Alright, so the most labor-intensive drudgery part of this whole process is now behind me – namely, the actual painting of the thing. Everything from here on will be a breeze again, right!?
Ideally all my going above-and-beyond just removing something for reinstallation later, paired with front-loading a lot of the interior repair work (mostly trying to delay the inevitable painting!), means the whole thing will all collapse back into itself and stop taking up so much floor space.
I hope. What takes more space to park than a vantruck? A vantruck which is disassembled into two halves and a pile of itself! Well, guess I’ll find out!
But first, the travelling and growing index:
- Episode 1 – the initial teardown of the house of horrors
- Episode 2 – Welding and repairing the major roof seam holes
- Episode 3 – Wrapping up electrical loose ends, some times literally
- Episode 4 – Actually painting the cab… using a Harbor Freight paint cannon
The first item to be remounted was the visor… which was also the first painting experiment with its attendant errors and imperfections, so naturally I wanted to get it above my eye level quickly.
One of my overcompensating fixes was buying ArmorCoat screws for everything exposed to the elements – also some times called zinc-aluminum coating. We use these aplenty at the #VapeShop, and I picked up a bunch of different sizes I needed in sheet metal/threadforming style as well as regular hex cap screws.
Where I couldn’t get Armorcoat, I went for 400-series stainless steel to maximize compatibility with plain steel. The entire rest of the thing will rust away around my new screws!
Also in the same series of tasks was re-installing the windshield trim. Just like when I had to get Mikuvan’s windshield replaced, all of the little clips that hold this trim piece on all broke away as I removed them. But there was a twist!
These weren’t plastic clips, but actually steel ones in a plastic insert. The plastic inserts themselves were almost completely turned to powder, so I obviously wasn’t gonna save them. The steel clips themselves were almost rusted through or deformed beyond repair as I pulled on them. I hunted around for a while and found what is basically just the steel insert for them, but sold as the complete part.
Geometrically it made sense, but these things took a lot of insertion force. I obviously (looking at that photo) bought these clips before painting – in fact I got them almost immediately after discovering the windshield frame rust hole – but did not open the package and actually think about it until now.
There’s probably a specialized plier that splits them open or something, but I wasn’t about to take chances with a deadblow hammer and a chisel right near the windshield. So, I actually flattened them a little in a vise to allow for gentle tapping installation.
It was finally time for the custom center stop light module to be mounted. This exercise was quick – just tighten the screws into the well nuts and stop when you feel some resistance, which is when the rubber has flared out behind the pilot hole.
This is the replacement Sparton airhorn I got on eBay. New old stock hanging out in someone’s basement for a while, so absolutely perfect for my needs. The chrome trumpets on my existing ones are completely pitted and chipped with zinc/bronze casting rot, and the internals of the sounding unit/flappy bits had also deteriorated. In fact I thought the air line was broken all this time, but after taking the roof liner inside off, I found that it was fine.
Finding a fitting for this assembly was an adventure. It seemed to exist in a size directly between 1/8 NPT and 1/4 NPT threads. 3/16 NPT doesn’t seem to be a real size, and I measured the thread minor diameter at about 0.41 inches, which was too big to be a M10, yet too small to be a M12.
In fact, the thread pitch lined up suspiciously with a 1/4-20″ size bolt I swirled in there as a makeshift thread gauge to check if my eye-crometers were miscalibrated. They were also non-tapered, and didn’t seem to have a conical seat or anything that would indicate it’s a modern standard.
After asking around some, I discovered that 7/16-20 hydraulic fittings are a thing. I literally took the drawbar out of our Bridgeport mill and threaded it in there to check – perfection!
Except… what? How about I just drill and tap this thing for 1/4″-NPT and have it exist in a future supported ecosystem with easy to find parts? That’s exactly what I did – blew these threads right off, then drilled and tapped for 1/4-NPT.
