My MWB Camper - The story so far...

Misterg

I started posting this on DIYMH, but will start again from the beginning here :)

The plan was to make a two berth camper with internal storage for a couple of mountain bikes in a MWB (L2H2) Citroen Relay. We wanted a fixed bed and minimal cooking facilities, and weren't too bothered about a dedicated toilet compartment. The various iterations of planning led to this:


We wanted a fairly recent van, but the prices of 2-3 year old vans were only a few £000 less than a brand new one. So last December, we ended up ordering a new van with single passenger seat, swivels, no solid bulkhead, passenger air bags, reversing camera, etc. which eventually turned up in April this year after a very fraught time caused by the dealership we ordered through going into administration.




We realised that the seats, when swivelled, protruded slightly further into the load area than we had thought, which put the hob burner in the above layout a bit too close to the elbow of the person in the driver side seat. On seeing this, my wife dropped her long-held objection to having a unit part way across the sliding door, so we've moved the kitchen over there. This, in turn has allowed me to turn the toilet compartment through 90 degrees so it doesn't cut across the van as much, and gives the option of fitting a cassette toilet rather than the Porta-Pooper we were planning.

We also moved the water tank to above the wheel-arch which means some tricky work to fit the filler (I don't want a 'bottom fill') - it looks do-able, but it very tight on positioning!

So the layout now looks something like this (Sketchup a bit rough, now !)

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The van actually worked for its living very briefly - to pick up about £400 worth of ply, insulation board and roofing batten.

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I had a few days off work and managed to make and fit the mid way and rear half-bulkheads and half the bed base before rain stopped play (I'm working outside, and need to store the 8x4 sheets outside).

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The bed base hangs from the rear bulkhead and sits on the mid bulkhead as a self-supporting, insulated panel spanning over the 'garage'. The bulkheads will be lined internally with 25mm insulation board and a cosmetic panel.

The rear bulkhead is 9mm ply and is held using bolts into riv-nuts set into the arch over the rear doors. (I cross threaded one fitting the bolts and spun it loose, and another one 'picked-up' on the bolt as I tried to remove it, and also span loose :mad:. I'll had to saw the bolts off and fit couple of new nuts - my fault for using stainless bolts 'dry' and being ham-fisted.)

The rear bulkhead is stiffened with 25x38 roofing battens lap jointed together:

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The mid bulkhead is also 9mm ply, but the stiffeners will just be screwed and glued to this. It's fitted with riv-nuts through the van floor. The riv-nuts are galvanised, they were dipped in zinc primer when fitted to seal the hole, and I'll be using galvanised bolts, so hopefully there won't be any corrosion issues down the line... I also learnt from my previous mistakes and squared them up and oiled them after fitting.

The hollow bed base is 9mm ply top and bottom with 25x38 roofing batten set on edge running across it and insulation between them. It needs to be made in two pieces in order to be able to fit it inside the structural members of the van - we're taking the bed out to the full width of the van.

This is the first (big) half just before fitting the second layer of 9mm ply

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I added a quick squiggle of foam before gluing and screwing the ply in place, just to try and stop the insulation working loose and rattling.

This is the second (small) half with the open edge sealed with aluminium tape. The top of the bed base will eventually be covered with waterproof vinyl to form a vapour barrier.

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I spent a looong time fitting parts, then taking them out again for adjustment, trying to make sure that everything was true and square, and nothing was rubbing on the metalwork of the van.

I was a bit nervous the the bed base would be strong enough, but it is (literally) as stiff as a board ( (y) ) - even with both of us on it, bouncing up and down (steady!) there's no 'spring' or feeling of flex to it.

To be continued once I've checked that this works OK!
 

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Misterg

Got the bed base, the rear bulkhead and the central divider made and fitted temporarily:


Checked the bike garage for size, and it's OK :)


I cut the living area floor to size then spent a whole day mocking up the layout of the living area, deciding where everything would go and making sure that it would fit so that the position of the floor battens could be finalised:


I'd thought about putting the (diesel) heater under the raised plinth behind the seats, but all the Euro 6 gubbins is under here now (Adblue tank, electronics, stuff and.... gubbins...). I could have put it against the bulkhead in the garage, but it would have been in the way there. I could just about get the exhaust through the floor about a foot behind the driver's seat, but then the batteries woudn't fit :-/ I'm sure it's a familiar tale... In the end, the "best" place for it seems to be under the raised toilet floor. This will mean an access hatch in the floor, which rules out the vague ideas I might have had about making it into a wet room, but I can live with that.

Floor battens were bedded on Stixall. The floor of the van wasn't very flat (it had a rise either side and a 'bubble' in the offside rear half). I'd picked the best of the roofing battens to cut the floor supports from, and luckily they were very true, so I just needed to bed them down with a straight edge on top (a length of Conti Board) to get them level across the width and with each other.


