A weekend of hard work and we’ve made some progress in the hefty things. It was time to tackle a scary task and cut a hole into the side of the van, here we go!

Scenic Visions

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It started early on Saturday for us, we travelled about and hour to Ben’s parents house. Our windows had been delivered there and we’d all decided that it’d be nice to spend some time together and it would be better for us to fit the windows on flatter ground as opposed to roadside on our hill. This proved to be an excellent plan and we had a nice big space on the driveway to work. It was a busy day and somewhat of a nerve-wracking one to cut a hole in the side of the van.

We are both tired and achy from the time we’ve spent working on the van this week. It was time to get going with the days task of fitting a window, without delay Ben set to cutting off the internal support panels. This needed to be done with and angle grinder, a steady hand and some patience as you only want to cut through the internal part and not go right through the side of the van. After the parts were cut I went around and cut off the residual glue that was left in order to get a nice flat surface.

Measuring and creating the template

Ben and his dad John now had a flat surface with which to measure out the window and draw the template, making sure all the lines were straight. Next step was to use a hole saw to drill through the van cutting circles into each of the corners, using these pilot holes you can then slip in with the jigsaw and cut the straight lines.

The starter holes from outside and in. The bottom picture also shows where the internal supports were removed.

We discovered that Ben is absolutely blinding with the jigsaw and that his straight lines were perfect, before long we had a nice hole in the side of the van!

Hello!

The next step was to file down the rough edges of the cut and apply POR 15 to stop any rust, we let this dry for a bit whilst we tucked into some lunch. After the refuel came the fitting of the windows, which is a little tricky and required all hands on deck.

The windows come in two parts, the outer part which contains the double glazed acrylic ‘glass’ and an internal frame with fly nets and blinds. These windows are designed to sit on a caravan wall, which is thicker than the thin sheet metal of the van wall. In order to for the window to fit on a van we needed to make an inner wooden frame to sandwich between the two parts and give support for the weight of the window.

After the frame was made we were ready to fit it all together, the front part of the window needed to be adhered to the van using a sealant, the wooden frame was next up and was glued in place to the inside of the van and finally the inner plastic frame containing the blinds was then screwed onto to the wooden frame. It was definitely handy to have the four of us holding all the parts as everything was secured. Finally at the end of a lovely sunny day we have a window! Only two more to do….

Voila!

We were very pleased with the progress we made today. We used the remaining time to get the larger of the two widows marked out and the frame made. This will greatly speed things up when we come to fit this and the third window. It was then time for a cracking roast lamb dinner prepared by Ben’s mum, Linda!