With NPT fittings installed, I had fun testing this thing (and cleaning it out) using an air compressor. Sadly, it wants about 30 PSI before it will even sound, which puts it out of the realm of most of the cheap “direct drive” air horn compressors which are small single-stage vane pumps.
At the full 120 PSI, this thing is quite a….. hoot, you might say. It’s lower in pitch than I expected after Alex Horne and I found out his were very high pitched.
As I’d have to actually rig up high pressure air, these are likely going to remain decorative for the foreseeable future.
I suppose the intention of a straight-threaded fitting is because it’s also supposed to help mount the thing. That’s how the old one came off – I unscrewed (read: sheared) the old fitting and off with it came a thin panel nut. The idea being you put this on the outside of the roof and thread the combined fitting + locknut in from the bottom, tighten the fitting, then jam the locknut against the bottom of the roof panel.
Well, you can technically do this with NPT threads too, just the taper might make for a looser fit on one end for the nut, but they do exist.
I found out after a test fit that the stock NPT nut was too tall, so lacking a lathe quickly on hand, I just reduced its height by some manual surface grinding.
The next step was to cut out a gasket. I bought a big roll of EPDM foam rubber which will continually make an appearance from here. It was easy to use a marker, knife, and scissors to make whatever sheet with a hole in it I needed.
Here’s the upper side install of the new horns!
And from the inside, after the fitting was crunk and the jam nut tightened!
This operation occurred synchronously with re-installing the “Hello I am a large truck of some sort” lights – I purchased brand new Truck-Lite Model 25 series units to replace the old faded and weathered ones.
Pictured ahead: The “portable shop” van of a friend who makes the best of having large metal object hobbies without a permanent parking spot, or a Big Chuck’s Auto Body. A shop van in my van shop, you say!
I decided to not reinstall the tacky single bulb holder in the “Courtesy i am a pimp van Lights “, but instead just bonded a segment of the “Ice Blue” LED strips to the existing baseplate. This would give a more even glow with the white plastic diffuser over it.
It does look good, but I wish it were more Miku-colored and less very high color temperature white – these Ice Blue leds are really just white LEDs with a purposefully skewed phosphor mix to make them emit like a blue star.
Maybe some time I will come back here and run more 5-wire RGBW cable so I can have varying colors!
The handles are next to be remounted, again with a custom-cut EPDM gasket on the the underside.
I’m now quickly reaching where the interior roof panels had to go back in. Here’s where I decided to divert quickly and make a more permanent mount for the roof console, one that is possibly removable or *gasp* serviceable later. I found which 4 holes were originally used to hold the shitty wood screws, and drilled them out for #8 sized tee-nuts for wood, then pounded them in from the backside. Not as secure as rivet nuts, perhaps, but it’ll do for now!
Operations moved outside the next day as the shop van friend committee was borrowing the garage for their own vehicle shenanigans. I’m definitely happy that I labeled every side and every screw that came out of these panels, because they really do fit on one-way only; all of the screws were drilled-in-place #BuildToPrint
After a few hours, we’re back inside to finish installation of the interior plastic trim and window frames. I decided spuriously one day that these should all be repainted in black bedliner. The motivation was more to have them all a uniform, deterministic color instead of shades of decaying gray and beige. I think they turned out quite well – the conversion window frames were painted first, then I decided to continue and also paint up the OEM van interior panel pieces.
There’s some lower trim pieces that I left gray simply because at the time they took more effort to remove; this is what we call “High production value”. Maybe I’ll do those later!
More post-painted trim pieces are going back in, as well as final cable pulls through the center mouse hole.
The shop van is lurking in the background – yes, we stuffed both of these damn things inside Big Chuck’s Auto Body for a while. Vantruck’s bed is behind me on stands in this photo, taking up the personnel entrance doorway. There was very little room to do stuff in this state! Luckily, they only needed the garage for a few days.
I somehow neglected to take any more photos of the center console, so here’s the only poorly-lit and exposed one I have. It now attaches using four #8-32 bolts into the tee-nuts I installed earlier. Since this photo, I’ve removed and reinstalled it a half dozen times to add or change things, so I know this worked out swell!