Did the normal thing and filled them with 25mm insulation board.


I had to come back later and add more battens around the edges of the floor - I thought I might get away without.

I'll tape over the joints once the insulation on the central bulkhead has been fitted so I can get a continuous vapour barrier between this and the floor. I the mean-time, I fitted the floor temporarily.

We've been planning on using laminated furniture ply for the living area to try and get a as good a finish as possible in a reasonable timescale. Having "finalised" the layout, I went through the panels that I think we'd need to construct the furniture and fed it all into 'Maxcut'. Previously, it had all fitted onto 4 sheets of ply (3 Hacienda White, 1 Grey Beige Zebrano). With the layout changes we'd made, it spilled onto a 5th sheet. Try as I might, I couldn't save the extra sheet :(

I still wasn't sure what to do with the ceiling (carpet, headlining or wall-board), but with a trip to Morlands imminent, I decided on wall-board over 6mm ply.

So with the credit card reeling from the shock of spending more on a few sheets of plywood than I've paid for whole cars, I stripped the bed base and bulkheads out of the van and headed off to Morlands in Welshpool to pick up the precious cargo.

With the ply and wall boards safely home and stacked in the hall, I could permanently fit the bed, etc. One of the compromises from moving the water tank to above the wheel-arch was that the water filler would come in at the same height as the bed base - it couldn't go lower because of the sliding door track.


After a lot of contorted measuring, trying to tie up features on the inside and outside of the van, I convinced myself that the water filler would fit and drilled a little hole that was hopefully within the target area on both inside and outside surfaces. With this as a reference, a few mm of tweaking was needed before attacking the poor van with a hole saw (I hate the things). I screwed wood inside and out, and drilled through the whole lot, giving a clean hole, and sense of relief when the water filler fitted.


I also got to fit two new riv-nuts to secure the rear bulkhead to replace the ones which has spun loose. (I'd drilled pilot holes adjacent to them previously) - I decided that life was too short to try and get the old riv-nuts out and ended up sawing the bolts off.

Lest the gods be offended by perfection:


I covered the 'garage' panels with flooring vinyl before they were refitted (I'll sink the bolts into the surface and fit an aluminium trim over the top sometime).


There was more finicky measurement to cut the bed base away for the water filler - I was pleased with the way it ended up:


More in a bit...
 

Misterg

I thought a lot about how to fit the ceiling. I've been looking at the Magnum show van construction on their web site: they favour a flat ceiling, and I can see the advantages, but this would lose me about 25mm of headroom in the middle of the van, just where I need it most to be able to climb into the raised bed. So the ceiling would have to follow the curvature of the roof. I think this will help give it some stiffness, too.

I spent ages wondering if it was better to fit wooden beams to the side or bottom of the metal roof ribs (to hold the ceiling), or whether to keep them completely independent. I was concerned at creating cold spots by fixing directly to the metal ribs, and eventually decided to glue 25mm wide x 9mm ply strips over the metal ribs and fix the ceiling to that. 25mm insulation board fits nicely against the roof between the ribs and the plan was to use 7mm closed cell 'Thermoliner' foam to insulate the remainder of the rib (alongside the ply strips) and seal to the insulation board to maintain a vapour barrier.

I also wanted there to be support under the joins in the roof lining, which would mean installing some extra roof beams. I was going to use 6mm ply panels with Morland wall board glued to it, both of which were 1220mm wide, so I needed 3 sheets (2 1/2, actually) to cover the area: 2 joints. (I did away with the 6mm ply layer in the end, and just glued the Morland board to the roof structure.) I also wanted to avoid joints across the roof-light holes, so with a bit of jiggling, I decided that I could put a (roughly) 1/2 width board at the back and one joint would fall on an existing roof rib, but I'd need to add beams for the rear edge of the ceiling and the other joint.

With the ceiling height decided by the 9mm ply over the ribs, I could make templates for the two extra roof beams and cut them out of 25mm thick board:



The rear beam needed to be rebated and cut away to fit over the metalwork over the rear doors. It took pretty much a whole day to cut one piece of wood!


There was a lot of measuring, re-measuring, tea drinking and checking to try and get the beams square across the van and level front to back. The beams were glued to the roof using Stixall - The holes in the van frames provide a convenient place to rest another bit of wood so that the beams could be held in place with packers while the stixall went off. I'd made a frame for the Mini Heki skylight, so fitted that the same way.


I fitted lengths of timber along each edge of the roof to support the edges of the ceiling, wedging long straight-edges under them to try and get a nice, level run from front to back.


I also added battens where I thought the top lockers and toilet walls would be in a similar manner.

