This weekend will be the inaugural camping trip for the new van, so I've been plugging away trying to cross off items on my to do list.
Electrical stuff: I got an AGM starting battery on order that will be in on Thursday, so I will be a bit more at ease linking everything together. The old one had a resting voltage of 12.2V, so something wasn't right. Also, thanks again for the battery wiring info, Viva - I got it corrected:
I may or may not get the solar panel mounted before this trip. If not it is no big deal as we are only out for two nights.
Interior: I finally got the rear trim panel/wire chase built so I could template for my upholstery guy to build the rear bed section. Here it is all done:
Also noteworthy in the above photo, you can see the 2'x4' folding table in it's slot under the rear bed section. I also got the passenger side C pillar and rear window trimmed. The bad news here is that I did my trim piece a little different here than the driver side windows so will now likely redo those so they look better... later.
Here is a fun little detail inspired by some magnet use that Paul Jensen did over on Expo:
See the magnet countersunk in the cutting board on the left side? There is a matching one underneath the counter.
When you push the cutting board in, the magnets hold the cutting board in place:
Cornering tests so far have had it holding fine with the single pair of magnets. If it starts coming out, I'll add another pair.
Flooring. What a pain this has been. I finally decided to try some vinyl planks that I saw in the local big box store a few months ago. Of course when I went in to purchase they are now online only. I went ahead and ordered two boxes up online, and about 2 weeks later they finally showed up. I installed the first box and then decided to give it a day to determine if I really liked it or not. When we decided that we would just move forward with it since the hard part was done, I popped open the second box to find... a totally different pattern!
At this point, I went and purchased a couple boxes of our second choice pergo pattern. The gray vinyl definitely shows more footprints/dust, but the pergo grain pattern in my opinion just didn't quite mesh like I thought it would. Here are the two options next to each other:
At the end of the day, I finally found another store that could ship a box of the gray vinyl plank material before the weekend. I'm not sure if it is what we will ultimately go with, but it will get us by for this season anyway.
Major items left that may or may not happen soon are:
Seat swivel (passenger to start with, but hopefully driver too)
Awning Brackets & mounting
Solar Panel
Water system