You Painted What?

Well, heady from our first successful mission in the Imperial Car Destroyer, it was time to make some real progress on the vehicle once more.  I had spent my last several sessions getting the cabin ready for some real transformative magic to take place, and the time was ripe.  I had shed blood, sweat and tears getting the Foam from Hell off the walls, I had already removed the data plates, and I had installed a Super Pack of DynaMat to the various exposed body plates.  The time was ripe for some good ól fashioned Beautification.

So I jumped right into it and instantly started... doing some more prep work.  Apparently if you are going to paint anything at all, you need to spend about 90% of your time on the prep, and the actual painting is kind of an after thought, tacked on at the end.  I knew this going into this project, it just always surprises me how much time it takes.  There was nothing else to it though, so I pulled out some junk mail (those damn annoying special deal on food from your local Big Name Grocery Store mini news papers) and put them to good use - masking off my windows.  I then went through and added masking tape over all of the instruments gauges as well, and over other things like the air horn button in the center of the steering wheel, and of course my air filter indicator at the bottom of the steering column.

Low Tech Black Out Ads

Leaky Front Axle Boot on the Passenger Side

It was sometime during this process that I crawled under vehicle for some reason.  It was then that I noticed I was leaking yucky Green Gobs of Goo (the deadly 3Gs) from my front passenger wheel.  There is a rubber boot that protects the steering knuckle just on the inside of the wheels, and it looks like mine had sprung a leak.  Not too surprising really, since this truck had most likely sat on some lonely airfield for the last decade or so waiting for something, anything to happen.  The tiny bit of driving around it has gotten to do with Captain Yarrow behind the wheel was probably more than it has seen in years.  Anyways, I noted this, and moved on, as it wasn't my project for that day.  For those of you that are interested, I looked this up on Steel Soldiers later, and cross referenced it with the TMs, and it looks like my Front Axle Boot is toast, and will need replacing.  They come in two varieties, one which is a zippered boot, that does not require you to remove the entire wheel, and a more durable fully enclosed boot, that does require the entire wheel to come off in order to be installed.  Both options have their advantages (and disadvantages), one is quick(er) and easier to do, the other gives me a chance to rebuild my front suspension, check out my front brakes, replace some bearing seals, and deal with any other lurking problems I may have down there.  It is also a MUCH bigger job.  However, that is a problem for some future day, so I just snapped a few pictures, and moved on.

So, I fired up my air compressor once more, let it fill the tank to 120 PSI, and adjusted the regulator to 40 PSI, which is appropriate for my HVLP spray gun, and started mixing the paint.  As I had bought two gallons of the Silver Mist grey for the interior of the van body, and barely used 2/3rds of one gallon, I figured I should go ahead and use that.  My basic plan is to have the interior be one basic color for the under coat, and the exterior one other basic color.  I went with light grey on the inside, and a darker grey on the outside (picked out, but not purchased yet).  So, loading up the paint gun, I got to work.  Something should be mentioned about paint guns.  They have a few major adjustments, one for spray pattern, and one for air flow.  Screwing with both of these knobs will get you the eventual pattern and flow you want, but neither is as important as this one thing.  Scrape off the end of your spray gun where the paint actually exits.  This may sound trivial, or obvious, but trust me, it's easy to forget.  And if there's even a little bit of dried on paint clogging something, it can seriously slow you down and make your paint gun seem pretty anemic.  Take it from a guy that found out the hard way.  Check that shit.

It had gotten dark by that point, so I decided to pack it in for the day, because painting in the dark is not very productive (read - stupid) and it was time to spend some time with my family.  I washed out the paint gun, put away my tools, and closed the doors to the cab to let it dry over night.  I would have loved to have had a beautiful, fully enclosed work area for the truck, but short of a full vehicle bay, my front drive way would just have to do.  Anyways, how else was I supposed to meet all of the neighbors and continue my Imperial Outreach program?  Luckily for me, this so called "Winter" has been more of a summer, and it not only didn't rain, but it was mostly clear with very little moisture in the air.  When I checked on stuff in the morning, it looked just fine.  Sure, I had missed a bunch of spots (painting in the dusk, tsk tsk tsk) but it looked essentially okay.

Cabin Interior the next day.  Yes, I painted the steering wheel...

Loading paint back up in the spray gun, making sure my nozzles were all cleared and clean this time, I proceeded to add a second coat over my efforts from yesterday.  This time things went fairly quickly.  It was a beautiful sunny day, and even though it was a little windy, it didn't seem to effect things too greatly.  I made fast progress, paying special attention to areas I had previously put too thin a coat on, or had simply missed.  I also covered the canvas seats with trash bags and did my best to paint the chairs support members as well.  I missed a few spots, but mostly got it.  Professional paint job this was not, but it looked a hell of a lot better than it had been.  Now, before I go into detail about some of the things I perhaps did a little wrong in my over zealousness to fix up the cabin, let me remind you that it was my overall goal to cover up and transform the rusty, dusty, grime filled interior into something else entirely, and if I may have or may not have gotten a little carried away with the glorious power of a paint gun, who can really blame me?  Right?  Right?

Wife:  "You painted the seat belt."
Me:  "Uh, yeah.  I guess I did..."

So, I coated everything in paint.  Nice, grey paint.  I painted the steering wheel.  Not the best idea, as it would most likely rub off in a day or two, but it was otherwise going to be a dark green, and not go with anything.  And more likely than not, I was going to get whiffs of paint on it anyways, so why the hell not.  My long term plan is to paint it black, or wrap it in something blackish.  And then there were the ancient-in-dire-need-of-replacing canvas booties that cover the bottom of the shift level and the high/low transfer shifter.  Both were cracked in a dozen places and impregnated in dust, and needed to be replaced.  Knowing I was going to replace them, why not have them be coated in a loving canvas of attractive grey paint until then?  Sure, the paint will crack some with use, but I was going to be replacing them any day now, so what did it matter?  In my attempt to paint over the DynaMat, I can tell you don't.  Not without priming.  The nice silvery reflective background needs primer to take a layer of paint, otherwise it scratches at everything.  This layer was just going to get some floor covering and a vinyl mat over it anyways, but hey - paint gun.  And last, but not least, I managed to get the one of my seat belts as well.  This is, of course, the very first thing my beloved wife noticed when I proudly dragged her out of the house for one of our "Hey honey, what do you think?" sessions.  Within seconds she pointed to the seat belt and started laughing.  I laughed too, because hell, what else could I do.  She didn't know how lucky she was that I still didn't have my paint gun in my hands.  grin


So, with most everything I wanted (and a few extras thrown in) painted grey, I started doing the most enjoyable part of painting, ripping all of the masking tape and paper off.  Off came the tape covering the gauges, off came the protective ads on the windows, off came the trash bags covering the seats!  When it was left, it was looking pretty damn good, if not a little bit too grey in areas.  Seemed much lighter in the cabin than in the van body, even though it was the same paint.  I then started with Phase Two of the cabin face lift project - adding some sound insulating foam!

