Good looking van

From the back

!! Van Is Sold !! - Went Quick, all van parts gone.

2020 Ford Transit 350 AWD Ecoboost High Roof 148" Cargo 9500 KM/5903 miles

Things have changed and we have decided to sell the van. Now that travel is back on the menu we didn’t like the thought of leaving the van sitting for extended periods. That combined with being able to sell it for more than what we paid for it 2 years ago make it a no brainer.

We don’t have an extended length van so we need to maximize space usage. We will have a ~38" deep garage with facing 24" bench seats next to it. The sliding bed covers the garage during the daytime and slides out at night to cover both the garage and bench seats which we don’t need while sleeping. I am 5'9" and Helen is 5'6" so E/W should work no problem.

We knew we wanted to put solar panels on the roof so that meant we needed some kind of roof rack to hold them up there. We also had the idea of just using a tarp attached to roof rails and then to telescopic poles for a DIY awning setup. The first solution was the Weatherguard rails. I was already to pull the pin on them via Amazon when I found out about the Transit’s sloped roof. Turns out there is a 5 degree slope to our van roof. So when you attach rails on each side you need to take the roof angle into account before attaching anything. As we were ordering our Thinsulate insulation and Maxxfan adapter plate from Hein’s DIYvan store, we decided to also go with his Ford Transit Roof Rail Pad and Bracket. These brackets work with sticks of Aluminum 15 series 80/20. The pads that come with the brackets also take into account the 5 degree roof slope. I decided to buy the 80/20 and assorted fasteners locally to save money. Ended up using a Canadian company called Faztek who had the best prices even including shipping from Montreal. Apart from forgetting 8 plastic push pins, and not replying to my emails about it, they were pretty good.

Every Canadian Van build needs a heater at some point. We’ve been camping in the Rockies in July and August and it has snowed. After looking at all of the solutions to the heat problem, one stood out: Chinese Diesel Heaters. They are by far and away the leader in price/performance, mostly due to the exorbitant costs $1000USD+ of brand name gas, propane and diesel heaters. Our transit has a gas fuel tank already but for several hundred dollars savings we are willing to add a small diesel tank. There are 2 kinds of Chinese diesel heaters: 2KW and 5KW. The 2KW units are physically smaller, put out less heat and use less fuel but are a bit hard to find. For some reason the market is flooded with the bigger 5KW units, often re-branding them and incorrectly selling them as 2KW units. After researching we found many examples of people saying a 2KW heater is more than enough for a van sized space. So we picked up a “real” 2KW heater from HCalory on Aliexpress for $160CAD. Luckily they had a US warehouse and it only took about a week to get to Canada. We also bought an Afterburner for $160 CAD to replace the gold heater controller the unit came with. The Afterburner adds a myriad of extra features over the included controller, including WiFi/Bluetooth control and monitoring of the heater. So for less than a third of the cost of a brand name heater we should have a very capable setup. After it arrived we set it up on a workbench to make sure that the heater and Afterburner work before installing them. Sure enough, it all fired up perfectly on the test bench with the exhaust pipe bent to fit the heater install location under the passenger seat. We now know for sure that there is more than enough heat for the van from the 2KW unit.

Removing the headliner makes insulating above a breeze. All you need for tools are an 7mm socket and a set of trim removal tools like this. With the following steps it only took about 10 minutes to remove and same to re-install.

1. Pop out the 3 orange clips holding up the rear center of the headliner.

2. Pry out and put aside 2 plastic trays in center of headliner.

3. Pry down overhead console. You can see rear clips once you have the 2 plastic trays out.

A big right of passage when DIY’ing a van is the roof fan installation. There’s nothing like cutting a gaping hole in a brand new van. No pressure! 🙂 I highly recommend you pick up a decent metal jigsaw blade. I believe the one I used was 25 teeth per inch and it cut the sheet metal like butter even with an old jigsaw. I also recommend watching as many YouTube videos as you can stomach on this as there’s a lot of good ideas (and what not to do) out there, they’re just spread out. We decided to install the fan above the bed to maximize the room we will have for solar panels in front of the fan. The fan’s cover encroaches rearward so if you mount it in the front of your van’s roof, you lose a bit more roof space. Between the roof fan and our unobtainium window vents we hope to get some decent ventilation.

The first thing we did to our new van was to add some Noico sound deadener to the metal panels. This stops a lot of the resonance that the larger panel sections are prone to and drastically reduces noise. We ordered 2 boxes of the 80 mil 36 sqft Noico and it worked out almost perfectly to do the walls, ceiling, above the front headliner, inside the side and rear door panels and inside the passenger seat pedestal (to help with noise from our Chinese diesel heater).

Paul’s parents have graciously offered to let us park the van at the side of their house when its not in use as we are off travelling. There was tons of room for the van and it is nicely sheltered between 2 houses. The first time we parked it there it spun out a lot as the pebbles are quite large and round making them like ball bearings. Rather than digging holes with spinning wheels and having to fill them in every time we come and go we decided to make a better parking pad. Paul’s Mum came across some plastic driveway panels that solved this problem perfectly. We dug out the old bigger pebbles from where we wanted to park, leveled the surface, laid the panels in and filled them with 1/2" gravel. No more sinking and tire spinning!