Wow, has it really been that long ?

Hi Everyone !

Long time no see, I can't believe its been 10 months since an update. I'm so sorry. As I said in my last post, I've been going through stuff, and although things still aren't perfect, they are much better than they were.

Nina is still waiting to be finished, that's not to say nothing has been done, actually a lot has been done, but I need to tie it all up and finish off things I have started.

Have done some camping this year, and enjoyed every bit of it, so looking forward to doing some more asap.

Her MOT is due again this week, wish her luck, hoping for a low cost one again. She has never let me down yet, please don't let it be this year she starts !

Ooh, this year she started her own YouTube channel, you can see updates and us actually camping up on there, here is the link if you fancy making a cuppa and wasting a few hours ;).

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCA2rDzKLyZ1FQtfn-MpWkgA/videos

Otherwise I will leave you with a few pics to see how she is looking now.

All the best everybody, hopefully wont leave it so long for the next blog, I really must get on top of whats been happening since the last work on here.































































- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Gloucester,United Kingdom

What's been happening ?

Hello everyone,

Just wanted to write a quick blog to let you all know what's been happening in mine and Nina's world.

I last posted in January when I laid the new floor, sadly since then things haven't been so good.

In January my stepdad had a fall on his Birthday and had to go to Accident & Emergency, unfortunately he had a long stay in hospital and when he came home needed a lot of care.

Sadly in June, my Mum died suddenly, and it brought my world to its knees for a while there, and only now am I starting to venture back in to the real world after a sort of break down.

I have been working on and off on Nina but haven't blogged anything as yet. I have taken photos and videos, and will start going through them at some point, so you will catch up eventually.

You won't recognise Nina since the last post, she is actually almost finished, the past few weeks in particular have been very busy and I am in fact going on my second camp in her tomorrow with my good friend Austin, aka Scudo Camper as seen on YouTube ;).

I hope to start putting posts up again very soon.

Would you all prefer me to do one big catch up post to this point, which obviously won't go in to the detail I normally do, or would you prefer me to break it down and explain each job as they happened ?

Let me know in the comments below and I'll start working on the most popular choice.

All the best to you all, make sure you come back soon :).

Location:Gloucester

Laying The New Floor Day Two

Second day of the flooring, as you can probably tell at the end of the video, I was quite pleased with it :). So relieved to have it out the way. It's great, very solid, no give at all and so many layers to it, should hold the heat in well.

Location:Gloucester

Finally Starting The Flooring !

Apologies for the lack of updates recently, things have been happening, quite a lot of things actually, you won't recognise Nina now !

I have had a couple of videos uploaded ready to go since November, for various reasons I haven't gotten around to updating the blog, but look our for a few updates in quick succession now.

Without further ado, the following video shows the start of my new flooring, enjoy :).

Location:Gloucester

Overhead Vent Board, Re-cover and Re-fit.

So after the new cupboard, the next job to be done, because it has been really annoying me, is the space in the roof over the cab. This has a blower in it and was part of the air conditioning system which is no longer active, but does create a useful blast of air in to the back in warmer weather. It runs from Nina's own vehicle battery, and is controlled via some dials fitted in the roof above the drivers seat.

I took it off a long time ago now, and it has been used to store junk since.

I think I was putting it off because I had attempted once before to remove the old black carpet that was on it, but it proved to be VERY stuck on with glue and staples.



It had to be done though, so I spent a good hour removing the vents, which were glued in with black silicon and very hard to cut away, even before I thought about removing the carpet.

Next the carpet came off piece by piece and then I removed all the old staples. Obviously staples weren't subject to a budget when used and I removed over 50 of them in a small piece of board. They had done their job though and the carpet had stayed put for many years.

Once all removed, I gave the board a good brush to get rid of all the loose dust, carpet fibre and old glue.

Placed it on the table on top of a piece of new carpet and proceeded to cut the carpet out and start gluing.















I had just finished cutting all the slits for the curves and bends around the edges, when I realised I had placed the board down the wrong way, back to front, and the new carpet I had just cut to its specific size was now useless !!

The fresh glue turned out to be very good, Screwfix No Nonsense Contact Adhesive, it took some vigorous pulling and tugging to remove the new carpet from where I had just stuck it.

Hey, at least I hadn't gotten as far as offering it up to its hole to fix in to place !