I had spent a ton of time removing a lot of the old foam from the walls and ceiling of the cabin, so now it was time to replace them with some nice acoustic deadening foam.  The roof of a Deuce and a Half is typically a canvas affair, easily replaceable and capable of being taken on and off in a hurry.  Luckily for me, mine had the hard top replacement done to it previous in its existence, and sported a nice weather proof metal skin.  The hard top roof is held up by a series of braces on the inside, and there is about a 1" gap between these and the roof of the vehicle proper.  These made great places to shove the ends of the newly cut acoustic foam to hold them in place.  It also looked really good.  So, I set about measuring the spaces that needed foam, then cutting appropriately sized pieces and stuffing them into place.

After I got most of the foam inserts in place, I then went and bought some spray on adhesive from the local hardware store.  I had a choice between the normal strength stuff, and the super heavy duty stuff.  I went with the normal stuff because of cost, and would learn to regret this decision later on.  However, blissfully ignorant of my poor choice at the time, I returned home to the Car Destroyer and proceeded to carefully pull out the foam inserts, lightly spray the wall to tack them in, and then replace the foam.  For the wall inserts this would be fine, as they supported themselves fairly well, stuffed in behind the support braces for the roof as they were.  This seemed to work fairly well, and things were looking really nice.  For the ceiling I first sprayed the back of the precut foam insert, and then also put a nice healthy coating on the roof as well.  Then, with the help of a friend, I carefully got it into place and pressed it softly but firmly against the ceiling.  It stuck right away, and I was really happy we hadn't been more than a fraction off when we pushed it into place, because it wasn't going anywhere after that (well, until the next day when I discovered the ceiling foam had fallen off in the middle of the night, but that is for another post!).  Standing back, things were looking pretty damn good.  Sure, I still had more work to do, such as the floor mats for the foot wells and so on, but the cabin had really started to take shape.  Felt good - now it was time for a long hot shower to de-paintify and celebrate over a nice cool beer!

Looking pretty good!  Sounding even better!

The Imperial Car Destroyer's First Mission

Just a heads up, this post is not about fixing up the old beast, but instead, about using it.  If you are only here for the restoration aspects of things, get out now.  You have been warned.  Because now, the Imperial Car Destroyer is taking on it's first mission, and crew compliment!

Leftenant Ember and Ensign Indigo reporting in Sir!

My youngest daughter Indigo (you remember her from earlier posts, the one who brought the princesses to help with the floor and the electrical installation) is a member of that elite cadre of the woman's Advanced Recon Unit, the Grrl Scouts.  Every year they do a relief mission to the beleaguered, cookieless planets of the Empire, and this year was no different.  Except for one thing.  This time, they would be delivering them in The Imperial Car Destroyer! Our local bridge crew for the Car Destroyer reported in early that Saturday morning, and we were ready to go.  Our designated pick up LZ was just down the street, so we didn't have to go far.  Leftenant Ember reported in as well, and Ensign Indigo and Cookie Coordinator Cricket completed the crew compliment for our initial fitting out.  At the designated time we fired up the Car Destroyer, let the hefty rumble of the engine fill the neighborhood, and moved out.

The Relief Goods

We arrived at the Cookie LZ (which I suppose stands for Loading Zone in this context)  without incident, although a few neighbors did stare in blank confusion as the sun was momentarily blotted out as the Car Destroyer passed by.  Massive mounds of fresh cookie supplies lay in carefully staged piles in front of the Middle School, each carefully accounted for.  As the Car Destroyer approached, the lesser vehicles scurried away from its presence, and it was able to park four abreast in front of the cookie depot.  Such is the might of the Car Destroyer.  We deployed and I opened the rear doors and lowered the ladder to enable the taking on of the Relief Goods (IE - cookies).  I was amazed at the ease of which we were able to start simply loading giant crates of cookies onto our vehicle.  Maybe I missed the part where they checked ID, but it seemed an awful lot like someone showing up in a big enough truck with at least one girl wearing a uniform could potentially walk away with thousands upon thousands of cookies.  I will make a detailed report of this security loophole in my report to Imperial Command, you can be sure!

Forming the traditional Bucket Brigade formation, we then proceeded to load the vehicle to the brim with said Relief Goods.  Leftenant Ember and Ensign Indigo were in the vehicle proper sorting the Goods into their appropriate stacks when additional reinforcements arrived.  The rest of the Advanced Recon Unit (AKA - Girl Scouts) showed up and we made quick work of the epic pile of cookies, er Goods.  We had over 1,100+ cartons of cookies, each holding a dozen boxes of cookies, each of which held close to twenty cookies each.  This means the following formula applies:

1100 x 12 x 20 = Bajillions of Cookies!

Once the Goods were properly loaded and sorted into stacks, the Advanced Recon Unit redeployed to our secondary staging area (my driveway down the street) and I loaded Cookie Coordinator Cricket (Also known as "Triple C" to her team mates) and the ladder back into the Car Destroyer and we departed.  The short trip back was uneventful - for me, the driver.  Apparently it was quite lively in the back, as we had somehow managed to overlook the fact that our wonderful ladder was not in any way secured, and at the first speed bump (there's a lot of them around a school zone by the way) it went careening off into a nicely stacked pile of relief goods and sent them sprawling.  When I opened the back at our Secondary Staging Area, it was a very frazzled Triple C that greeted me.  Still, no Relief Goods were harmed during this process (or our dear Cookie Coordinator!) so we noted the error on our part and moved forward at a brisk pace.

At this point we had the entire strength of the Troop behind us, and things started moving.  We were on a strict schedule and timeline, and were on track to meet our self imposed deadlines.  The various parents of the  Advanced Recon Unit were doled out their Relief Goods for their individual distribution points, and soon the various Lesser Vehicles that lay behind the Imperial Car Destroyer were filled to the gills with Relief Goods, like so many mechanical suckling piglets come to mama.  This process took a little over and hour, closer to two, but we got it done in good time.  Spirits were flying high, and indeed morale was up across the board.  You could practical feel the espirit de corps as the Troop broke into some of their favorite work songs.  Indeed, it was a good day to be a member of such an important Relief Effort.

