Box Truck Conversion – Page 4 – The Northwest Adventure Truck

April 22, 2017April 23, 2017

More big holes, its time for Windows and Doors

Now that the truck and box are connected its time to make it feel more like a livable space, I need windows! The windows were ordered from Motion windows. They will make any size or shape you need. I ordered all of them double pane, this was the big one for me. A bit of insulation value and they don’t fog/drip quite as much. They all also open, and have screens, which should help a bit as we don’t have any AC.

I started with the Door, it was an ebay special, lots available there, but the UPS guys definitely had their way with it. It will still work, just some dents around the edges.

Hole was cut with a skill saw on the straight parts and a jig saw for the curves.

Door was installed with polyurethane caulk and stainless screws. Gives some scale to the truck. That is an 8 foot ladder…..

That was the easy one, now onto windows. The windows have a 3″ corner radius, I used a 6″ hole saw to make the four corners, then connected the holes with a skill saw for the straight lines. They are sandwiched together with the inside panels, so I can only temporarily install then before the inside is done.

The tape keeps the window in place and the water mostly out. There is one big window where the dinette is, one in the kitchen, and one above the bed. Hopefully that’s enough venting. I wanted as much natural light as possible, but had to balance cabinet/storage space as well.

Two windows you can see here, and a little preview of the next chapter, furring the walls and ceiling in.

March 27, 2017

Window replacements and cab seals.

We left off with a big new hole in the truck. Plastic works to cover it, but not exactly what we are going for.

So A gasket was ordered, its a rubber accordion shaped seal, its made to slip over a lip on either side. e left a lip around the hole in the box, that as easy, but we need to fill in the holes where the window was, and shape a lip around the back of the cab.

A little CAD (cardboard aided design) and we have templates for the window. I used the piece of the back wall cut out of the box, it has ribs in it take make for nice strong panels and was just big enough.

They were cut using a jig saw and skill saw, then trail fit many many times, a little grinder work each time and finally they fit in place nicely. Some sealant and a few bolts hold them in place.

Just imagine the same thing on the other side.

Now we need to finish cutting the hole, if you remember I left the bottom not done. This took some serious doing, I went trough four carbide tipped blades trying to cut that Little bit off.

Once that is cut and the window panels are in place we can start to fit the gasket. The gasket is from Uni Grip, they makes lots of different ones. Its made for a nice straight flange, I have the back of a cab wall, not straight or the right size.

The seal was glued in place with polyurethane caulk, after hammering it onto the lip all the way around it seems to fit well! We have a connected box and truck!

Next up is more holes for doors and windows.

March 25, 2017

Holes! Cutting holes in a new truck.

Cutting holes in a new truck is SCARY. But it needs to be done. One of the design requirements my wife and I had was being able to get between the cab and box without going outside. That means a big hole.

I started by striping the interior out of the back of the truck. This allowed access to the back wall and moving the headliner forward. Seats out, trim pieces out, seatbelts out, there are a lot of pieces in a new truck.

Headliner had to be dropped and moved forward

Once all that is out of the way, there is a lot of measuring this and that, thinking, staring at it, cutting holes cant be undone. We decided on a 3′ wide opening as tall as we could make it. Its offset to the drivers side a couple inches to allow a little more room for the passenger rear seat. Once the plan was finally in place, we drilled two holes in the bottom through both the truck and the box, this gave us the bottom corners. More measuring to make sure everything fit and its cutting time.

Starting from the box side I cut a big hole…. No going back now. A skill saw goes though the aluminum box easily. The floor not so much, its steel and really hard.

Once the hole was cut there it was on to the truck. I started by removing the window. I spent WAY too much time trying to get it out in one piece, I was doing great, it was loose all the way across the bottom and I only had about 8″ left to go on the top, when yeah it broke. Out comes the shop vac to clean up a lot of glass.

With the window out there was more thinking and tape measure work, and head scratching. Everything needs to line up on both sides. Get on with it, out comes the sawzall and I significantly drop the value of my new truck. But we have a hole! And it even lines up pretty damn well on both sides. The bottom lip will have to get attacked with different tools, its really hard and needs to get cut close to the floor.

Up next, closing up the big new hole.

March 15, 2017

Water Leaks, and Wiring, its a Build!

