EUC rider 
lol that’s what I did in the last car. The steel kept rusting until the fibreglass fell out too 
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Thanks for sharing the photos of the rust and uncured paint shots.
I’ll remind myself of that while I’m replacing rotted weather boards, making new scribers, and repainting my 100 year old wooden windows again.
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In order to complete the deadening and insulation in the back, I first wanted to complete works to the roof. This would be a lot of work and has spanned over the course of a few months.
Before work on the roof could start, I needed to remove the roof rack. It was the stupid type of rack that mounts from the gutters, so naturally the gutters had been backed up with shit and were significantly rusty along the whole length.
Roof rack is all steel and super heavy. I built this super dodgy frame over the top of the van, used cam straps to hoist it up off the van and then lowered it to the ground.
As well as all the rust in the gutters, the previous owner had done drilling work on the roof rack and left all of the iron filings on the roof of the van. These caused a boatload of rust spots and patches all over the roof that needed to be repaired.
The first step to getting up on the roof involved fixing up the gutter rust. As well as the gutters, the mastic that covered the panel seams also had rust growing under it. I removed all the old mastic and rust as best I could and pumped sikaflex into the gutters and over the seams. It looks trash but IDGAF
I also drilled all the holes in the sides of the roof for the awning and power outlets that are still to be installed.
Next I needed a way to get up on top of the roof to complete all the rust repair and make holes for the ventilation fans. I knew that I did not want to install the roof racks back into the gutters, so I devised a way to install rails onto the roof that would serve as both a scaffold to work off and a structure to bolt my roof rack to.
I drilled holes over the roof pillars/beams and made 3DP risers and galvanised steel brackets that would be installed to mount the rails to.
I wanted brackets for inside the van as well to wrap around the internal beam for potentially overkill reasons. I don’t know if they are necessary but they made me feel good.
I faffed around and 3DP a mold to bend up some aluminium brackets… I had limited success but it was crazy hard work with the g clamps.
I ended up using the clamps and multi grips and just bent the brackets by hand, it was quicker and worked well enough.
Rail brackets installed, I used loads of sikaflex everywhere during this installation and even completely covered the bolt heads. I really hope I don’t get any leaks. The mounting face of the bracket has 3mm rubber to stop the galvanised steel rails rubbing against the gal steel brackets.
The bolts are extra long on the inside as eventually they will serve to hold up bulkheads for the internal joinery as well. The inside of the bracket is also covered with a 3mm layer of rubber for dampening against the panels/beams.
Rails on! This was a big moment for me, it was essentially the hump of the roof works…. All down hill from here 
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Taking a jigsaw to the roof of the van was definitely daunting, but I’d certainly had enough time to build myself up to it it went pretty well and was probably made easier by the fact that it was more enjoyable than removing rust 
I removed the majority of the rust with a small wire wheel on the cordless drill. I had a wire wheel for the grinder, but it seemed to burn the paint rather than remove it, the drill just worked better. I also used the orbital sander and even just regular sand paper and elbow grease!
There was a considerable amount of bare steel, so I etch primed as locally as I could to the bare steel and then needed to call it a day as the threat of rain was nigh…
A few days earlier I’d just rebuilt my dodgy driveway frame to be a little less dodgy in anticipation of getting the roof rack back on. I’m glad I did, it worked perfectly as a makeshift carport to keep the freshly etched rust repairs out of the rain.
I’d procrastinated on this body work all year in order to do it in summer when it surely wouldn’t rain 
gotta love Melbourne.
I took the rainy downtime as an opportunity to finish printing my gasket/flanges for the installation of my ventilation fans. Printed with petg in puzzle pieces as the full circle is too big to fit on the bed.
The fit was great so I got them installed with plenty of sikaflex after a couple of coats of primer to the rust repairs.
I chose a polyurethane bed liner to paint the roof with, as I wanted the toughest finish possible, never want to see this roof again the product says it shouldn’t get wet for at least 3 days after application and I didn’t want to take any risks so I took it down to the work factory.
The bed liner came as a 4L kit with 4 x 1L bottles. Once you mix the hardener into a bottle, it has an hour pot life before it starts curing super quick.
It recommended to use a textured roller, but the one I got seemed to use way too much paint so I decided to brush coat the first coat and then see how much was left over to decide whether or not I could roll the second.
One tin of the paint pretty much only did half of one coat, so it was decided for me that the entire thing would just need to be brushed.
Unfortunately I only had these baby brushes, so I ended up painting the entire roof, two coats with these fucking 1inch brushes
It looks ok from afar but it’s pretty scruffy up close, I may end up muralling over the front and sides but for now the roof repair is complete 
that was about a week ago and it’s been locked up snug in the work factory since then while I’m off gallivanting on the other side of the country for a sneaky holiday 
Poking around the south west coast of Western Australia, not the first time I’ve been over here and certainly won’t be the last! Only a 10 day trip, hopefully next time will be a lot longer!
