It’s been a busy few weeks with Christmas, we’ve enjoyed the time with our families and discussed our plans at length with them as we prepare to navigate the next steps of the build.

A Dusty Affair

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As I mentioned in the previous post, After taking down the ply we noticed some quite bad rusting to the lower part of the van walls. It only got worse once we finally managed to remove the floor, unfortunately we have quite a rust problem on our hands. Having ploughed a lot of time into rust research we started the day strong with angle grinders in hand taking back the rust and paint in the order to expose how extensive the problem is, as you can imagine we are both feeling quite worried and a little deflated by this not so wondrous find.

We cleaned the van up spending a full three weeks scrabbling around on the floor, scrubbing and grinding away,  slowly being covered in a lovely orange layer of rust dust. It was a truly grim task, I did however, find out that I am not too bad with an angle grinder! The exposed patches left us with a clean slate and a clear idea of the damage. Thankfully there was no rust damage to any structural parts of the van, a small win! With the relief of knowing that we looked into options to fix the mainly cosmetic damage.

Moving Forward

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We’d been researching methods of dealing with campervan rust and noted several options, all of which will be covered in depth on the van conversion page that I am currently working on. We took a week to think things through as we really want to do as much as possible of this build ourselves. There were really three options to consider:

• A ‘homemade’ fix using fibre glass or metal sheeting and putty to fill in the holes.
• Buying the equipment and learning to weld as we went.
• Sending the van to be welded professionally.

We didn’t feel that the first option on this list was really acceptable, we hope to enjoy this van for a long time to come and I don’t think we’d sleep well knowing a little patch repair is all that is stopping the cold and snow getting into the side of the van and soaking the insulation and potentially causing more damage. We felt there was no real point spending the amount the build is estimated to cost us, only to have a poorly repaired foundation underneath. It would be very annoying to have to rip the van apart to make the proper repairs down the line.

The second option was an interesting one, I used to sit and watch my uncle weld cars as a child, it would be an interesting skill to have, whilst also saving on any further repairs down the line. It may also come in handy if we decide to do a metal bed-frame or if we need a custom roof rack for the solar panels. The downside to this is that whilst I am happy to give anything a go, I may not actually turn out to be any good at it and we’d have spent out over £100 for nothing. There are also time considerations, the sills run all along either side of the van and it may take us a good few weeks of practice and learning to get it right before we can even begin to complete this part of the build.

So we are left with having someone do the welding for us. I asked in several of my camper conversion groups on Facebook, sadly no-one is that near to us and understandably everyone is busy trying to get through their own conversion. So I did a little research online and found a guy about 2 hours away from us, down in Lewes. I really liked his work, he was quick to respond and helpful in answering our questions. We set a date and headed off for him to make an assessment of the work.

Lewes

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After a windy journey down many hair-raising lanes that the SatNav thought she could take us down, we finally arrived to meet Alex. I’d previously sent some pictures over of the damage to the van, which we pointed out and let him have a good look around. We discussed the plan to turn Gandalf into a camper and he commented on how popular it’s becoming at the moment and went on to explain some of the work he’d recently completed on a couple of campervans. He stated that although it looks bad the van was actually not too worse for wear and seemed positive that it Gandalf could make a full recovery with a bit of welding.

On the topic of rust, Ben and I had been discussing having the underside of the van sprayed with a waxoyl type product to help with the onslaught of gritted roads we would likely face in Canada. This is obviously an expensive procedure and all the companies we’d looked at were charging upwards of £750. We brought this up with Alex who agreed that it would be a good idea to have it sprayed, he also happened to have the facilities to do so onsite. We were happy with the quote for the rust repair and asked for another to include the spraying of the underneath. We started our journey back home with a lot to talk about and decide.