Now that the roof is sealed up, I seem to have other places of water ingress….. The marker lights and something in the corners by the cab.

Marker lights are easy, but I don’t really know where the other water is coming in. A coat of sealant on the lights and we move on. Corners will have to be dealt with later.

On to forward progress, wiring design! This was kind of critical, once the insulation is in there is no changing it. I spent quite a bit of time thinking on electrical. I settled on batteries under the bed, I wanted to try to keep them a little warm as that was an issue in our old truck. We are using four 250Ah 6V AGM batteries, this should provide us with 250 usable amp hours at 12v.

So the forward edge under the bed became the main electrical hub. I needed to run both wiring for 12v, and 120V. We will have a few things that need 120V, coffee maker, microwave, and a plug if laptops etc need to be charged. This will be feed by an inverter or generator/plug in.

I decided on 12/3 wire for the 120v, enough for 20 amp circuits, and 12/2 wire for the 12V, this should keep voltage drop to a minimum. I did run a couple of larger circuits as well, one for the fridge and one for the heater and water pump. The 12v is tinned marine wire, the 120v is stranded copper, it was cheaper just to buy an extension cord than I could buy the wire by the foot.

Wiring begun, it was all strung overhead to keep it out of the elements. I am trying to keep as much as possible above the floor.

The wiring went fairly quick but it took miles of wire. I used an entire 300′ roll of the 12V wiring, and had to run a different wire for all the lights. The other main connection area will be in the kitchen cabinets, the switches will be located here, just inside the door.

Passenger side has the main switch area.

That is the bulk of the wiring, a few more circuits here and there, but that’s most of it. Next is furring out the walls and cutting the pass through!

March 10, 2017

Make a Plan

Now that the truck is home, its time for a plan. I measured the truck and made another revision to the plan. It looks like it should work.

The cabover will be a bed for our daughter, and a cabinet on the passenger side. There will be a small dinette on the drivers side, a crawl through to the cab in the middle and the kitchen on the passenger side. The back will have ski storage accessible from the outside, and a bathroom and bed for us in the back corner.

The truck arrived as a box truck, one light in the center, some plywood on the walls and some tie down tracks. Not very RV like.

Notice the trash can? Yeah the roof had a bog hole, well a piece of plywood covering a big hole, it leaked, a lot. That became the first order of business. We had decided not to do a roof top AC unit, the truck is already about 12′ tall, adding more height didn’t work for us. So for ventilation we decided on two MaxxFans. This gives us one above the kitchen to help with cooking venting, and one over the bed. They can both blow in or out, hopefully this works!

Fans ordered and arrived, time to find a dry day to install.

Next order of business is to strip the walls down, and strip the back of the cab so I can cut the pass through in!

March 9, 2017March 10, 2017

The Begining

Where to start, we got into this mess when we looked at renting an RV to go ski bumming in. As I am sure many of you have found out, renting an RV is extraordinarily expensive! So Instead we purchased out own! We both volunteered with the local Search and Rescue group when we were younger and just happened across the old communications van on CL. It was a 4×4 converted small Winnebago.

Aptly named “the Beast”, it was loud, it was bouncy and it was awesome. We took it skiing all over BC, WA, OR, ID and MT. We had so many good times in that truck, but it was big, it had some water issues when we got it that we had band aided to keep it alive, and it was time to move on.

I had half heatedly been looking at cab chassis trucks, to build a replacement on. I was looking F450 and 550’s mostly as they are the most common “medium” duty trucks, lots of fleet trucks available. I had made drawings of a layout using a cab over and a 13′ floor, and a box built by a local company, but it was almost prohibitively expensive.

That is when I happened across an add for this, out new truck, on CL. I was searching under some obscure title for box truck when it popped up.

It was nearly perfect, we needed a crew cab, our daughter has gotten big enough to not need a car seat which made us not feel so good about her sitting at the dinette in the old truck. It had a body from the same company I was looking at getting one done at, but it didn’t have a pass thorough. It was also a foot shorter than I had designed, I redrew the plans and it seemed to still work, just a little tighter. It seemed to run well and had a newer motor put in it at some point. The deal was struck and it was brought home.

Now the real work begins. We need to sell the old truck, and get the new one usable as fast as possible!

Next Installment: Make a Plan