Old new carpet dumped and new piece of carpet cut to size, the right way this time, and I glued the edges down. The new carpet is quite thick, and if you don't allow the glue some setting time before you apply the carpet, the stiffness of the carpet meant it was just popping back up each time so re glued it and waited a good few minutes for the glue to become really tacky. Once it had, the carpet folded over and stuck pretty firmly.




















Once it was all glued in to place it was time to turn it over and put the vents back in. Because the carpet was glued through the vent holes beforehand, I didn't need any silicon to fix the plastic vents in to place, just popped them through their holes lined with carpet and they stuck firm. Think they call that an interference fit ;).


It looked great when done, the black contrasting with the new sand coloured carpet lining.



Offered it up to its hole in Nina and screwed it on with brand new screws, made such a difference and really tied that end of the conversion up.







Another job out the way ! :).

It was time to start thinking about the floor, another job I was dreading because all along I had intended on removing the metal runners in the floor used to secure stretchers/gurneys and wheelchairs, then I had decided to remove the whole of the old floor and start again with insulation so that I didn't lose any height.

On looking at all the bolts that held the runners going through the floor, ensuring a good solid fixing the trolley wheels, I decided against removing any of the old floor and just fixing a new floor over the top, which yes meant I would lose about an inch in height, but after building a section of the floor up by and inch and standing on it, my hair still didnt touch the ceiling so I made an executive decision to keep it, adding to layers for insulation, and just building the new floor over the top.

More on that next time ;).

Location:Gloucester

Double Trouble - Second cupboard goes in !

It’s been a long while since I posted an update, that doesn’t mean that nothing has been happening though, on the contrary, quite a lot has happened, and I have a couple of videos already uploaded but ’hidden’ until I have caught up.

In this update, I will talk about the next job on the long list, which is the single overhead cupboard on the passenger side.

You will remember that the bank of three overhead cupboards above the seating area was the unit from ’Emma’, leaving Nina’s original cupboard for me to break down to fit the other side above what will be the fold away seat.

I did it this way round, because Nina’s cupboard was constructed in a more modular way than Emma’s, and easier to reduce to a single.

The first thing to do was break it all down into its kit form, ready to cut and re-assemble.






























You will see in the timelapse that I was having a little trouble with my jigsaw, the aluminium cutting blade just snagged and jumped out of my jigsaw everytime I tried to cut with it, after a while I went back to a normal metal cutting (fine toothed) blade and it went through like a hot knife through butter. The GoPro did stop recording timelapse halfway through so you will have to go to the photos to see it finished, but the video will give you an idea of how it was all deconstructed then reconstructed to build a single unit.






Everything was going well, until I tried to put the carpet covered wooden base in to the framework, the carpet was a lot thicker than the original stuff, and I had also left some foam covering the underneath of the wood to make the carpet padded, this would be good as it’s directly over the fold away seat and you may just stand straight up from the seat and bump your head on the underside of the cupboard, so it was all a much tighter fit, I tried tapping the frame together over the carpet to force it in to the runners, this was a mistake, and resulted in me snapping one of the die cast corner pieces meaning that the one corner just fell apart. Of course all this happened just as the cupboard was about finished, and as I was trying to fit it to the wall in Nina, it just fell apart completely. At this point I was really fed up, it had taken me around three hours to get to this point, and I didn’t have any other corner pieces.










































I removed it from Nina and took it back to the table, went in to the house and sat in the warm for a bit to ’ponder’ :S.

Once I had calmed down a bit amd started thinking rationally again, I went back out and started hunting the sheds for something to repair the corner with that would be strong and still enable me to somehow fix the chrome cover back over the corner to conceal the ’workings’.

I found a tent peg, not the wire kind, but the flattened steel bent into a right angle down the main shaft for strength and rolled over at the top where you hit it with a mallet. It was the exact size of the channel that the original corner piece slid in to. Out came the jigsaw and I cut it to size and made it into a right angle that held the bottom two pieces of the frame together, and riveted them in to place. This held pretty well and once I had attached the downward strut, the corner felt strong. Put it all back together and the unit felt good and didn’t look like it was going to fall apart again. Phew !

That’s a good point when doing a self build. If it’s going wrong, take a break, or even finish for the day and go back with a fresh mind, it’s amazing how much good that does for creativity.

I refitted it in to Nina, and it looks great and does the job it was intended for. Although I’m not used to having a cupboard on that side and have on a couple of occasions cracked my head in to it ! Might need to put a big flashing light on it ;).

Location:Gloucester