLD 100w solar panels. I now have 800w of solar panels, wired through a morningstar MPPT regulator into a 540ah 24v Rolls Surrette battery bank. The batteries are on their last legs and so at the moment, the solar is simply preventing the self discharge from flattening the bank.

Having finished fitting the solar panels, I was left with a significant portion of the roof which remained to be covered. Having spent many mornings waking up in a hot tent with the ground sheet stuck to my sweaty face, and feeling like a dehydrated elephant had been urinating in my mouth, I have always been keen to try to keep the internal temperature down as much as possible in hot climates. One of of the ways I have planned to do this is to use a tropical roof the shade Jim's aluminium roof. To ensure that the tropical roof works as effectively as possible in keeping the internal temperature down, I have always planned to cover the full surface of Jim's roof, with the exception of the hatches which are needed to ventilate the inside and provide light.

Where to go?

My original travelling plan for Jim, was for me to take him to India. I had the romantic notion of finishing the conversion, quiting my job, and then leaving home, with just a starting point and a destination, leaving the route and pace to be decided as I went. As time went on, and I started to research the bureaucracy of overland travel, I realised that if I left without any preparation I would get as far as Turkey before an impenetrable wall of antiquated paperwork would halt forward progress.

 For a start, one needs a Carnet de Passage to be able to temporarily import a vehicle into Iran, Pakistan and India; without this document these countries have no assurance that you will not sell your vehicle once inside their country and avoid paying import duty. Secondly, one needs a Visa for each of these countries too, and each country en route has particular intricacies which make having a valid visa complicated. For example there is no Indian embassy in Pakistan, and so you have to apply for the visa in Iran. Also visas for Pakistan can only be gotten in your home country, which would be fine, except they are also only valid for six months, and so you have to plan carefully to avoid getting to Pakistan and finding that your visa has expired. A third complication is that in 2011, Iran all but banned dog ownership, making it a tricky country to travel through with a canine companion, even one as handsome as Boris!

Whilst I had not realised that I would have all of these complication, they were not enough to dissuade me from travelling this route. That changed recently, and my enthusiasm for driving to India via Iran and Pakistan wained. I have been reading a number of blogs of travellers who have transited Pakistan over the last few years, and have watched as the experiences of those travellers has gotten worse. The security restrictions, whilst previously restricted to border areas, have spread inward, and the distance the police escorts continue for has increased from a few hundred miles, to most of the way across the country. If you wish to drive through Pakistan now, you are pretty much escorted by police from one side of the country to the other; there is little scope for lengthy stopovers or sightseeing excursions. After rushing the 1,600 miles through Iran to avoid any dog related dramas, the last thing I will want is 1,000 miles of police escorts and sleeping in police compounds; I spent much of my youth avoiding them!

Travel Plans

For most travellers (in the literal rather than ethnic sense), their vehicle is just a tool to let them go travelling in whatever style and comfort they wish. It nearly always gains a degree of sentimental attachment, but for most the key pleasure is in the travelling itself. For me, part of the enjoyment has been in working on Jim. This is not to say I wouldn't buy something off the shelf  if I had the resources and they made shelves big enough, but if I didn't enjoy the work on converting Jim from a cash-in-transit truck to a mobile home, I would undoubtedly have simplified the conversion, finished the work more quickly, and been on the road a long time ago.

It didn't start this way though; when I bought Jim I expected to be travelling within a year or two. Things clearly changed and I began to enjoy the work I was doing. For a long time, I didn't have enough money to go travelling even if the conversion had been finished, and so I didn't worry about rushing the job and doing it to a lower standard, as it would sit there unused until I had saved more money anyway. For this reason I began to make Jim a labour of love, doing everything the difficult way to make sure then end product was as good as I could make it, never rushing anything for the sake of finishing sooner. A few months ago this changed, I realised that the money I had saved would be enough to travel for a decent length of time, perhaps 9 - 18 month, and at this point it became the conversion on the truck which was holding my plans up. I knew that I could never bring myself to rush the next part of the conversion out and bodge it to let me get on the road, but on the other hand I didn't want to spend the rest of my life converting Jim.

I've recently had to admit to myself, that with the time I am willing to spend working on the conversion each week,  Jim will have rusted to dust and I will be too broken to go travelling, before the work is finished. And so I made the decision to hand in my resignation from the job I have been at for 5 years, and work full time on Jim until the conversion is complete. Whilst this is hugely exciting for me for many reasons, it does put the pressure on, because every month I spend working on Jim, is a month where the money I have saved for travelling goes towards paying my mortgage and bills, and living an expensive life in London when I should be living frugally on the road. I am leaving my job on May 17th, and expect to spend about 4 months finishing the conversion before I am ready to condense my possessions from a 3 bed house to a 12.5sqm truck, and leave London behind.

Not to make life too easy for myself, I got engaged yesterday, and so in additional to finishing Jim, I now have a wedding to plan.

Finishing off the Generator Install

It was hovering around 0°C in London over the last few weeks, and when it hasn't been cold, it's been raining, neither of which are conducive to enthusiastic working. How I long for a heated workshop with a 4m roller shutter. Nevertheless I managed to don three jumpers and do some small jobs on the Jim, the first of which was to change the latch holding the generator locker shut.

In itself the job only took about 45 minutes, but the series of jobs leading up to it have taken considerably longer and were spread out over a couple of years! As you can see in the photo below, when Jim was passed into my care there was a sizable space on the nearside of the chassis that was not used for anything. The front section is used for the exhaust silencer, starter batteries, air dryer, and primary air tanks, but behind it was about 700mm of unused space.

On the offside, the space was smaller, and in it I fitted an auxiliary fuel tank, but on the nearside I decided to fit a generator; not in anticipation of regular usage, but more for use in emergencies to charge batteries, or run power tools. There are numerous things I would have liked to have fitted in the space including leisure batteries, a water tank or a storage locker; it is always best to keep the weight as low as possible on a vehicle to improve stability and handling, and so storing the 400kg  leisure batteries would have made sense. However, having a noisy, smelly combustion engine inside the living compartment made the least sense to me, and so the decision was made to fit a generator to the chassis.

I'm still here!

Sorry for the massive lack of posts recently. It has been cold and wet in London and I have been suffering the usual wintry lack of enthusiasm.

I have managed to get a few small jobs done recently, including installing the remaining solar panels and commissioning the system, starting on the roofrack decking panels, and refitting the latches to the generator locker door.

I'll try to get a proper blog post up in the next few days.