It’s a 2011 LWB Ford Transit with the extra high roof. It came with the bullbar as well as the full size roof rack, dual battery system with 2 x 100ah AGM batteries and 2 solar panels up on top. It has 3 seats in the front, as well as an extra 2 seats in the back.
As some of you know, I bought this van in August 2023 and in true Al fashion, I have procrastinated heavily on building it out to be my new home on wheels.
When I first bought the van, I had no idea how I wanted to kit it out, but after driving it around for a bit, I knew that I wanted to keep the rear seats. This creates a pretty significant constraint, but at the same time I felt it made it a lot easier to plan how I wanted it to be laid out.
it will permanently house myself, but needs to be reasonably easy to house Jess and Zari as well for road trips
It needs to be highly functional, aesthetics are of minimal concern
As many dual purpose items as possible… I don’t particularly like being locked in to a single way of doing things, eg. I’d rather have a table that I can use inside and outside the van than some snazzy built-in table that is attached inside the van and can’t be used outside.
It needs to be warm in winter. I can deal with heat, but I can’t deal with the cold. A diesel heater is 100% necessary
While it is just me in the van, it needs to contain my push bike, skateboard and of course, the woofer. It is also a strong want to be able to fit the 3d printer in as well.
Summer 2023 I roughly mapped out how I wanted it and lived in it for about 3 months. It was great and gave me further ideas about how I wanted to kit out the inside.
It did need a little work done to it, mainly a gremlin to do with the heating/cooling in the cab, so as the colder months approached, I stripped out my bare bones kit and took it to the auto-elec, for what I thought would be a couple of days work… max.
Literally 3 months later I got the van back. I had completely lost any motivation to work on it as it was now the dead of winter and it was super easy to find more appealing things to do with my spare time.
This is turning into a wall of text, so I’ll leave this as the introductory post and add more to the thread as time permits! Feels good to have an active build thread again!!!
technically I still own a onewheel but haven’t used it for a loooong time. I will be able to run fridge, freezer and 3d printer tho!!
Yep! I have one ready to go, not sure what size it is tho, ordered it ages ago. The vevor ones had heaps of options and seemed good value, all the reviews were pretty good!
Protip from experience with them, the 2kw is enough to heat a small garage. The 5kw will be overkill on that van and you’ll be turning it off every couple hours.
Stripping the interior of the van was a bit of an exercise. I was quite pleased that the entire rear of the van still had very good paint and basically zero rust. The front was a slightly different story.
There was significant rust around the drivers seat area, in particular, one of the bolts holding the seat down. It took a hell of a lot of persuasion (swear words), but I was victorious in the end.
My last car had serious rust in the foot wells, so I wanted to make sure I did the best I could to prevent it in this one…
The footwells had this weird hard polyurethane like shit spread on them, and on closer inspection, rust had begun seeping underneath it
It was really difficult to remove, but a hammer, chisel and a lot more swear words later, I had removed all of the foamy shit and uncovered more rust than I had hoped to find.
There was nothing for it but to get stuck in with the grinder and remove as much as I could. It was a shitty job, but I figured the more effort I put in at that stage, the longer I’d get out of it before the footwells disintegrated
Haha I’ve seen them literally catch fire, I’m happy to spend the beans on the real ones. They’re crazy expensive when you know what the cells cost, but such is consumer life
And then painted over the lot. Unfortunately, the topcoat never cured I left it for like a week with a heater and a fan running in there, but it just wouldn’t have it.
With that mess behind me I moved on to sound deadening with a foil backed butyl, and then ‘van seal’ a 3mm air filled foil barrier. I am hopeful that all my work here will allow me to never need to return to this area again
When reinstalling the seats, I changed all of the bolts to standard bolt heads rather than the huge flanged torx head bolts that were in there to start with.
Getting the front seats fully reinstalled was a major milestone that I wasn’t actually expecting I definitely wasn’t expecting to find that amount of rust, let alone the work it took to actually uncover and then repair it all.
It did allow me to realise that the passenger/middle seat could be moved forward roughly 100mm, an actual gold mine for me. Every cubic cm of space I can gain in the back of the van is a huge bonus.
she gon be toasty in there 
