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Van Conversion: Part 8 - Insulation

This one has been months in the making. Not only is this one of the larger undertakings, but there were also stock and weather issues to contend with (which I'll detail later).

Cab

So a long time ago, back in Part 1, I stripped the cab of its headlining and shelf.

No headliner

Well, a good 4 months later I finally started working on insulating it. For this I used sheets of 10mm closed cell foam. This also serves to act as a sound dampener on the van metal, as well as thermal insulation. I used 3 layers of this, taking it to 30mm total. Due to the flexibility of the material and curvature of the van it was hard to put these sheets down in a straight line.

First layer

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Van Conversion: Part 7 - Mounting the tanks

Time to free up some space from inside the house and put the fresh water tank, waste water tank, and calorifier under the chassis.

Prep

To hold the tanks under the chassis I'm used M8 hook bolts, aluminium square tube, washers, and nylock nuts.

One of six sets of mounting hardware

I cut 3 330mm lengths of aluminium square tube, and drilled 2 8mm holes through each end to accommodate the hook bolts.

Raised the side of the van

Redundant handbrake cable mount for European vans

The chassis comes with the handbrake cable mount/guide for both sides of the van, but it needs to go to make way for the fresh tank.

Mount removed

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Van Conversion: Part 6 - Rear door handle relocation

One of the key things I want to do is be able to open the door from the bed. The door handle, in its factory position, will be hidden away in the garage so it need to be moved. There's only one other feasible place for the handle, which is the top of the door. Luckily this is where I want it anyway.

Door drilled and rivnuts installed

I had to get a 9mm drill bit specially for this.

Handle dry fit

It feels much sturdier here than its usual location.

Next I took some road bicycle brake cable, 3D printed some adapters, and strapped it all together.

End stop for the handle

See it's chamfered hole to allow cable flex

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Van Conversion: Part 5 - The floor

Sorry for the 2 month gap in posts. There's been a lot of little bits going on with the van like servicing it and changing the brakes and discs, wiring up additional rear view cameras, and other stuff which I've not documented. A lot of that time has also been spent deliberating on parts, particularly what floor to go with. I went for Altro Orchestra in the colour "Fusion".

Prep

First thing to do was rip out the old ply floor. This required removing a lot of screws, many of which were rusty and wouldn't unscrew. When the screws wouldn't come out the only option was to go hulk on the ply and rip it out with brute force.

Revealing a lot of dust...

Swept up

Holes and screws left behind

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Van Conversion: Part 4 - Bed frame, roof rack, and solar panels

Bed frame

A bit premature, this one, but because I'm going to be dealing with the aluminium profile for the roof rack I'm getting it out the way.

Not much in the way of progress pics, as it's just bolting aluminium profile together, but here's the plan: 45mm aluminium profile bolted together using core screws and brackets for maximum strength, with a corner on each side at the back to make room for the rear pillars.

Cutting to length

Assembling the rear section, which will go around the pillars

Assembled, with 6ft human for scale

Test placement

The corners on cut profile are surprisingly sharp, so in order to protect the paint of the van, and other things, I designed and pri

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Van Conversion: Part 3 - Slide out step, hookup points, and sound dampening

Slide out step

Whilst I can get in and out of the van without a fuss I understand that it's not so easily accessible to others, and I want it so that people can get in and out with little fuss, so I've fitted a Thule slide out step. I will eventually be hooking it up so it opens and closes with the sliding door. I do have a prototype circuit to control the step, which shows promise.

As an extra usability upgrade I put an LED strip under the front of the step to illuminate the ground underneath.

The LED strip, in aluminium profile, with 3D printed holders

I had to drill the step arm to route the cable for the strip

Routing the cable in the arm means that it'll be protected and kept neat and tidy both in transit and as the step actuates.

![Sealed up to stop water and dirt ingress and to protect the cable from the sharp edges](https:/

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Van Conversion: Part 2 - Holey edition

Pretty much the first proper job on a van is the installation of windows, which means cutting some rather large holes. For my build that consists of 2 roof lights and 3 windows.

Roof lights

I started with the roof lights. First I made some frames. These helped with drawing the cutout as they gave me a rectangle to trace around once I'd made my measurements.

Frames, two of them

Front Roof light

Starting measurements

I put a tent up on the roof

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Van Conversion: Part 1 - Acquisition, Swivel Seats, and Suspension

I bought a van

The plan

My plan is to have something I can securely take mountain bikes and have as much comfort as I can fit in the van. So it needs to be warm, have heating, hot shower, toilet, garage (thus a fixed bed), cooking facilities and a few other bits. I also want to be able to accommodate a decent size social gathering of 6 to 8 people, as well as make it 4 birth.

Here's what I've come up with so far

What you see above isn't the first iteration, and it's not the final one either in all likelihood, but it's very close to what I'm pretty sure will be the final plan.

Main features, from left to right (front to back of van) are:

• Double seat on the driver's side and single seat on the passenger's. These will expand out to make another bed.
• Coat storage
• Shower
• Kitchen
• Fixe

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3D printing UK road signs

Beware of Sheep

Don't ask me what inspired this, as I have no idea. I'm just going to detail the process on how I got this from an SVG to a 3 colour 3D print using FreeCAD.

It turns out there's a list of UK road signs in SVG format. Simply download whichever sign takes your fancy and follow these steps to make a model using FreeCAD.

Design

First, do the usual and create a new document with a new body. Then go File->Import and select the SVG file, then click on SVG as geometry followed by Select.

Import

SVG as geometry

When you import the SVG there may be a whole load of redundant paths. Select and

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Git: Ignoring specific lines - prevent personal config being comitted in 3 easy steps!

One of the key things I like to do when setting up a new project for my team is to make it as easy as possible to get up and running. One major facet of this is making sure any local dev config stays local, even if it's part of a deployed config file (as is the case in Umbraco). In this situation you need to be able to ignore or exclude certain lines within git.

Note: I'll be using what I did with Umbraco throughout as a practical example, but the same principles apply to any file.

The three steps

First I created a new bash script, clean-umbraco-config.sh, to clean out the offending content:

#!/bin/sh

sed \
-e 's/<add key="Umbraco.Core.ConfigurationStatus" value=".*" \/>/<add key="Umbraco.Core.ConfigurationStatus" value="" \/>/g' \
-e 's/<add name="umbracoDbDSN" connectionString=".*" providerName=".*" \/>/<add name="umbracoDbDSN" connectionString="" providerName="" \/>/g' \
$1

What this

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