Project Erica: Part 15 - Ta Dah! (Kinda)

Three videos in the space of a week: that's how quickly things progressed towards the end. Hot on the heels of completing the electrical installation, attention was turned back to the sofa/bed, which had sat almost untouched since we first made the frame back in August. 

Finishing the bed required some upholstery fabric and I had been tardy in ordering samples, so we needed something as a stop-gap (we ordered the foam with a stockinette cover which snags easily, so we couldn't just throw the uncovered foam in, even temporarily). That led us to make a trip into town (second time this year that I've ventured into town and last time was only to one specific shop) to do a trawl of the charity shops, which netted us a pair of curtains for £6. I can't say that either of us was wild about the design, but aesthetics weren't important for our immediate purposes; however, a week down the line and I have to say that the look is growing on me. We do now have the fabric samples I ordered (bar one that didn't arrive)...

 

I *really* don't like the one on the left. All of the others are in contention.

...the question is whether we go ahead and buy our choice of fabric, or whether, for now, we stick with what I've already made?

It probably didn't make sense to go as far as covering the head bumpers with the temporary fabric, but I wasn't going to reinstall them in their nasty yellow vinylness, and without them we had holes in Erica's header liner. I reckoned I had just enough fabric left to do them (golly, it was tight! Had to join two pieces together for the one above the tailgate and one of them only has about 5mm wrapped around to the rear of it) so I did a quick job with some double-sided tape.

The few scraps then remaining were allocated to making buttoned straps to hold the cushions in place when we're driving, after which this is the entirety of what was left from that pair of charity shop curtains:

I think we can say we got our money's worth from our £6 curtains!

Lots of other bits and pieces have been finished too. The toilet mount was built, and various bits of wood cut and secured to make various unfinished bits look prettier. We even put up a bit of wallpaper, in the shape of an OS map on the visible section of the back of the kitchen cabinet. 

Where does all that leave us? With a campervan that's fit and ready for use, albeit currently lacking in flooring and curtains. 

How chuffed are we with how she's looking? Mightily!

You can see the almost-final bit of her transformation from patient transfer vehicle to campervan by clicking on the thumbnail below:

 

Don't know if it's the same for every browser, but I only see part of the full YouTube thumbnail here, which rather ruins the before/after view that took me so long to assemble into a YouTube-suitable thumbnail!

(By way of a small aside: these videos have, until now, taken between 2 and 3 hours to upload to YouTube and we had to refrain from doing anything else on the internet whilst they were in progress. Yesterday we changed our internet provider and upgraded to fibre. This video took less than 10 minutes to upload. What timing, now that I'm all but finished with this video-making malarkey!)

Project Erica: Part 14 - We Have The Power!

For most of Project Erica I've been publishing one video a week, but here we are with the second installment in the space of 4 days. There are two reasons for this:

1) The build has accelerated over the last couple of weeks with lots of tasks getting finished, so I've already got the footage recorded for the next two videos;

2) My month-by-month subscription to the video editing software is up for renewal in a few days' time, so it seems sensible to get the antepenultimate and penultimate videos edited now so that I can cancel it (the final video* may be a while away yet) - and if I'm making the videos, I may as well publish them**.

The subject of this video is Erica's electrical system, which involved three days of me kneeling on her floor surrounding myself with tools and wires. My pleasure at things actually working once I'd connected them was arguably a little disproportionate and perhaps reflects an inbuilt pessimism that I seldom expect things to go to plan.

It's another quite long one at 23 minutes (including a couple of bonus snippets at the end), but unlike the heater installation installment, I'm happy with how this video has turned out. 

(*Now I think about it there may be two more videos: the final bits of the build combined with the grand tour, and a 'what it cost' review.

**YouTube would probably advise me to stick with a regular schedule, however, I've no interest in building a YouTube channel. I may well create more videos in the future if we do another significant project of some description, but for now the vlogging will finish with the completion of Erica.)

Project Erica: Part 13 - Portable Warmth for Nesh People

As if we haven't abused Erica enough over the last two months (I'm not sure she's yet forgiven us for wielding an angle grinder at her ramp), a couple of weeks ago we decided the time had come to cut another hole in her - quite a big one this time at 127mm across (or 5" if you prefer old money). 

