Rusty The Black Nosed Sprinter
December is a busy month for us and we’ve coped well adding van work onto our daily tasks. Let’s get started and we wish you all a happy holiday!
Iron Oxide, Frankincense and Myrrh
It’s quite exciting seeing the Gandalf the van parked up outside when you get up in the mornings and we are eager to get going. After acquiring Gandalf I’d set about mocking up a layout idea in a program called Sketchup, so we felt confident about making a start on the work. The first order of business was to strip out the old ply and flooring to see what we were really working with. In addition to the standard coverings the previous owner had also installed an additional timber structure. As it’s December and decidedly chilly out we chucked on our coats, hats and gloves on and got out there!
It was quite a long process to get the framing out, whoever had put them in had made sure they were not going anywhere, this left us having to cut some of it out as the screws were just too deeply buried in the wood, even with the use of some very good power tools. Once we’d gotten everything out we made templates of some of the more tricky shapes, cut all the wood down to smaller sizes and took it to the tip. It was at this point with the van now bare that we could see that there was a rust problem on the lower sils. The plastic trim on the outside is held on with pegs, this is to let any condensation out of the van, however it also lets water in (Mercedes are aware of the design flaw). We could also see some previous caulk repairs that had been made, we hoped this wasn’t going to be too much of an issue and set to on the floor.
The Floor
The floor was a right game to get up! It took us a couple of weeks of WD40 spray, rust remover spray, a blow torch and brute force. The cargo tie downs had rusted over pretty badly and were preventing us from pulling up the floor, we managed to get most of them out eventually, but a few were just too bad and Ben had to use an angle grinder to cut them out.
It’s been a great start to the build and we only hope we can keep up this good pace as time goes on!