Suuuunssshhhheeeeeeiinnne

What you are about to read here is possibly the most ambitious part of the build so far.  Install a solar panel that will charge the leisure battery.  This has taken some very long conversations with Dave who has also undertaken this modification - albeit in a slightly different way.

Ya see...  when we pitched up at Camperjam, Dave got himself busy setting up and materialised from the back of his van with a solar panel which he placed on the roof of his van and fed the wires in through the window.  Whoa , whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.  Erm... excuse me?  I hadn't really thought about it much until that weekend but this is the stuff of genius and from walking around the trades section of Camperjam, solar panels were everywhere.  The ones I was most impressed with were the flexible panels like Dave's - didn't really care for the glass one's in an aluminium picture frames as they are way too bulky.
As Dave puts it - free electricity when you camping for a few days!!  I needed to get involved.

From chatting over that weekend a few thoughts and ideas were discussed :
 - A lot of people were bonding them to the rook of the van.  What happens when it breaks?
 - Bonding does give an invisible look.  You can only really see the connectors.  This, we agreed, was they way to go.
 - PWM or MPPT?  Dave had clearly done a lot of reading and was trying to explain to me the difference between the 2 types of charge regulators.

After that weekend, I really wanted to find a way of introducing this to my van but really didn't fancy bonding it to the roof.  Low profile was definitely preferred.  My van has the roof rack gutters already fitted and I was hard at work conjuring some kind of bracket that would allow me to bolt it into these channels.

This is where I got to :

1.  I'd need some kind of L shaped aluminium strip.  I figured L shaped would hopefully give some rigidity and stop it drumming onto the roof of the van at high speed.

2.  I could glue the panel to the aluminium strip and curve them to profile of the roof.

3.  The front channel would need to be bent over so as no to just be square into the wind.

4.  Each aluminium strip could them be bolted into the roof channels by using upside down bolts that would slide into the roof channel.

5.  Oh and I'd probably want some foam sticky strip on the aluminium strip to protect the roof of the van.

So, I figured, I would prototype something and see how it goes.  

Here is a picture of the back of the panel being glued onto the aluminium strips.  The fancy tool work you see is old bits of wire holding the ends together.  This was singularly because when I bent over the L of the front strip it curved the ends in the opposite direction - I hadn't anticipated that.

And here it is in position on the roof of my van.

The other modification that I had to make to my design was to trim/shape then ends of the strips so that they joined into the roof channels properly and to keep them as low profile as possible. 

I think it looks pretty cool and is happily charging my leisure battery - at least I think it is!

Green light

A very quick update - I installed a nifty little indicator LED that will tell the charge status of the leisure battery.  I've had it connected for a while but decided to locate it in the B-pillar.  Easy to see and check at a glance.

That's all.  As you were.

Slider

This has jumped up the list!!  Escape hatch for the boys.

As the weather had warmed up, I'd been getting a lot of comments from rear passengers about how hot it was in the back - probably due to the the excellent work I'd done on insulating the van.  I had wanted to put a sliding window into the drivers side but not yet.  Ah well!  There's an upcoming week in Cornwall with the boys and Dave so it made sense to have it fitted in the hope that the weather that week would be cracking the flags.

Chose the thoroughly nice chaps at Van Doc Conversions (www.vandoc.co.uk) to do the work.  As with most of the work I get other people to do, I'd always go with a recommendation.  Dave had used VanDoc for his insulation (I think) and was impressed by their work.

Prepping the outgoing window and starting to cheesewire it out.  Seems to know what he's doing...

...ah, he's got a man on the inside.

I don't have any pics of it mid-work unfortunately - not much to tell really, they took the existing window off and bonded on the new window.  Little bit of jiggery pokery to see if we could put some edging trim on around the window to neaten up the carpet.  Sadly, as it's a factory kombi there isn't enough room, it makes the window stick out too much - I had been warned but worth a try.  Bish, bash, bosh - an hour and a half later...

And back home with all the tape removed.  Does make a significant difference in the back when the weather is warm - so I'm told.  Once again opted for limo tint to keep things nice and private in the back.

Speaker Replacement Pt 2

It had always been part of the plan to install rear speakers into the van.  The boys will frequently travel in the back and we all love our music.  I also think it gives a much more complete sound.

Not a trivial job but not a complicated one either.  Another flashback to my beetle and running speaker cables the full length of the vehicle although somehow I envisaged that this one would be easier than it was back then.  I'm older and wiser these days and I'm getting to know this van now.  Not surprising with the number of times I seem to be removing panels from the interior of the van.

So, off come the rear side panels.  Having decided that they were going to go high up and not too far back from where the rear passengers currently sit, I carefully measure the position and draw around the template provided in the Pioneer Box.   Not the most exciting picture in the world but this is where they are going.

Out comes the head unit (again).  Out comes the glovebox (again) in a time that is marginally slower than my personal best - 1:37.  Remove the A-pillar trim and fish the speaker wire over the passenger door into the rear of the van.  Thats actually the hardest part of wiring done.  Then its simply a case of lowering the roof panels and positioning the cables along the channel right to the back of the van and fishing them through into the void for the rear side panels.  Cable tie the cables to other cables to keep things neat and put the panels back.

Why all the way to the back of the van?  Well that's because I don't seem to have a way of getting in to that side panel void from the top without going to very rear corner of the van.  I'm not sure if this is because my van is a factory Kombi but there's no way in.  It's not a problem, just have to bear in mind when working out how much cable you need for these jobs.

They look good though and the sound really does fill the van now.  Very please with the results.