The purpose of this hole was for the fitting of the diesel-powered air heater, which is the subject of this week's video:

Whilst almost everything on this project has been a learning experience to some extent, much of the work has been somehow comparable to things we've done in the past. The fitting of the diesel heater, in common with carpeting the walls and changing the passenger seat, felt like far more of a novel task.

Fortunately, I joined a couple of diesel heater groups on Facebook at the end of last year and over the months I've picked up many tips (mainly from other people's mistakes). Even so, it was a daunting task that I had in mind would take two days to complete. I wasn't wrong on the timescale, although if some of my tools hadn't gone into hiding, and if the weather been more amenable such that I'd been able to have a good run at the job (rather than snatching five minutes here and there when the rain wasn't so heavy), I would have been pleasantly surprised at how quickly and (relatively!) smoothly the fit went. As for complexity, it was easier than I'd expected, even if a couple of aspects were tricky (drilling the hole was as bad as I expected; routing the exhaust was significantly harder than anticipated).

I know that none of my videos in any way approach a professional standard, but I've managed to make this one worse than usual, with shaky pictures (filmed entirely phone-in-hand, rather than using the mount) and with wind across the mic right from the beginning. It's also rather long (23 minutes); I would have liked to have cut it down further, but given that I started out with over an hour's footage, I congratulated myself on getting it down that far!

Project Erica - Part 12: Switching Seats

When we bought Erica one of the compromises we had to make against our ideal vehicle specification was that she had a double front passenger seat, whereas we wanted a single. We knew it was something we could change, although we had also come to realise that single Peugeot Expert passenger seats don’t get advertised for sale too often* (because the vast majority of Experts come with doubles), and when they do they can be silly money (as in £600 for a second-hand one). Thus we thought our best bet may be to buy a driver’s seat in France when we’re over there some time. Given the current state of travel, we acknowledged that may be a couple of years down the line.

Then a week last Sunday we were watching a YouTube video where someone made a passing reference to a seat swivel, which reminded Mick that we hadn’t searched Ebay for a while. A couple of moments later he pointed me towards an auction and to cut the story a little shorter than what I tell in this week’s video, three days later we found ourselves in possession of a single passenger seat for £40.

A single passenger seat in itself has a huge benefit over the double: you can get from the cab into the living area without going outside (arguably it has a negative too: we can no longer give anyone a lift anywhere). A swivelling passenger seat is a bigger bonus as it not only gives an extra living-space seat, but it also creates more room (plus easy access to chuck things like daypacks in the front at night).

As the swivel plate was going to be four times the price we’d paid for the seat (I could have got one cheaper, but I went for a model with safety certificates), I didn’t want to commit to that purchase until we’d fitted the seat and knew that everything was okay with it. Again, I expected there may be quite a delay between the seat fitting and the swivel fitting. As it turned out, they happened two days apart.

Both activities were really simple … save for a couple or three time-consuming stumbling blocks (one of which involved the electrical connection to a seat that no longer exists which triggered a fault on an air bag that has never existed).

Anyways, enough wittering, if you want to see the video of all this coming to pass, you’ll find it here:

(*There was one on Ebay for about 3 weeks before we took delivery of Erica but to buy the seat before we had the vehicle seemed like tempting fate and by the time Erica arrived it was no longer available. I can’t remember whether it was £125 plus £25 delivery or £100 plus £25 delivery, but it was one or the other. That's the only other seat I've seen at what I would consider a reasonable price.) 

Project Erica - Part 11: Much Proudness Surrounds Kitchen Completion

In last week's Project Erica post, I referred to how we have put together detailed schedules for past projects. What I long ago learnt in making such plans is that all tasks should be allocated at least twice the time that my initial gut-feel suggested it should take. Sometimes a ten-minute job does only take ten minutes, and that is always a bonus, but oftentimes a ten-minute job takes half an hour*.

I didn't have any firm idea in my mind as to how long it would take us to build Erica's kitchen, but I can say with certainty that never in my wildest 'add x%' dreams (or nightmares!) think that it would take anywhere near as long as it did, nor did I anticipate that we would run into quite so many hitches (some of which were quite ridiculous and entirely of our own making).

The time it took was, however, worthwhile: I'm soooooo chuffed with how it has turned out.  

Here's this week's video showing us getting to that end result.  

(*Or longer. Sometimes a lot longer. I'm sure that if I gave Mick the keyboard at this point he would tell a few tales on me...)