I wasn't going to do anything specific about sound deadening, however I was working in the van one day when it started raining - what a bloomin' racket! It was like someone had emptied a bucket of ball bearings over the roof from a great height, and it wasn't even very heavy rain! So things took a diversion while I resolved what to do.

I'm sure that the proper stuff is very good, but I found that Flash Band made a very noticeable difference. I even made a video!


I used 225mm wide Flash band from Toolstation. Two rolls has done the whole roof and enough of the side panels, and at £19 a roll is much, much cheaper than proprietary sound deadening mat. (I did get some Silent Coat to put around the door speakers, and while it's a bit heavier than the Flash Band, it isn't *that* much different).

I put a few strips of Flash Band on the roof, rolling it into the corrugations before fitting insulation board flush to the roof between the ribs.



The insulation board was stuck to the roof beams and battens with Soudal low expansion foam - it seemed to work very well. (The insulation on the rear bulkhead was just wedged between the battens with foil tape to make a vapour barrier.)

Everything was held up by lengths of wood sprung between the roof and the floor - mostly I got the right length by clamping two shorter battens together - fully adjustable! :)


The upper sides above the bed were framed out and clad with insulation board, following the contour of the van as much as possible so that I could fit cubby holes at the head end and maximise locker space at the foot end. The insulation is stuck to the framing, rather than the skin of the van because I wanted to avoid the possibility of creating visual distortion on the outside of the van (well, any more than it comes from the factory with, anyway!).


The 'corners' between the roof and sides were stuffed with recycled bottle insulation inside polythene bags. The thermal benefit is nil, but it helps with soundproofing.

I wanted to minimise the thickness of the lining at the head and foot of the bed to get as long a bed as possible, so the 'anti drumming' bar was taken removed by drilling through the spot welds, and framing fitted to carry 25mm insulation board.


Note that the wood is not connected to the skin of the van except for a few generous blobs of non-setting mastic to give the same effect as the anti-drumming bar.

I needed to run some cables for the lighting in the bed area before I could finish lining everything with 25mm insulation board and taping all the seams.

It ended up looking like this:


Note the removable section for access to the high level brake light / reversing camera. I want to have a single panel lining the whole of the rear bulkhead, but will make this removable. That's the plan, anyway.

More in a bit...
 

Misterg

I'd bought adaptor frames for both the mini and midi Heki roof lights that are specific to the X250 / X290 Sevel vans. They match the roof profile to leave a flat surface for mounting the roof light. There are two adaptors for the midi Heki; one that matches the castellated roof profile for installing the roof light in the back part of the van, and one that's sculpted to fit around the 'sunroof' pressing just behind the bulkhead of the van -which is what I wanted.

Midi Heki adaptor front

Mini Heki adaptor

I bought mine from Germany via ebay (seller wwwcarlinegmbhcom).

Because of the way that the front adaptor is shaped to the bodywork, it will only fit in one place. I couldn't continue framing the ceiling until I knew where this was, but the adaptor only lines up properly when fitted on the outside, so it would either mean some fancy measuring to transfer the measurements to the inside of the roof, or biting the bullet and cutting the hole!

I'm not good at fancy measuring.

The first hurdle was actually getting to the roof! Our step ladders were too short; and the 'big' ladders were too, erm... big.

A quick trip to Argos found the 'Abru' 10 way ladder on special offer that was perfect for the job (Argos 428/7458). It's the perfect height for a H2 van, and the angled end matches the slope of the roof:


Just needed to lay the adaptor on the roof, draw around the hole and cut it out. I used a hand nibbler to cut the hole, which worked well enough, and was a bit less antisocial that the jigsaw.


I'd made the frame previously, but it needed a few packers adding so that it sat properly inside the hole:


I cleaned up and primed the cut edges, stuck the frame to the inside with stixall and used Sikaflex 710 non-setting mastic on the plastic adaptor. It is horribly sticky, stringy stuff!


I used Arboseal GZ butyl mastic tape between the roof light and the frame - I've used it before for boat windows and found that it is very easy and clean to use and forms a good, long-lasting seal. (fingers crossed). A couple of layers seemed about right:


(photo from fitting the mini Heki, as I didn't take many photos when fitting the midi heki - mixture of needing to crack on, and stress!)

And then it was in! :)


The forecast for the next day was a bit dodgy, so I decided against trying to fit the back roof light (a mini Heki), but to do the cassette door instead.

A *lot* of measuring later: (Trying to avoid the plastic trim strip on the outside and the sill weld on the inside while still ending up with a door that lined up with the toilet!)


Cut using the jigsaw, as I needed to preserve the cut-out panel to fit into the door frame. I found it far more disconcerting to have a hole in the side of the van that I could see the ground through than I did having a hole in the roof that I could see sky through.

