Yes, I avoided mucking up a Star Wars title in the way everyone wants me to. SHUT UP. Nobody asked for your opinion. Well, you probably have figured out what’s gonna be presented, so why not just read the other 5 parts first?

1. Episode 1 – the initial teardown of the house of horrors
2. Episode 2 – Welding and repairing the major roof seam holes
3. Episode 3 – Wrapping up electrical loose ends, some times literally
4. Episode 4 – Actually painting the cab… using a Harbor Freight paint cannon
5. Episode 5 – Putting the van and truck halves back together

 

So we begin this story the week after the Regular Car Reviews show, which was an absolutely fantastic time. I only really had a few things I wanted to take care of before Dragon Con. They were, in order of importance:

• Re-mounting the rear sofa bed/bench seat
• Bringing back the Next Generation Sex Lights as I mentioned before, and
• Adding lighting to the running boards

Let’s begin! Chronologically speaking, the running board lights were first and the NGSL were last (days before I left), so we’ll go in that order. To be truthful, the story of the running board lights extends all the way back into late last year when I started doing some lighting investigations for custom bumper designs.

Fun truck-related trivia: Gratuitous amber marker lights are some times called “chicken lights” in trucker-speak. The origins of this are not too clear, but I mentally file it under the same generational oral tradition that gave us things like “Pitman arm” and “Schottky diode” – because someone called it that and it got popular.

The unit lighting products I decided to use, instead of drilling and mounting one billion tiny little lights, was called an “identification bar” – named for the mandatory “I am a big-ass truck of some sort” lights that are mounted to the rooflines of commercial trucks. The center three lights are often supplied as one unit for quick installation. I was going to just use a couple of them linked together.

Par with my usual shopping technique, I cross-compared eBay, Amazon, and a bunch of independent vendors to see who was offering the same Chinesium for lowest cost-to-me. Since the products are nominally fungible (e.g. at this point in history, there’s not gonna be that much difference between two LEDs of different pirate manufactueres), this is a good tactic, and I was able to get each bar for just over $12 each, so about $150 for both sides, on Ebay.

I spaced them out to look visually correct, then back-CADded them to get a regular pattern that I can start drilling into the boards.

(Excuse the camera-screenshot – I took this literally to message someone on my phone, in the truest possible Millennial way, then decided to keep it!)

Fast forward to the #VapeShop, and I’m marking out everything and drilling the holes after “work” one day, in accordance with my drawing. Wait… what am I doing at the company shop again, when I have Big Chuck’s Auto Body?

Sadly, I lost Big Chucks’ Auto Body at the end of July, when my lease expired. The first week after I got back from the RCR show was filled with moving my stuff out, into the “Cruft corner” of the #VapeShop.

I anticipated this happening one day soon, since it was unlikely that the property company would keep renewing a lease for a rando when they have legitimate businesses they could rent to instead, so all of my goods that were heavy or unwieldy were on wheels. It took one truckload to get my shelves and toolboxes and stuff out – the workbench you see was left behind, since we got better ones! Yay!

May my mis-sprayed paint forever stain the ground!

 

The power hookup for each light was pretty simple, as they were frame-grounded, so I had to just wire all the modules together. I’m not too much a fan of frame-grounding, so I ended up making a separate “ground wire” that was really just bolted to one of the mounting holes as a ring terminal, terminating in a 2-pin connector (which naturally I scavenged from a product part bin).

And then onwards we go! An hour of surgery one night to add the corresponding 2-pin connector to the existing lines I ran downwards from the front marker lights to the area right behind the front wheelwells, and the fried chicken lights as I termed them were all set to go.

Next up was putting the rear seat back on. I had this idea in my head for a while, once again, so it was merely execution. I wanted the rear seat to potentially be modular and removable for any other attachment I had in mind in the future. The factory method was just driving some bolts through the floor and using what basically were just pipe clamps to hold the whole damn thing down. In fact, it jiggled natively.