Alright, so this thing is still just a frame and hoses in the back. Before I put the bed back on, I still needed to do a bit of mechanical work. This included running some new fuel hoses where I thought the existing ones were rigid and beginning to dry rot, and replacing both fuel filler neck vent houses (which were DEFINITELY rigid and dry rotted).
Next, I decided to mount the new spare step bumper that I bought at a steep discount a long time ago (the vendor’s logic being who the hell else would buy it from them ever again? I can’t argue.) – the gray one that has been seen on Vantruck previously is slightly bent on one side due to jack-knifing the #VapeTrailer in the dark just a little too hard. As long as I’m going to this much effort to make it look good, why put the bent and slightly rusty one back on!?
It now gets to be the spare, and I emptied a can of black bedliner onto this one beforehand to unify the color scheme.
#OSHACrane is called to action once more to plop the bed back on the rails.
In re-mounting the running boards, I decided to address the galvanic corrosion issue by using Armor-Coat bolts in conjunction with fully isolating the aluminum from the steel mounts using some plastic strips in between. Because I am a millennial hipster, and would have had to go out and purchase something to make plastic strips from, I just spent a few minutes in CAD and then had the Markforged Army spit out a bunch overnight. What a world we live in?
While these finishing steps were happening, I was out scouting the Craigslists for two things that I’ve wanted but never went to the energy of getting, but the time is nigh after the thing is now a uniform color and pattern a.k.a the “It looks nice now, so you HAVE to” stage of affairs.
First is a bed-mounted toolbox, so I can actually carry a “crash cart” of service tools and fluids without them being a pile under the sofa bed, and second was a bed liner insert. I never quite got into the idea of spray-in bedliners. Instead, I was able to locate these big plastic kiddie-pool inserts and went to pick one up. The plastic bucket inserts do permit me to not do any prep work or cleanup work on the interior of the bed itself, but over time they can trap moisture and cause rust issues. Well, I’ll burn that bridge when I get there.
The story of ｖａｎｔｒｕｃｋstops here for a little while. It was the last weekend of July, and I was targeting completion by this time in order to hit up two shows: one was the Van Nationals over in western Massachusetts, because I figured if there was any place it belonged show-wise, it was there… and the other one was the Regular Car Reviews meet in Pennsylvania! Last year (which is insane that it was only last year!) we filmed the RCR episode which at this point stands at over 400,000 views, so this year I was aiming to hit both of these events as they were on the same weekend!
So here we are on July 27th at the Van Nationals event. The visuals won’t change much from here, as I only have some of the interior to complete and lights to add to the running boards. The bed isn’t painted yet – I decided to let my credit card rest a while before continuing on here. This will be something I hit either while visiting Atlanta again for Dragon Con, or afterwards in the fall.
The stainless steel caps were a hare-brained purchase following a recommendation. Short of actually getting polished aluminum wheels (e.g. Alcoas and Alco-alikes) which take work to keep looking nice, these “simulator” hubcaps improve the appearance over the regular painted gray wheels substantially… again, “It looks nice now, so you HAVE to”.
I discovered they come in varying levels of cheesiness, though, and I of course got the cheesiest grade possible to see how bad they could be. These have plastic retaining rings with a metal insert, which feels less than secure to me but probably are fine. More expensive ones are all steel construction. I can’t see pulling these off more than once without causing damage to the retaining rings, for instance. Aluminum polished wheels are an “Eventually” item.
I bounded south from Greenfield, MA around 6pm and encamped in Hamburg, PA that night, then rolled out to the RCR show! This event was quite a scorcher – the day was around 90 degrees and sunny. Coupled with the entire previous day of me wandering around the Van Nationals show and I was decidedly darker and sensitive to the touch when I came back from it all.
Next and last up, the final few addenda to complete the project and then we’re back to ROBOTS!