 Members of the Advanced Recon Unit on their Relief Mission to the Planet of Santa Cruz

As the unit dispersed towards their individual distribution nodes, the remaining core Bridge Crew for the Car Destroyer geared up for the next part of their operation - an in person delivery to the great center of learning on this planet, the Forested Library Moon of UCSC.  Now, it should be noted that the Import Export regulations on the Forest Moon of UCSC are very strict, and they do not allow any nuclear weapons or devices of any kind.  We double checked our Relief Goods manifest, and were relieved to see that none of our imports contained such banned ingredients.  Other than being "criminally tasty", they should pass inspection.  We loaded the Leftenant and Ensign in the back with Midship Woman Veronica (whom had arrived at the Staging Area earlier) and Triple C joined me in the Command Cabin.  We then moved out, plotting a course towards the Forest Moon.

We parted the seas of traffic before us, and began the long ascent up the steep hill towards where the main campus lay.  Slow though we may be, nothing would stop the Car Destroyer.  Heads swiveled and eyes bulged as the Car Destroyer gracefully (read - loud and mighty) moved through campus.  Startled herds of Freshmen scattered as we arrived, and soon we found our berth behind the mighty grey edifice of Engineering 2.  As Captain, I stayed with the vehicle as the rest of the Bridge Crew unloaded the Relief Goods.  As the sun set through the boughs of the redwoods, the dappled light casting both shadow and light over the bulk of the Car Destroyer, I knew it was a good day to be part of such a glorious effort.  My chest swelled with pride at the honest, hard working task accomplished that day.  Indeed, the might and wisdom of the Imperial Car Destroyer is second to none.

The Imperial Car Destroyer delivering Relief Goods to the Forested Library Moon of UCSC

The Right Tool For the Job

Greetings once again!  I am happy to report that I am having troubles keeping up with the progress on the truck. This is good because #1 - It means I am actually continuing to make forward progress, and #2 - I continue to write!  I plan on writing more often, and perhaps in slightly smaller chunks, in an effort to stay up to date on all of the activity while it is fresh in my mind.

When last we left our stalwart heroes, they were deep in the throws of dealing with the recalcitrant Foam from Hell, so that's where we will pick back up.  If you remember correctly, I was using a heavy duty scraper and manually trying to prey loose the caked on foam from the metal cabin of the truck.  I had hit upon the trick of using some acetone to denature the old adhesive, but it was still a long, tiring, slow process.  Well, it turns out I was going about things all wrong, and what I needed was the proper Tool for the Job.  Imagine, if you will, that I am a lone Infantryman in the Line Company for the Imperial Car Destroyers compliment of marines.  Imagine further that I am being faced with a large tank bearing down on me, intent with my destruction.  My heavy duty hand scraper and acetone was the equivalent of being armed with a sharpened spoon against the oncoming armor.  Okay, with the addition of the acetone, I'll give you a sharpened spork, but no more.

I'm calling in Air Support!

What I needed was some serious fire power.  What I needed was air support.  Specifically, a nice Variable Speed Multifunction Air Tool from Harbor Freight.  This thing is basically just a small hand held wand that vibrates at up to 17,000 oscillations a minute (don't get too excited now Grrls).  It has a simple single allen bolt head that takes a variety of attachments, transforming it from a cutting device, to a scraping device, to a sander.  I had already purchased a 25 gallon, 5 HP air compressor on eBay from a local bloke in Scotts Valley, so I figured I would give it a shot.  Boy, was it the right thing to do.  I bought a 1-3/8" Multi-Tool Plunge Blade for it that was technically for wood, but it looked like just what I needed.  This showed up in the mail mid week, and by the weekend I was ready to rumble.  It should be noted at this point in our story that my wife is starting to freak out a little bit about how many boxes of tools and parts are arriving at our house.  Daily.  Twice a day even.  When she suggested I might have a problem, I might have laughed maniacally and went outside to play with my air tools.  I couldn't really tell you for sure, I was still riding the high of my mighty power - I no longer had a sharpened spork, I had AIR POWER!

This took minutes, I shit you not!

So, early Saturday morning - no, I lie.  I wasn't early at all, it was something like the crack of noon.  So, early at the crack of noon, armed with my new power, I fire up the air compressor, attach my new multi-function air tool, with plunge blade attached, and go to town.  The thing fires right up, vibrates like hell, and cuts right through the foam like it wasn't there.  The metal blade glides through the foam, cuts through the nasty adhesive, and skitters off the metal underneath.  Sure, I scored the metal a little bit, but it got the job done!  In less time than it took to write this paragraph, I had the first section stripped and done.  What had taken me hours was reduced to the mere effort of minutes.  I was astounded.  I mean, I had hoped it would be easier, but this was ridiculous.  Not that I was complaining mind you, I just felt a little foolish for having suffered through the lame manual way before, but I figured nobody would know.  It could be my little secret, that I had wasted days of effort in vain because I was using the wrong tool.  I mean, it wasn't as if anybody was going to post it on their blog or anything, right?  Right?

Well, after the initial euphoria wore off, I got down to business and went to town.  Nasty old foam was flying left and right.  It didn't stand a chance.  What had once been a rebel hold out of opposition was annihilated in no time at all.  I was giddy with excitement.  I followed up the operation with my newly purchased shop vac and sucked down the offending bits of left over foam that were too small to simply toss out of the truck.   I then came back and attempted to sand the sections smooth, but discovered that many of the roof panels had a severe angle in them, and were in tight spaces, so this became untenable.  Instead I went back with the multi-tool and the plunge blade and used it as shaver to get rid of the remaining foam.  This thing can do anything!  Well, okay, maybe not anything, but it was certainly the Tool of the Hour.  Soon I had all of the upper foam sections out of the cabin, in fact I had all of the bits of foam I had targeted for execution out and done with.

Not wasting a moment, I busted out with some rust resistant primer and coated the now bare metal surfaces with some paint.  I was planning on painting the entire interior of the cab anyways, but I wanted to make sure no bare metal was left unprimed.  Luckily primer dries pretty quickly, and I didn't have to be too picky with its finish, as I was planning on putting foam over these sections anyways.  Not to be stopped, I went ahead and added the remained of my DynaMat to the newly exposed and primered cabin panels.  This process basically entailed taking measurements, not screwing them up, cutting sections of DynaMat (see my previous posts for this Wunder Product), removing their adhesive sticky backing, and putting them in place.  It took me a while to do it, but as I did not run into serious difficulty doing so, and I have covered it before, I won't bore you with all that many details along the lines of and then I put on another piece after having cut it, and then I tied my other shoe, and then...  etc etc.  Needless to say, it turned out well, and I could have bought a lot more DynaMat (with an unlimited budget, let's lie and say I did, okay?).  It was starting to come together!

This was the unmitigated success I was looking for after last weeks mostly useless effort.  It felt good to be one of the Good Guys, riding high on my success.  Next post I will cover prepping and actually painting the cabin's interior, and installing some sound insulating foam.  Until then, soldier on mighty Spork Warriors!

