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.

Tidying up the DC Power Distribution

A while back I installed a pair of switch panels to distribute power from the battery bank to all DC electrical appliances (lights, fridge, fans, etc) in Jim. I chose to use circuit breakers over fuses, partly because they are easier to reset if they blow, and partly because they can easily be used as switches to isolate power to items like water pumps which wouldn't necessarily need their own switch (like lights or fans) but which I may want to isolate at times. Below is how they looked when installed a year or so ago.

 

For reasons which I can't really understand, most caravan and motorhome manufacturers still choose to use fuses over circuit breakers, despite AC installers choosing to make the switch more than three decades ago. If you could still buy them, I have no doubt that caravan manufacturers would still use Bakelite switches and rubber wiring. Nevertheless, there are a fair range of circuit breaker panels to chose from, mostly from the world of marine electricals where their use is more common.

I chose to use two 11-way breaker panels from Victron's ESP panel range. I could have used less than 22 circuits, but I would have had to start aggregating various electrical items together in non-intuitive ways. Do the toilet flush, and kitchen extractor fan belong on the same circuit? The Victron panels seem to be less popular than the BEP Marine or Blue Sea Systems panels, despite costing about half that of the BEP Marine panels and about the same as the Blue Sea Systems ones. In my opinion the Victron panels are better looking aesthetically, and I cannot see the alternatives offering anything over the Victron Panels.
 

When I installed the switch panels, I just wired in the small number of circuits I retained from Jim's orginal electrical installation, and the remaining breakers were left unusused. Below is how the electrical cabinet looked when largely empty; the bus bars for the newly installed panels are on the top right.

Given that I am now begining to install some electrical appliances, I thought it was about time I labelled up each circuit on the panels, and worked out what breaker rating each circuit would require.

Solar Install

I haven't found much time to work on Jim recently. With the sun down by about 4pm I don't get any daylight during the week, and unless I'm up at dawn I only get about six hours on Saturday and Sunday. Despite this, I've managed to make some progress on the installation of the solar panels.

The first thing I had to do was run the cabling under the roof rack. The cables are fixed to the steel using rubber line P-clips; all available steelwork is occupied with solar panels at the back end of the rack, and so to ensure that the solar panels can sit flush in the frames, all of the clips had to be fixed using countersunk rivets. This task involved drilling about 70 5mm holes in the steel roof rack, countersinking each hole, painting each hole to protect the exposed steel, and then riveting a p-clip in each hole. As well as testing my patience, my cordless drill batteries committed suicide, I snapped two drill bits, and my riveter declared war on my hand.

I toyed with the idea of using conduit, but decided it was unnecessary. The solar cable is double insulated, and is fairly protected being 3.5m off the ground, in the 80mm gap between the roof of the truck and the underside of the roof rack. I've clipped the cable every 20cm, and have wrapped it in cloth tape where is likely to chafe.

Four cables were run across the rack (two positive and two negative), to allow me to run two parallel strings of solar panels, each with four 100w panels in series. Three of the eight panels are likely to be in shade for some of the day as the adjacent awning sticks up a fair way. You can see the potential shading issues with the panels on the right of the rack in the picture at the the beginning of this post.

To give me a better chance of getting a good charge into the batteries I have wired the three partially shaded panels into one string of four panels, and the the remaining unshaded panels into another string. The Morningstar MPPT regulator I am using only has one set of panel inputs (as most off-grid regulators do) and so i am parallelling the two stings together. I am not knowledgeable enough on solar wiring to understand the impact this situation will have on the charge current and voltage, and the ability of the MPPT regulator to track the optimal power point properly, over two strings in differing light conditions. Can anyone reading enlighten me? 

Table Top #1

I had a spare few hours so I built the tabletop for the bench I've been working on. The table top pretty much came out as I wanted, but I'm not 100% happy with the hinges; they'll do for now but I may try to improve them in the future.

The problem with these hinges is that they are not designed to take the weight of the folding table leaf and anything you put on it (such as elbows). If the hinges take the weight, the leaves bend backwards and will eventually break, or rip out of the wood.  

Finishing the Nearside Bench Seat

I have recently had a little time to continue working on the nearside bench seat.

Cutting out the Multiwall (laminated birch plywood) to clad the steel framed seat base is fairly quick using the template technique I described in the post on making the bathroom. The slow part has been fitting the edging and trim mouldings. To cover the exposed edges of sheet materials, many people use plastic mouldings and plastic edge trim available from caravan parts suppliers. If fitted well, these can look OK, but I relish making easy jobs complicated and expensive, and so I chose to use hardwood mouldings instead.

If I had wished to walk an even easier path, I could have simply varnished the exposed plywood edges; I actually quite like the look of exposed plywood edges. But in my infinite wisdom, I started using Teak mouldings when I was cladding the bathroom, and not wishing to let parts of the interior let the final finish down, I continued in the same way. If I'd known at the start of this project how many lengths of Teak trim I might use, I would have considered buying a table for my router, and investing in a set of cutters, but KJ Howells have a wide choice of mouldings, and making the mouldings myself would make a time consuming job, even more time consuming.