Sure enough, as soon as I finished cutting the hole, the heavens opened. Rain stopped play again:


The bottom of the hole was 16mm above the top of the plastic trim on the outside which allowed the door to *just* fit between the trim at the bottom and the horizontal swage line in the bodywork at the top.


I used Arboseal GZ tape again to seal the frame to the van (black this time), adding a few layers top and bottom where the bodywork curved away from the door frame. Quite a bit of it oozed out over the next day or so, but because it doesn't set, it's not too bad to clean this up. The door panel is bedded into the frame with black silicone.

The rear roof light went in the day after - had to use the jigsaw to cut this hole, too as the nibbler couldn't be used from the inside due to the wooden frame (you need to work from both sides to get up/down the corrugations). On balance, the jigsaw is easier - I'd got some extra fine tooth blades (Bosch T118G) which I think helped.


I could crack on with finishing framing and insulating inside the roof now and fit the ceiling.

More in a mo'...
 

Misterg

I've used Morland 4mm vinyl faced board for the ceiling, stuck directly to wooden ribs / beams. I don't plan on having lockers both sides all the way down the van, so the visible ceiling is wider than a standard ceiling board (1220mm), and is longer than a standard board (2440mm). I thought that the most acceptable way of covering it was to run the boards across the van. I would use three boards ,so two visible joints.

I had only the vaguest idea of where the lights would be, and was going to run cables in roughly the right place above the ceiling, and fish for them later, once I'd decided where the lights would be and drilled holes for them. How would I drill the holes when the ceiling was only 8mm from the insulation and 30mm from the roof? No idea! So I thought I'd better drill the holes for the down lights before fitting the ceiling. Spent a happy few hours trying to decide just *where* the lights needed to be so that they avoided lockers and looked evenly spaced, etc. It's amazing where the time goes...

I'd intended fixing the ceiling up and using a router to cut the roof light holes 'in-situ' as a neat and accurate way of doing it, but then I got to thinking that the edges of the holes get hidden by the roof light frames, which also give a fair margin for error, so why would I want to fill my van / hair / ears with wood shavings by using a router overhead inside the van?

Cutting the first board was easy - a simple rectangle. I cut it out, propped it up in position and drew around the roof light hole from above. Took the board down, cut out the hole, drilled for the lights and put it back in position after running a bead of Stixall along all the roof battens. The Stixall held it in position on its own, but I secured the edges with staples into the wooden beams, catching the base of a 2 piece joining strip where the next sheet would join.

The second sheet needed to be cut around the 'C' pillars (behind the sliding door). I made cardboard templates for each end of the board and very carefully transferred them to the next sheet of ply. I checked, and double checked that the measurements were right, and trimmed the first end with the jigsaw.

Before committing to cutting the second end, I checked the measurements again - yep, still good. I picked up the jigsaw and lined up the blade with the start of the cut. I was about to pull the trigger (literally milliseconds away) and then it hit me. You stupid, stupid pillock!

I was cutting the sheet out upside down! Ply side to the van, vinyl side to the sky! Time for a brew.

As I'd only trimmed a few inches off the board there was plenty of length left to mark it out THE RIGHT WAY UP!

Installed with Stixall and staples, as before, and the edges of the boards were propped overnight to try and make sure that they ended up as true as possible.



I needed to finalise the floor before going too much further, which meant confirming the position of the diesel heater. The only place left for it was under the raised toilet floor, and it needed to sit on a low part of the corrugated profile (so it fits under the floor) and it was a bit of a puzzle finding a location that gave a clear run for the exhaust and intake under the van and also a decent run for the heating ducts inside. It's a bit of a compromise, but hopefully it'll be OK.


About this time I had a bit of personal news that brought home just how transient our time on this planet is, and I thought ***it! and splashed out on a Dometic fly screen for the side door. I made sense that if I was going to fit one, it should be now, before buttoning the floor down for good.

(Not a particularly good photo:)


Once the floor was down, I could start on the furniture board. The key piece on each side of the van is the divider at the head and foot of the bed. On the off-side of the van it forms the rear wall of the toilet cubicle. I made a rough panel out of ply and fixed it in position with the edge vertical and in the correct position.


I then used a 'tick stick' to record an accurate outline...


... and transferred this to another sheet of 6mm ply to make a full size template.


This was checked and tweaked before cutting the horrendously expensive Morland furniture board. I drew around the template to make the rough cut of the furniture board with a jigsaw, then used the template again with a bearing guided router cutter to give a neat and accurate (?) edge on the ply.



It fits! (sort of - turns out it wasn't quite in position in this photo. The fit is actually a bit better).


Right, that's all for now. It takes us up to about May this year. I'll carry the story on in a few days.

Hope it is of some interest / use.

Andy :)
 

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