A Weekend Lost

There comes a time in every Project of Magnitude where everything lines up, everything goes your way, and all you try is easy and successful.  Where you have all of the right parts, the right tools, and no bolts are seized, and all is well and right in the Universe.  A time of joy, and unmitigated success.

This was not one of those weekends.

My daughter Ember, saying goodbye
to the YarMini...

Everything was lined up to be another productive weekend working on The Imperial Car Destroyer.  I had sold my Mini Cooper on eBay, and the buyer was showing up in the morning to purchase the vehicle.  I had received my case of DynaMat and was itching to work on the interior of the cabin.  I had the sun shining in my hair, and the world was my oyster (WTF does that expression mean anyways?).  The Universe, however, had other ideas.  First disaster is the arrival of the Grumpy Russian (tm).  He was to buy my Mini, and I was excited/sad to see it go.  I have been a classic British car guy for close to a decade now, and that little beast and I had been through a lot.  Truth be told, it was the end of an era.  From the moment Grumpy Russian (tm) pulled up in his $45k SUV, I knew things were about to go pear shaped.

Ends up, he had never owned a British car before, and was buying this one for his daughter for her 16th birthday.  I blinked several times when I heard that.  Might as well get your son a used Main Battle Tank as well while you are at it.  The two ideas are almost on par with each other.  Anyways, he proceeds to find anything and everything wrong with the car he can, and generally insults me with his thick heavy Russian accent in the process.  I guess somehow he was expecting a car that was showroom quality, everything gleaming and factory new, and powered by Unicorn magic.  News flash people - forty year old British cars take work - and even the nice, clean, working ones like mine have their blemishes.  The deal fell through, and I was back to the drawing board with needing to get my old car sold, so I could pay off the truck (...which I have intelligently purchased on a credit card so far.  Me iz smartz).  The shitty thing is, I went on Craigslist and eBay and looked at other classic Minis being sold, and I am right in the right spot, even a little below what other people are asking.  Oh well, at least my truck still loves me.

So, off to work on the truck at last.  Now, the night before I had shown off my cool shore power setup to my gamer friends that were over, except that when I threw the knife switch to turn on shore power, I got squat.  No lights, no power.  I smartly didn't do anything about it late at night, but decided to look into it during the day, post Mini fiasco.  I was just opening shop and getting my tools out when my buddy Joe showed up with his other friend Joe.  The Fates had thrown me a bone, the Master Electrician showed up just when I needed him.  We then proceeded to look into the issue and spent the rest of the day trying to track down what had happened.  Here is basically what was going on.

Sorry GFI Circuit...

Somehow I was now getting something on the order of ~617 miliamps of current through the system which had not been present before.  It is basically nothing, static in the wind as far as current goes, but it was enough to trip the GFI circuit we had installed each and every time we tried to switch to shore power.  24V truck power still worked fine.  We merrily went about isolating every single thing we could, going so far as to unplug and uncouple everything we could get our hands on, but all to no avail.  Somehow the ~617 milivolts kept on showing up.  So, in the end, we decided on the short term fix of simply replacing the GFI outlet with a normal outlet, and buttoning everything back up.  It was getting close to dark at this point, and at the end of that miserable day I was at slightly behind where I had started, and my spirits were a bit low.  I decided to call it an early day and go inside to drown my sorrows in beer and gaming.  At least they still love me!


Okay, next day, waking up refreshed and willing to get back on the metaphorical horse (this one just happened to weigh 15,500 lbs) I got back to it.  I decided to attack the cabin once more.  I have already mentioned what a bitch it is to remove that old foam in my previous post, and today proved no exception.  Undeterred however, I plowed onwards.  I removed the fire extinguisher mount on the curved passenger side of the cabin, near the door, and then proceeded to attack the caked on foam underneath.  It took some time, but with some acetone, a heavy duty scraper, and a hammer, I got the job done.  I was sweaty and covered in ancient foam flakes by the end of it, but I had met with success, of a sort.  I sanded the sucker to metal in most places, then cleaned it up and put a coat of rust resistant primer on it for good measure.


I had received my package full of DynaMat in the mail that week, so I was obviously itching to use it.  I ripped into it, and was surprised to discover it was not what I had envisioned.  I bought it simply because everyone I spoke to told me "That's the stuff to get", and I believed em.  Turns out, they were right, I just had a different idea in my head what that stuff was going to look like.  My imagination conjured up some Wunder Foam with Uber Insulation, but in reality I got large sheets of dense tarry rubber stuff with a giant peel off sticker on the back.  For all the world, it looked as if I had just bought several giant sheets of black eraser goo mixed with modelling clay.  You see, how it works is that it deadens the actual body panels it is attached to, making them more resistant to vibrations, and more dead to sound.  Crazy cool stuff, and actually very easy to work with.  One Super Pack got me nine sheets, which I had no idea if that was too much or too little at this point.  A lot would depend on whether or not I could put my new insulation right over the old foam and call it a day.  With my mythical, dreamed up Wunder Foam, I thought it could work.  Looking at the dense, tarry DynaMat in my hands, I realized that just wasn't going to happen.  The DynaMat only really worked if it was put right on the body panel to be deadened.  Placing it on top of the older foam would be like pouring jet fuel into an old truck.... oh wait, I can do that.  Well, pick a different metaphore then.  ;)  I did push forward and get the two foot well sections cut out and installed.  I had already done the work of prepping those areas, and I was going to be damned if I didn't get some of this stuff installed, even if it was going to take me a millennium to get the rest of the foam off.  The driver side was particularly difficult, as I had to have cut outs for the various pedals and what not that live there.  First attempt I did all of my measurements totally bang on, made the cuts, only to discover to my horror that I had cut it sticky side up, and the damn thing was upside down.  *groan*  The second time I nailed it though, and it looked pretty good.

At this point I also noticed that the edges of my windows were covered in rust, and in some cases whole chunks were missing due to the corrosion.  Obviously something had to be done.  I attacked it with a sander, then cleaned it up with some sand paper by hand, and then blew it off with my air compressor.  It wasn't pretty, but at least I had gotten rid of the larger chunks and flakes of rust, and had a surface I could work with now.  I then hit it with my favorite nasty die-if-you-ingest-it chemical, Loctite Extend.  It worked its transformative magics upon the rust and turned it into not-rust.  I then hit it with some more rust resistant primer as well.  Now, a note about these windows.  They are cool.  I mean seriously cool.  You can not only fold them down entirely and bolt them to the hood of the engine, allowing you to drive like some crazy Mad Max bad ass getting bugs in your teeth and wearing goggles which you can't see out of, but you can also hinge them forward so they are propped open from the top, allowing air to get in along the bottom.  I'd like to see you try that in your Toyota Camry, ha!