My solution was one that I actually saw at the Van Nationals show in some camper/vanlife style builds, and only heard of in passing before: L-track. Also called “airline track”, it’s an aluminum rail profile with standardized hole patterns and anchors that you can use to attach “stuff” with. The idea is that an anchor fits into the round cavities and is locked in place by a retaining bolt, typically taking the shape of another anchor.

So I ordered some off Amazon.  In measuring out the remnants of the seat mount, a 24″ section was actually a perfect fit, and you could get it in 24″ lengths with a sack of questionable anchors! LUXURY!

To mount the L-track, I wasn’t just going to zip it into the floor, but build a frame to adapt the haphazard holes drilled by Centurion to something vaguely standard. They didn’t seem to pay much attention to WHERE the holes were drilled – some lay on the slopes of the floor stiffening stampings, others on the bottom of the valleys of the same. The front set of holes was more 41.75″ apart than 42″ (a standard width in the van world, as I found out, for seat mounts) and the offset from the rear cab wall also varied.

In other words, this rigid frame had to compensate for all of the absolute bullshitt they got up to and turn it into something vaguely square and regular. I made it with some spare 1x1x0.075 wall steel tubing at the shop, and pretty much freeballed all of the measurements after making confirmations.

The result was then MIG welded together.

Test fit of the frame to double check all of the planned offsets, shifts, and transforms lined up!

Indeed they did, so I naturally painted everything my favorite color before mounting it all up. The steel frame is bolted through the floor using a number of steel and rubber washers as spacers – steel for height offset, and rubber for conformation to the varying hole placement angles. The L-track is then screwed in from the top into the steel tubing using each rail’s five 1/4-20 countersunk clearance holes.

 

Next up was the seat mount itself. What you see are split clamp shaft collars with the bottom halves drilled radially downward, for the threaded anchors of each L-track stud. These bottom halves are permanently threadlocked together with the L-track studs. I used a 1″ diameter piece of tubing (the same diameter as the seat rails) as a template to get them to the right alignment. When these are mounted, the shaft collar clamp screws and upper halves will then be tightened in permanently with the same threadlocker. They don’t come off ever again – to remove the seat, I would then release the four hex nuts that hold the anchors to the L-track.

This is the assembly fully mounted and tightened. Again, the shaft collars are considered part of the seat now. If I wanted to shift the seat forward or backwards, I’d release the L-track hex nuts and do so; same for complete removal.

(At least until I buy the new van sofa bed with the same mounting dimensions, that is!)

Everything still folds down! A side effect of my mounting setup, though, is that the seat is now a good 2.5″ higher than it was before. Not the end of the world, I suppose.  The companies making van sofa beds still are all made-to-order outfits, so I might be able to convince them to shorten the height of any future one I get. It does get awkward to sit in if you’re short, however, since you no longer reach the ground…. like me.

Either way, I consider this far more improved than what were basically fucking P-clamps for pipes.

Now we move onto the final and most glorious step, the one which I went extra out-of-the-way weeks before to ensure can happen: the Next Generation Sex Lights.

From Episode III, the touch-me LED controller makes a return! I decided to go ahead with its installation since to do any light install in the cabin would have required basically the same amount of work.

I measured up the rectangular body of it and cut an accordingly rectangular hole into the center console.

This was when, on closer inspection, I (re?)discovered the mounting holes were exactly aligned with an edge of the rectangular body.

What in the actual fuck is your product design division doing, mysterious Chinese company who made this?? Nobody at all thought about how this would be installed, huh? First we had the teeny tiny ribbon cable connecting two snap-fit parts requiring a lot of force to actually un-snap…. and now the mounting hole which, if you cut the indicated panel size out, would actually sit right on the edge of said cutout and not off to the side.

I don’t get it. There’s NO way anybody has installed this product the way the originators wanted.

And I’m not going to either! The touch-sensitive bits, after inspecting with a strong flashlight shining through the whole assembly, are really just restrained to the touch-button area. I was afraid of bringing too much metal close to the buttons just in case.

