Fancy keeping cool
The work continued over the bank holiday weekend, with more progress! It was a brutal 7am start, Ben and I’s sixth straight day of working on the van. It’s unfortunate to have such a punishing schedule this week but in order to catch up we felt it necessary. At this moment in time we are a little behind where we’d hoped to be, mainly due to the rust issues and the insulation taking longer than expected. We hope with some help and extra graft on our part that we can catch up in the coming weeks.
A Jigsaw Named Smokey
After yesterdays window installation went well we headed out pleased and ready to tackle the roof fan installation. We decided to do this ahead of fitting the other windows as we’d prefer to install this on the flat ground away from the roadside. The remaining windows can be fitted at home on the hill as it will be curbside, for safety reasons it made more sense to tackle yesterdays roadside window and the roof over this weekend.
The fan is a similar process to the window, both need a frame made in order to support the weight and both were meant for thicker walls than the van has. The measuring for the fan was tricky because the roof is ribbed. Installing the fan means cutting through a couple of these ribs. This creates a challenge when fitting the fan as it will not sit flat on the van. To get around this we added additional framing that would sit in the lower grooves or ‘gully’s’ of the roof, this would build them up to the height of the ribs, creating a flat even height surface to work with. Ben and John went off to the shops to get the equipment that we needed, soon returning with the goods.
Prior to cutting a hole in the roof we decided to prepare the plastic, ready for the assembly. We’d pre purchased a large sheet of clear plastic, of which we only ended up using six small rectangular pieces in order to get everything to line up right. The cutting of the plastic took Ben and John quite a while, as each piece needed to be cut by hand. We tried using a jigsaw to speed up the process but the heat generated from the tool melted the plastic resealing the line after each cut.
During this time Linda lent a hand and by painting the bumpers and trims, ours had unfortunately gone a sun faded shade of grey, but a fantastic job was done in bringing them back to life and they are now shiny and black once again. I got stuck in insulating around the window that we’d put in yesterday, it’s great progress as I can now put the vapour barrier all along the drivers side of the van.
The work continued with the fan through-out the day right into the evening. After cutting all the plastic pieces and double checking the measurements Ben and John had the tricky task of cutting the hole in the roof. When cutting a hole in the roof it’s better to use a slow speed with the jigsaw, especially because of the different heights of the ribs. Unfortunately my jigsaw was just a cheap one that I purchased a few years ago and it had no speed settings.
Shortly after the cutting started smoke began to pour out of the jigsaw, we stopped and waited for it to cool down before trying again. When we tried to get up and running for the second time the smoke came spilling out once again. This was not ideal so John made a last minute dash to the shops to get another one. Ben and I waited anxiously knowing that it would not be ideal to leave a half cut hole in the van overnight. Thankfully after a visit to a couple of shops a new jigsaw complete with speed control was acquired and the installation continued. Before we knew it we had a hole in the roof!
The guys didn’t stop to rest after their cutting efforts, and set about making a wooden frame for the fan whilst I filed off the edges of the new hole and applied the POR 15 in preparation for the next stage. We were soon ready to make a start on the assembly. The fan comes in three pieces, the fan it’s self, an outer plastic frame that secures it to the top of the van and finally a garnish ring for inside of the van. The newly made wooden frame needs to be placed on the inside of the van roof, this will help to secure the outer plastic frame and the internal garnish ring and stabilize everything.
First things first, we needed to get the plastic pieces that were cut earlier in place on the roof of the van. This stage took quite some time with Ben on the ladder leaning over to lay and secure the plastic, with a large dose of sealant for good measure. Once that was done we carefully set both the plastic outside and the wooden inner frames onto each side of the roof, This also took a while with sixteen screws needed to secure the frame in place. Sealant was then applied to the edge of the frame and over the screw-heads, to make doubly sure that the fan was not going anywhere we used a mastic/ butyl tape to ensure good adhesion. We were finally nearing the end of the fan install, but had bit of a fiddle to get the fan sat on the outer plastic frame and secured, before finally adding the garnish ring to the inside.
It was now getting dark and we were all quite hungry, with the work complete we headed in for some food. Both Ben and John did a fantastic job and worked so hard to help move us on another stage, despite being very tired we are very pleased with this weeks progress!
Ben and I will now be taking a few days off to recover and catch up with our business work, which has been a bit side-lined this week. We are both exhausted and coming down with head colds, which we hope wont last too long. There’s lots of things to do next but we are hoping to order the solar panels and get them up at the weekend, as it will be difficult to finish the ceiling insulation until this has been done. We also have the two remaining windows to install and the bulkhead hatch to cut, exciting times!