The Yellow block is the car, the silver block is the bathroom (still deciding if i want a full shower or not), the golden block is the kitchen and the blue blocks are the sofa/beds. There will be shelves behind the rear bunk, accessed from the rear doors of the van.
First job was to set up a water proof cover and get the doors off to see what i had to work with.
I need a gap of 1750mm to get the car into back of the van. After removing the rear doors and carpet covered aluminium internal panels i could see the main internal frame of the body. To my delight, the internal framework is made of stainless steel and obviously had no rust or corrosion. The rest of the dody is made from aluminium and fibreglass, so other than the floor i have no worries about corrosion on the main body. Just to the inside of each light there is an existing upright, so the plan was to cut the entire rear section out around this frame and build a steel and aluminium horsebox type door/ramp. But after designing it and looking at the weight and cost of it it i had to discount the idea and come up with something else.
Eventually we decided upon the way to go was to chop one of the existing doors down and hanging it from the top, so there would be access to high level shelving, and having 2 barn style doors below it to allow the car in, under the shelves/rear bunk bed. The rear barn doors are going to be made of GRP skinned ply as used in box van, catering vans and some horse boxes.
After some cutting, shutting and riveting the basic idea started to come together.
The lower opening has just been roughly cut out to see what is exactly there to work with. It will be trimmed back neatly to the frame upright and capped off with aluminium section and reusing the hinges and latches from the old doors to hang the new doors and the recobbled upper hatch
I have the GRP coated ply and aluminium capping ready and waiting to make the doors.
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