savannals

After a bit of a break from van things during which we worked on Planet Comicon things, we're back on it! This weekend: prepping for and beginning insulation.

I started out by removing the wood rails along the sides of the cargo area. Don't need those when you've got (plans for) actual walls! I also wiped the walls down with alcohol (not the drinking kind) to remove stuff on the wall that might interfere with sticking things to it. Got a lot of grime off!

I also decided that I wanted to try to take the wiring that was clipped to the top of the wall and re-route it inside the channel behind where it was clipped. So I started loosening that, which you can see above.

In a major development in the get-things-out-of-our-house-and-into-the-van front, we put the solar panels on the roof this weekend!

I am very glad that's done and I really, truly hope we don't have to mess with the solar panels for a long time. Getting those up there was not easy.

The weather finally got warm and dry enough to clean Agent May up and take her out for some quick photos. Time to show off the wrap!

Oooooo. Isn't she beautiful?

This weekend we got the vent fan (mostly) installed! This is the result:

Pretend the blurring is just, like, artful hinting instead of questionable photography. And buckle up! This is a long one.

Last Thursday, the fellow at the vinyl wraps shop let me know that he could get the van wrapped early if we could drop it off on Friday. We could! Which means the wrapping started a week and a half earlier than we expected! It also meant that we didn't have the van last weekend.

We did have nice weather, some solar panels, and some bits to make a mounting frame for them. So that's what we did!

First step was to get the solar panels laid out so we could measure the distance between the mounting holes on the bottom. I grabbed some red wire thingydoodles from the shed because they were about the right size and we had a lot of them. We used those as spacers between the panels to give them a little bit of wiggle room.

On either end, you can see the cross bars of the roof rack where this array will eventually be installed.