At this point darkness threatened once more, and I called it a day.  At least I had made some progress, even if it fell far below what I was hoping to accomplish.  Actually, reading back on this post, I have to say it wasn't nearly as bad as I felt at the time.  I went to bed that night in pretty low spirits, but upon more mature reflection, I did indeed get some shit done.  I had installed my first two pieces of DynaMat, cleaned out yet another section of foam, and dealt with some rust issues in the cabin.  I had also got my damn shore power working once more, but that didn't seem like as much of a win.  Getting something working that had previously been working was not my idea of progress, although I should know better, working as a software engineer for the last decade plus.

Next post I will make up for lost time in a BIG way, and get the project rolling again.  So, stay tuned, and remember, report any Rebel Scum you come across to your local Storm Trooper Authorities at once!

The Foam from Hell...

A quick update on some more of the work that has been accomplished/attempted.  I had hinted last post that I was going to encounter some serious resistance to Progress when I attempted to tackle doing the sound insulation in the cab interior, and that's no joke.  I am going to get into it a little bit more now and describe in some more detail how my expectations of an easy job were so far off the mark.

I had already removed the passenger seat at this point, and was amazed at the thick layers of dust, dust and more dust that covered everything.  The cabin had 1/4" foam installed in it to provide some modicum of sound insulation, as well as some padding (not much) for its passengers.  However this foam was ancient (most likely just as old as the vehicle, so over forty!) and was completely worn through in several locations, such as the foot wells on both the driver and passenger sides.  So I figured I would rip it all out and replace it.  I mean, how hard could it be, right?

Correct answer:  Extremely.

Making progress now!

At first I just tried pulling up on the foam, but as you might expect, I was rewarded with only little bits of foam ripped off in my hands for my efforts.  As it aged, the foam became brittle and more prone to ripping - at least the top part did.  The bottom part had become one with whatever crazy military grade adhesive they stuck it to the floor with.  Undaunted, I got out a large scraper and started jamming it under the foam, shoving with all of my might to scrape it clear of the metal underneath.  Work was super slow, and I quickly realized the little cheesy scraper I was using wasn't going to cut it, both literally and figuratively.  I popped out to the local hardware store and bought a heavy duty scraper, and some acetone.  Returning rearmed, I had another go at it.

This time I made more progress, and was able to get most of the foam out of the passenger foot well where I had been working.  It had easily been over and hour or two, and I had barely cleared one small section.  Additionally the section that I had scraped clear still had a thin layer of ancient adhesive with foam stubble on it, looking for all the world like some scraggly ass beard a teenage troll might try to grow on his sixteenth birthday.  Improvising, I decided to try to simply sand the hell out of it and see if it worked.  Pulling out my trusty orbital sander, I got down to work.  After a few minutes noisy sanding, I had penetrated the nasty layer of glue and stubble, and had nice clean bare metal beneath it!

Now that I was down in it, I started to see little bits of rust here and there, especially in the cracks where the foam had come up a bit over the years.  I blew everything out with my air compressor as best I could, and then applied some of the miracle fluid, Loctite Extend and let it dry.  Once it had I grabbed my can of rust resistant grey primer and coated the now rust free areas in a protective layer of paint.  I also spray painted the freshly bare passenger foot well as well.

One prepped passenger foot well ready!

Now that I had a system worked out, I attacked the other major problem spot, the driver side foot well.  This time I added a step where I first soaked the foam in a little bit of acetone before proceeding with the heavy duty scraper.  This helped A LOT, and I started to make some real progress.  It was at this point where I recognized that it was possible to keep a layer of the more heavy duty paint (looks like bed liner paint perhaps) that the army had coated the floor in if I was real careful in how I scraped and then sanded.  So, with a little more delicacy (as much as you can have grunting, pushing and shoving a bladed spatula under resistant ancient foam) I was able to salvage some of the original protective paint and not take it down to metal.  I finished up by spray painting the driver's side foot well with primer as well.  Was looking pretty good!

At this point it was getting late, I had been at it for hours and hours, and I had barely managed to clean and prep to small areas.  Looking around at the rest of the cabin interior, I started to reassess my overall strategy for what I was doing.  I hadn't received my sound insulation yet ( had purchased some DynaMat on Amazon) and I was now having thoughts along the lines of "Perhaps I can just leave a lot of this old foam in place where it's not so bad and put additional insulation over it..."  More next post on why THAT particular idea didn't work, and why the next weekend's worth of work felt a lot like spinning my wheels in place and going no where.  Fun fun fun!

As usual, thanks for reading along, and I will try to have the next post out as quickly as possible!

God, that took a lot of work...

House Power, A Kitchen Table, and Cabin Work!

Work proceeds at a ramshackle pace, but I am definitely making progress.  When we left our stalwart heroes, they had just gotten the House Power to work in the coffer, but it was a jury-rigged, temporary affair, mainly just to prove it could be done.  So, lets pick up there, shall we?

Time to secure the
Shore Power correctly!

The external shore power receptical we picked up at West Marine was never properly bolted in the first time around - we used some random sheet metal screws we had at the time if I recall correctly.  So, time to do it right.  My buddy Joe (you remember him from our earlier episodes - the 5th Dan Black Belt in ElectraJitsu) is a huge fan of blind fasteners, and convinced me to try them out.  I must say, I am now a believer.  You see, with your typical fastener (read - screw or nut and bolt) you either go right into the material, biting into it in order to secure yourself, or you drill right through it and secure the fastener on the far side.  The problem with either of these two traditional approaches is that the van body is made out of two sheets of relatively thin steel, with a hollow space between the two an inch or so thick.  A screw will work, but as the metal isn't amazingly thick it doesn't make a great connection.  A bolt has issues because it is very hard to get a nut on its other end, due to the tight spaces and so on.  Enter the blind fastener.

Two RivNuts in!

In this case we elected to go with RivNuts, the blind fastener love child of a rivet and a nut.  We drilled out the original holes and made then exactly large enough to insert the selected RivNuts.  You then slot them into the newly drilled holes using this massive rivet gun, and then pull the handle (causing the RivNut's sides to expand), securing them firmly in place inside the new hole.  You now have a threaded nut securely in place, without having had to get behind the thing or glue it there or anything awkward.  Very cool.  Maybe everyone else in the universe knows about blind fasteners, but to me, right then, they were the stuff of magic and legend.  After adding the four RivNuts, we then enlarged the space for the wires on the internal wall and added a rubber grommet in order to prevent the wires from rubbing against the metal edge.  We then mounted a proper two outlet water proof junction box on the inside wall and hooked up the wires once more.  It was late, and a week day night, so Joe and I decided to pack it in at this point.  I needed to go buy appropriate stainless steel bolts for the shore power box anyways, so I had my work cut out for me.

