Forging The Van
Two weeks in review as we confirmed and sent Gandalf for some patching up.
A Trip to Lewes
Having discussed a suitable time for us to bring to van back to Lewes, we had a week to think over the quote for the spraying of the underside of the van. All the other places that were able to do the van were over four hours away. Deciding it was perhaps easier, quicker to get both done at the same time. We are eager to make more ‘visible’ progress on the van and have desperately been pushing to to crack on with the build. It seemed mad to delay things further in order to take it elsewhere. Taking advantage of a reduction in train fare costs, would also help us to buy some tools or parts that we need.
The discovery of the rust has been quite a pain, our schedule for the build has slipped and we are about a month behind where we’d like to be at this point. Our initial hope was to leave the UK in June, only six months away, this would give us time to see some of Canada in more reasonable weather! We remain positive and know that it is worth doing the step properly.
After a similar bizarre journey we arrived and left Gandalf to be mended. See you in a weeks time buddy!
Mid-week News
It was a long week as we awaited news on Gandalf, he was in the shop and all we could do was be patient. It all seemed to go very slowly as we carried on with business stuff and tried to keep ourselves busy whilst wondering how it was going with the van. Mid way through the week we were delighted to receive and email with some photographs showing how the welding had gone. There was a huge improvement and we were glad that the sides were now sturdy and ready to hit the road. As you can see the van has been transformed:
In addition to the welding, we’d given the go ahead to have the underneath sprayed and the floor inside the van epoxied. The floor despite it’s shabby looking state wasn’t to bad and there were only a couple of minor holes to be taken care of. We went back to waiting looking forward to picking the van up. We also took this time to refine our Sketchup plans and research into trickier things such as the heating and hot water situation, which ended up giving us a bit of a headache in itself.
Home Time
Finally the day came, we headed out to catch a very early train, only making it by a matter of minutes. The journey was quite scenic as we traveled down along the coast, watching the waves crash over the various beaches. Soon we had arrived and met Alex at the station who gave us a lift back to his workshop, during the journey we asked many questions about how to install a fan and windows and if there were any further special precautions we should take with the metal.
We were glad to be back in the van and headed home, it seemed like a very long drive yet again, we held out on eating hoping to pick something up closer to home at a farm shop we particularly like. Unfortunately they had stopped serving by the time we got there, so we headed on to get some food shopping and something easy to take home.