Back to work on Thursday and then hopefully get the roof rack back on the van on the weekend!
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Picked up the van from work yesterday and did a little tinkering after work this afternoon… the mounting adapter for the fan bolts through the flange adaptor thing and bolts one up on the inside as well.
The inside ring has captured nuts on both sides, one set to tie inside and outside together, and the other set will allow me to bolt up a cover and insect screen from the inside.
This is the cover for the inside. I’m not entirely thrilled with it, as it ends up pointing in one direction and can’t point any other way. I will design a thin fly screen to fit between this and the flange it bolts to.
It will do for the time being, if nothing else but to serve as a placeholder until I can be bothered designing something of my own for it.
Lids are on, fans are in!! Super exciting! Would be even more exciting if I’d properly figure out the motor controllers for them their time will come.
Ran out of daylight today, but the rack is ready to go up. With any luck I can get it on tomorrow and then work on the solar panel box on the weekend!
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The dodgy hoist smashed it! I hoisted the rack up in stages, lifting it up and resting it on my legs while I tightened the straps up. I had to do one end at a time and 4 seperate stages of lifting but it went without a hitch.
It wouldn’t be a build of mine without some hot glue!! The screws were sealed with sikaflex but I didn’t want the holes filling up with water and potentially rusting the screws, so filled them up with goo!
As well as getting the mounting points out of the gutters, revising the roof rack mounting let me lift it up a bit so that the fans would fit under the rack.
Anywhere the racks touched the rails, I added EVA foam and 3mm rubber to stop any rubbing/eventual rusting.
Everything went really well with the rack install next up is a storage box for on top of the racks, where the lid will be my solar panels!
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Was a cracking weekend in terms of productivity on the van. After I secured the roof rack onto the rails I pulled down the dodgy hoist and turned it into the skeleton for the roof box!
Initially the plan was for the box to be 300mm tall and the solar panels on top for the lid, but after measuring a few of the things that I might wanna put in the box, along with the way I wanted to construct the box, I opted to make it 375mm tall, for a total of 410mm with the solar panel lid.
This kinda bit me in the arse because I’d already bought 300mm garden edging that I would ‘clad’ the box with… so I went and bought another roll and overlapped them.
I bought aluminium angle to trim around the top and a weather seal strip that stuck to the panels to try and seal the top as best as possible.
I don’t like the way the top looks nice and neat with the aluminium trim and the bottom is a bit
wavy and just looks unfinished. I might go get some more aluminium to remedy this.
I sikaflexed and screwed the two panels together in the center, added hinges and latches and ropes to hold the lid from opening too far.
I clamped down the hinge side when I screwed the hinges on so that when the box is closed, the rubber weather seal closes nicely. Coupled with the adjustable latches, I feel like I’ve got a pretty good seal.
I made the skeleton the exact same size as the panels, so by the time I’d added the cladding and aluminium, my box was a bit too big. I cut up some aluminium strips to pack out the hook for the latch. This worked out well as it helps distribute the load of the latch which is actually putting down a significant amount of pressure when closed.
Gave the panels a good clean and the box is almost ready to go up on the racks. I’m definitely going to get some trim for the bottom to clean it up, I’m not happy with it as is.
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What is a push bike?
Also I love you and miss you Al.
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Do you really have winter down there?
What kind of temperatures would you be dealing with?
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It’s a strange beast, propelled by muscle power with zero electronic parts!
Winter here never really gets much lower than about 0C at its absolute coldest , and the highs on those days would be about 10C
Nothing on what you’re probably used to but anything colder than that can fuck right off as far as I’m concerned
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It was deadly here last week… Polar vortex…
Got down to -20c…
Pretty sure I went riding at around -10C.
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-10C and I would literally be hibernating.
I couldn’t do it.
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I go through great extremes to get away from my savage screaming kids. Between winter break and snow days they were home 19 days in a row…
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Look at how beautiful…
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Hell on earth 
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I actually don’t know if Al’s has pedals or not…
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It has pedals… and belt drive!
Speaking of pedals though, I do need to get a new set of pedals, the ones that flip up so the bike can push closer to the cabinets it will be against… like this
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Did some dodgy stuff like using an xt90 connection to parallel 2 wires into one… and I’ve been soldering all my crimp connectors
Each solar panel will run through its own 40a fuse, although they are only 160w panels so I probably could have paralleled them before they hit the fuse or got smaller fuses but whatever, it’ll be fiiiiine.
There will also be 40a fuses from charger to aux battery and charger to main battery. Just gotta make one more little harness for the main battery to charger and then I’ll have this harness ready to hook up the panels.
Need to do a little work inside the van before I’m ready to install the batteries and solar panels tho, just gotta keep chipping away at it!
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