Interior junction box for the Shore Power

Flash forward to that weekend.  I have bought the remaining supplies I needed on one of my lunch breaks during the week, those being some appropriately sized stainless steel screws, and a few outlets for the junction box (one of them being a GFI outlet).  During the week the table I had ordered from Overstock.com had arrived as well, so I had all kinds of stuff to do.  I awoke early(ish) in the morning and got to work.  First thing I did was build the beautiful stainless steel table that is going to become our kitchen.  I pulled it out, read the one page instructions, and then proceeded to not entirely screw up building it.  So far, so good. At a little over $160 for the table, I was really impressed with its quality and construction.  The thing looks durable, and should stand up to the abuse of travelling and having me try to cook on it!

At this point I decided to start working on prepping the cabin for painting and sound insulation.  "How hard could it be?" I thought, "I did the van interior prep in just a day or so."  What a fool I am.  Ends up, it's a ton more work, even though it's a much smaller space.  However I didn't know this at the time, so I blissfully went about my business, and started pulling off the various data plates and warning signs inside the cabin, carefully setting them aside inside my garage.  I then went ahead and used a razor blade to remove all of the various warning labels and stickers throughout the cabin as well.  So far so good.  This was the easy step.  I then set about removing the passenger seat in order make some more space to work on things, and also get to some of the floor and back of the cabin a bit easier.  Setting it aside on my lawn, I started to take a good, close look at the interior of the cab.

Passenger seat is out, and I staring at the dust in dismay...

Everything was coated in multiple layers of dust and grime, but mostly dust.  Random rocks, rusted bolts and nuts were everywhere.  Most places were a uniform desert tan from all of the residue.  There was some 1/4" rubber foam coating most of the interior.  In some places it still wasn't too bad (such as directly behind the passenger seat), but in others it was disintegrating into a flakey, hard packed mess.  The two worst spots were the driver side floor board, and the passenger floorboard areas.  I guess it made sense, as this is were everyone's feet have been rubbing against for the past forty-seven some odd years.  I also found a bunch of places were rust had started taking hold, although far less of it than I had prepared myself for, truth be told.


At this point Joe showed up, so I switched gears rapidly and we got back to work on the shore power project.  Now armed with the proper outlets, bolts, wires, GFI and so on, we got down to work.  We wired in the two outlets into the junction box, the GFI being the first in the series so it would protect everything downstream from it.  We then drew some wire (three of them to be precise) from the junction box through our water proof cable conduit, and up into the switch box itself.  We used one of the knock out holes provided in the switch box to the rear right on the bottom, which gave us a more or less straight shot up from the junction box below.  We then connected in to the exact same spot the original wiring for the 115V system had been.  It sounds simple to describe it, but it took a while as we wanted to make sure we did it right the first time.  Luckily, we had Joe, so we did it right the first time.  At some point some bit of metal took a bite of Joe's finger as well, and he had a small cut, so we knew we were alright.  The Blood Sacrifice required by the Truck Gods had been made,  and the Gods were pleased.  We knew this to be true, because shortly later when we flipped the knife switch to go from 24V to 115V power, we had beautiful, beautiful lights!

Indigo's Black Out lights will become our new night light for the girls...

So, it may not have seemed like much progress - because didn't you have your lights working a week ago or so Yarry? - but it felt really good to have done it right this time.  I am now confident I could take this guy on the road, and not have anything funky happen with the wiring.  Once again, many thanks to Grandmaster Alig, my friend Joe.  I have decided I am going to have little brass plaques made up for all of the people that help me on the Imperial Car Destroyer during its build up and fitting out, and his name is going down on the very first one.

Next post we will get into the details of trying to prep the cabin, and how much harder it ends up being than I thought it should have been.  Ends up, whatever adhesive they put that wimpy looking foam on is gnarly.  Probably originally used to glue airplane wings together or something.  Anyways, more on that next time.  As usual, thanks for stopping by, and I promise to keep you as up to date on my progress as possible.  I think we are only a week behind at this point!

Imperial Entanglements

AKA - Getting Legal with The Man


Well, I've stalled long enough, time to cover the more boring, yet far more critical aspects of this project.  The paperwork.  In specific, getting the vehicle registered and legal with the man.  Here is some back story.

"That's a great price on a 25 ton crane..."

First off, let's cover the process of simply buying one.  The easiest way is to buy one off of Craigslist from a private individual.  If you do this, you bypass a ton of paperwork, and have the Fast Path towards getting legal with The Man.  If someone else has already gotten the damn thing registered, then all you have to do is a title transfer and pay some fees.  A far simpler, basic, run-of-the-mill operation that will raise no eyebrows at the DMV and will usually just sail on through.  Of course, you have to get really lucky and find just the vehicle you are looking for on Craigslist, which I could not when I went searching.  Of course, I was impatient, and given more time - like a year or so - I am sure one would have popped up.  So, okay, you want one right now, or at least soonish, and you decide you are going to buy one (semi)directly form the U.S. Military.  Enter Government Liquidation!  Basically you register for the site, then you are able to bid on the crap posted up there.  And it is simply amazing what you can find on that site.  I saw pallets of tons of scrap aluminum being sold for dollars, entire stacks of 647 heavy duty travel enclosures, pallets of old laptops with their HDD removed, twenty-ton fire trucks and more!  Reigning myself in, I found that Nellis Airforce Base had three older M109A3s up for auction, and I found the one I wanted.

For those of you that don't know, the Military uses a classification system, Supply Condition Codes for its motor pool.  It goes something like this:  A vehicle rolls off the assembly line onto the show room floor (or perhaps parade ground in this case) it is considered a classification A1.  The A means it is new, and the 1 means it is in the highest bracket of New.  You put your first ding in it and it gets keyed in the parking lot, it becomes A2.  You run over a small tree because you couldn't see the damn thing backing up, it becomes an A3, and so on.  The one I was looking at was an F7.  Now, before you groan too loudly, that was the best of the three up for auction. As a matter of fact, I am pretty certain that if they are in better shape, the Military has to keep them as they are serviceable.  I don't know this for a fact, but it wouldn't surprise me if perfectly functional, but old vehicles get tagged as F7 and lower just to make room for new incoming stock.

You then bid on the item as normal - I did mine on the way to a meeting at work - and win just like on eBay.  If you win, your credit card on file is charged, and then nominally are owed a truck.  I say this because this is where they have to do a background check on you.  This only happens for a few controlled items on Government Liquidators, but giant old army trucks are one of them.  You have to fill out something called an EUC, or End User Certificate.  Basically it is a bunch of rote questions asking you if you are a business, are you planning on reselling the vehicle, are you a US citizen, do you currently live in the country, are you now, or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party, and so on.  That sort of thing.  Being an odd classification of a Gun Toting Liberal, I was pretty sure I still qualified, even living in Santa Cruz, so I filled the damn thing out and sent it off to the good people at Battle Creek.  I still have my official piece of paper from the impressive sounding Defense Logistics Agency.  I knew I was in the Big Time now!  Much to everyone's surprise, I checked out, and was awarded my EUC.  It should be noted that this process takes up to 4 to 6 weeks for first time buyers, and during that time you are in the unenviable position of having shelled out for a vehicle you can not yet take possession of.