So you know what? Forget your actually-mounting holes. I’m just going to drive four screws through the corners and move on with my life.

If you choose to do this (for some reason…if you buy one), I used the ‘triple point’ where the edge chamfers meet the main flat face.

Here’s the backside of that installation – locknuts that are gently torqued will hopefully not crush the whole thing!

The lights themselves are the RGB+W strips I bought mounted in “corner” LED housing. You can buy this extrusion by the foot/meter and it comes in several shapes to accommodate different LED strip widths. I merely cut them to length, shoved the strips in, and soldered a small length of the 5-pin RGBW cable to each end, sealing the ends in hot glue. The plastic cover is a bit tacky to snap on, but with some extra coercion it stays on fine.

And here we have it. Six mounting brackets screw into the interior walls, and the LED rails snap right in. I made a splitter that interfaced with the original cable drop to fan it out to both of the LED rails. I really like these more lower-profile light bars compared to the “behind the curtains” style that came with it. It’s a sleeker, more modern look to contrast the antiquated American luxury this thing represents. The camera exposure makes them look more obnoxious than they really are, by the way. Along with the adjustability of the LED controller, they are actually quite tame to be in a direct line of sight scenario.

Meanwhile, on a fortuitous trip to New Hampshire, I had scored this gull-wing toolbox off Facebook Marketplace. I’d been actually looking for a gull-wing box in particular, because I preferred the accessibility from the sides. They tended to be more expensive than the usual one-lid, rear access ones, so I never went to the effort of buying one. Instead, I guess it took being in the right place (Manchester, NH area) at the right time to see a relatively fresh post, and divert course while calling the seller and confirming location and price.

These toolboxes typically call for drilling the truck bed and bolting them in to the side rails via the skinny parts at the sides, but it seems like this one was set up for a “no drill” style clamp mount that latched to the underside of said bed rails.

Absent buying the matching kit, I just stopped by a Tractor Supply (my favorite chain store now after Harbor Freight) and bought these J-hook bolts.  To avoid munging up and denting the bed, I added the fine touch of a strip of heat-shrink tubing and a vacuum line plug to each one before throwing them in.

And so now, without further ado, to conclude this #VantruckSummer….

That’s all! It was a crazy adventure that I really couldn’t have hoped for going any better. Any one of many possible delays could have pushed me into having to reassemble everything as-is and call it quits, or at least forced me to delay everything beyond having the mental tolerance for.

What’s next for ｖａｎｔｒｕｃｋ? From a physical appearance perspective, nothing really urgent. I’ll get the bed finish-painted soon, and beyond that, who knows!? My short list include a small amount of bringup on the interior, such as repairing/replacing the crystalline 1980s acrylic cupholder. New seating is on the docket, but it’s expensive and non-urgent (It would cost around $1900 to get two brand new captain’s chairs and a sofa bed). The near-term expenses would probably be a few hundred to get the bed finished.

In total, the restoration to this point has cost me about $1500 out of pocket not counting capital equipment and tools such as #Limewelder, the paint cannon, and some sanding tools – if you count all that it’s more $2000. Still, this is far less than what any “professional” restoration would have cost, especially one which would perform similar levels of craftsmanship for future-proofing (I do emphasize a LOT on future-proofing versus just making it look nice, to be fair!).  I’m not gonna count “labor equivalent” time at all since this is still just a personal project of mine and I can’t expect someone else to do it to the same creative mandates.  The biggest single line item was the paint – which was about 2 gallons total for about $400, and otherwise a lot of small things that add up such as hardware, new-old lighting products, wiring and connectors, and so on.

I’ll probably leave this thing alone for a while to focus on getting back into gear for BattleBots next year ….. there IS a season 5, right guys? Right!?

But the most important part is what y’all were waiting for:

Vantrucks on the Dragon.

 

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:

1. Episode 1 – the initial teardown of the house of horrors
2. Episode 2 – Welding and repairing the major roof seam holes
3. Episode 3 – Wrapping up electrical loose ends, some times literally
4. 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!