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!