Now, there is great controversy over what type of license you need to drive one of these trucks.  Especially in good 'ole California.  After a lot of research, it basically looked like I was going to need at least a Class B license to drive one if it was the troop transport flatbed truck version of the vehicle.  If it had a van body on it, and that van body had a bunk bed and other RV accouterments , it could be considered a Motor Home, and a Class C license (your standard car license) would do fine.

Everything hinges on the fact that it has three axles.  Any vehicle over 6,000 lbs. with three axles needs a Class B license (and apparently there are Commercial and Non-Commercial Class B as well - ungh), and just as a reminder, the M109A3 weighs in at just under 15,500 lbs!  Of course a Motor Home under 42' long only requires a Class C.  After reading a whole lot of forum posts, and California Vehicle Codes, it looked like the Motor Home ruling took precedence over the three-axle rule.  Another interesting fact - if it is not a Motor Home, the DMV wanted to register it as a commercial vehicle, and thus charge me registration by its weight, which would have been an additional thousand dollars or more!  So, after having done my homework, I decided I was going to take the plunge and buy the thing.

Believe it or not, I had a giant truck show up in front of my house, get dropped off, and I had nothing else in the form of paper work besides a receipt from the trucking company, saying they had simply shipped something, and a few vague emails from Government Liquidation.

The Capitola DMV

Being who I am, I gathered up what few scraps of paperwork I had and marched down to my local DMV the very same day the truck had arrived.  I waited through my lines, and eventually talked to a helpful DMV employee.  After a bit, I had her thoroughly bamboozled, and when she went to the Old Timer with white hair to ask him what he thought (think of him as the DMV equivilent of the Old Sensei on the Mountain) and he still didn't know, I knew I was doing good.  At a loss of what to do, she simply took $20 from me as a "Miscellaneous Charge" and issued me a Temp Permit for the next two months.  She had mentioned that the computer kept asking about something called a "SF-97" form that the Goverment was apparently supposed to give me.  I thanked her for her time, grabbed my temp permit before she changed her mind, and headed back home.

At this point I started to do some serious research on Steel Soldiers, quite simply the best single resource for anyone interested in owning a Military Vehicle from the US.  After some searching through other registration forum threads, I discovered that apparently I should have been issued an entire separate set of paperwork with my vehicle, including the coveted "SF-97" form.  Calling Goverment Liquidators, I found they were extremely helpful, and pointed me to the section of their web site that now contained my application for the form.  It was a little tricky, in that the link will not show up until you have actually won a bid apparently, so even though I had looked there before, I hadn't seen it.  Oh well, I know now.  Filling it out, and giving them some more money (apparently it was free before, but now they charge you), I sent it off to them.  Now you wait another few weeks to get back the paperwork.

You may ask yourself, "Hey wait a minute, this sounds like this would take months...  Don't you still have a giant, 7 1/2 ton unregistered military truck sitting in front of your house?"  Well, the answer is, yes.  Yes I do.  This was not a fact that was lost on me, and as a result I didn't really drive her anywhere around town (except to sneak out to ProBuild to buy the floors - no other vehicle of mine would fit the plywood!) for fear of being pulled over.  It helped I had the temporary permit, and I had gotten my insurance to sign off on the vehicle, but until I could prove it was a motor home, I didn't want to take my chances.  What I did spend my time w doing was fixing up the truck, getting it to the point where when I did  have my paperwork, I could drive the sucker down to the DMV and show them the bunk bed and so on.

Well, I got the SF-97 Form back, along with a freshly printed Nevada title, so I marched on down to the DMV for my second attempt.  At this point in the timeline I wasn't quite done getting the bunk beds in, and had only just painted the interior of the van body.  After waiting in line, I spoke with another fine DMV employee who basically told me "Go forth and make it look like an RV, and come back when you are ready".  Otherwise, Commercial Vehicle, thousands of extra dollars in registration, and I would need a new classification of license.  Flash forward to me working my ass off, getting the bunk bed purchased and installed, and then I crossed my fingers, hopped in the truck, and drove it across town to the DMV.

You know what they say, the third time is a charm.  I pulled into the little vehicle inspection area and pressed the little buzzer they give you.  Horrible flashbacks to when I was 15 and took the driving test - right there at that exact same DMV - ran through my head.  There was some hipster girl on a beat up Japanese moped in front of me, and she and the DMV Inspector had a serious screw-you rivalry going on between them.  I swear she shot daggers out of her eyes at his turned back, and he crawled all over and under that poor little 50 lbs. scooter looking for anything that could be out of place.  By the time he got to me I was seriously nervous.  Nothing for it though, so I put on my best Number One Smile, and greeted him.  He accepted the VIN on my dash plate just fine, and didn't try to crawl under the vehicle or engine looking for it anywhere else.  Upon opening up the back, he grunted and said "You haven't gotten very far", which was fair I guess, as I had just bolted in the bunk bed, but it still hurt.  He grumble/mumbled something, handed me some paperwork, and sent me inside.

Sitting inside, I waited back through line, then spoke with a helpful DMV employee.  I got really lucky, and got the original woman I had spoken to on Trip #1, the nice one who had issued me the 2 month temp permit.  She looked over my paperwork, smiling and nodding, and I started to feel hopeful.  Then her brows knitted together, and I started worrying again.  She stood up and went back to speak to the white haired Sensei On The Mounatin.  Upon returning, I asked her what was up.  She said, "I don't know what was up with Fred (insert random name here), our inspector.  This vehicle inspection has been marked as a 'Truck with Camper Shell', which it clearly isn't.  I asked Sifu what to do, and he said to just mark it down as a Motor Home".  I practically cried with joy at those words.

It's like a birth certificate, only bigger, and made of metal...

I paid about a hundred more dollars, as opposed to over $1,100 more, got my new plates and stickers and registration, and I was done.  I couldn't believe it.  The deed had been done, I was legal with the man.  I think I kissed those plates about a dozen times after getting them, and for the whole day I had that kind of inner glow you get after something big has happened in your life, like your first child is born.  And, in a way, it had been...

Let there be Light!

Now that the interior of the van body was starting to take shape, it was time to figure out how the hell the thing was wired.  I knew the batteries were good, because I had already started the beast up on more than one occasion, and had that memorable inaugural drive down to ProBuild in order to buy the plywood for the floor.  Still, I hadn't quite figured out how all of the various fuse boxes, relays and circuit breakers in the back had been wired together, and to say the least, I was a little bit daunted.  So, time to call in some heavy duty reinforcements.

I called upon my friend Joe.

Grand Master Joe, 5th Dan Black Belt in Eletra-jitsu

Now, a little background on Joe.  I work with him, and he has been an Electrical Engineer since you could get degrees in such things.  I would not be surprised if he and Tesla wouldn't have gotten along quite well in fact.  He is the kind of guy who has a collection of old oscilloscopes because its fun.  In other words, he is just the sort of bad ass electrical genius the Bad Ass M109A3 needed in a bad way.  And yes, I just used the word bad three times in one sentence, all the while conveying the meaning of awesome.

We started by reading all of the various labels, wiring diagrams, and other informational plaques bolted to the various boxes that comprised the electrical system.We then proceeded to pull out our trusty volt meter and open up all of boxes one by one, flipping switches and checking continuity and presence of power.  It should be noted we weren't plugged into shore power or anything at this point, as he hadn't discovered where that was yet, and really only had access to the vehicles onboard 24V battery system.  After a little bit of trial and terror, we figured out most of it.  Perhaps even all of it.

It brakes down like this:  All power to the van body is controlled by a giant knife switch that selects between using the vehicles onboard 24V power, or in its other selection it will run off of conventional 115V shore power (plugged into an external power source, such as a building, a portable generator, and so on).  Set to 24V, we got current running through the thing, so we knew it to be live, but we couldn't for the life of us figure out how to turn on the damn lights.  After screwing around with the various circuit breakers (which I will get to in a second), I finally noticed a light switch on the other side of the van body's interior up at head height above the door that read "Light Switches".  Flipping that one to the "On" position (with the knife switch set to 24V, and the circuit breaker for the lights set to ON) the lights came on.  Success!  I know it may not sound like much upon reading it, but I can tell you that I was pretty well stoked at the time.  Hell, I still am.

Lights!  First time seeing the 24V lights work...

Still heady with our success, we moved on.  Shore power.  Walking around the exterior of the vehicle, we identified what we believed to be the original external shore power receptacle.  It is this great big honking thing hanging off the top right front of the van body, not so coincidentally right on the other side of the electrical control boxes.  It was impressive, heavy duty, and way over the top.  I did some quick online searches to figure out just where I could buy a plug to go into it and build the appropriate cable that would be needed.  Ends up it is an Arktite connector, rated to survive in biological war zones, hazardous wastes sites, and basically the End of Days.  It also cost roughly $400 to $700 for a used one, if you were lucky enough to find one.  So, screw that, we would need an alternate method of supplying power.  Once again going back to my favorite Canadian's M109A3 conversion web site, I saw that he ran into the same issue.  Joe has owned boats throughout a great majority of his life, and simply suggested we go down to West Marine and wire the sucker up with an off the shelf receptacle for shore power.  I said "Hell yes" and we both jumped in the car.

Barely owned the vehicle for a month
or two, and already putting holes in it!

So, a quick stop by West Marine, and then a follow up trip to Home Despot and we had everything we needed to get going on adding our own shore power receptacle up and running.  I had purchased a boat shore power receptacle, an insulated rubber booty, a 30amp plug connector, a traditional heavy-duty three prong plug, and 50' of heavy duty thick gauge wire.  I also picked up some water proof cable conduit, a mounting box, and a cut out saw as well.  Laden with hardware, we returned to the project.  First order of business was cut out the hole that the shore power receptacle would live in.  I selected a place just above the right front reflector  on the van body.  This would put it a few feet below the knife switch on the inside, and still be generally convenient to access and plug in from the outside.  I drilled the pilot hole, and then got down to the serious business of putting gaping holes in the side of my newly acquired old military truck.

A man, and his cable...

I managed to get the hole cut out without horribly destroying either the truck, the drill, or myself, so I considered it a grand success.  We made sure the shore power receptacle fit (it did) and made an appropriate (smaller) sized hole in the far wall leading into the van interior.  After this it was time to make the cable.  We started by stripping the ends of one side, exposing the three wires contained within, and then wiring them into the big 30amp plug.  Working on electrical this large is a joy, because you have actual wires the size you can hold onto, instead of teeny, tiny little wires that want to bend at a moments notice.  That wired up, we added the weather proof bootie to it and ran into a snag.  The cheaper 30amp plug I had bought at Home Despot didn't quite fit inside the bootie.  After screwing around with it for a little while, we decided to punt, deal with it later, and move on.  We added the generic 3 prong male plug to the other end and presto, we had our cable!

Completed outside shore power receptacle

It aint pretty, but it works!

We were running out of daylight at this point, and didn't have all of the necessary goods to finish the project right, but we decided to push forward and at least get it wired up in a temporary fashion so that we might see if shore power worked at all, then come back in the near future and ruggedize it and do a more permanent mounting job.  So, with that in mind, we screwed in the outside shore power receptacle in with not-quite-right screws, fed the wires through the other side, and wired them up in a temporary manner to the knife switch's 115V side of things.  And by we I mean Joe.  Not that I didn't stand by and soak up as much knowledge as possible, hand him wrenches, fetch him beer, and what not, but I was no dummy, I also gave the Master room to work.  We forewent the junction box, the cable conduit, and just got the damn thing wired up.  It wasn't pretty, but it was only going to stay this way for a few days until we did it right.  What was pretty was plugging it into the house on the other side of things, throwing that big 'ole knife switch, and having lights, glorious 115V lights switch on in the back of the van body!

Hooked up to shore power externally, with the knife switch set to its 115V position, and all of the circuit breakers set to the ON position, I am happy to report that the lights work, the power strips on both the right and left sides work, the black out bulb works, and even the blower/fan near the door works!  I was overjoyed.  I had set my expectations for the day to be investigation only, with the stretch goal of coming up with a solid plan of what to do next.  Instead I stood in the back of my vehicle, cackling madly under beautiful 115V lights, listening to the horrid whine of my blower wheezing away.  I was ecstatic to say the least!  Once again, my thanks have to go out to Joe for making this happen.  In him I have found a fellow old truck nut, diesel officianado, and electrical genius.  Having him on the team just made this project a lot more doable, and I can't thank him enough for it (although I may try).  I also have to thank my tireless helper, Indigo, and her princesses that were always there for us when we needed some perspective and a break from things.

Indigo, Joe and two princesses enjoy the new lights of the truck!

I promised to cover the legal aspects of getting this vehicle registered and legal with The Man, but it looks like I have ran out of space in this post, so it will have to be next week.  For all of you who have harbored secret desires to buy old military vehicles that weigh thousands upon thousands of pounds, read on to see what getting it legal with The Man entails.  Until then, enjoy!