 And so it begins, the old Kootz van conversion. Hola, people, Paul Croson here, old Kootz. In my other life, I'm known as a small workshop guy. So the two of us, the old Kootz and the small workshop guy, are going to do primarily most of the work to convert this brand new Mercedes Sprinter van. It's a 144 wheelbase, a short wheelbase, because I'm the only one traveling most of the time. So I'm going to design it primarily for me. Well I picked it up on August 1st, 2021, over in San Jose, California. I got lucky when I looked at another model Sprinter van 3500, because I thought that was the only one on the lot, and I was anxious to get started. And lo and behold, after we talked about that one quite a bit, I said, well I guess I'm just going to have to order the appropriate one, which is the 2500, and then wait for eight months until it can get built and delivered. He says, well, why do you want to do that? He says, I've got two of them right back there, and he pointed back on the lot. And I said, oh my God. And one of the big things I didn't like was white. You know, 99% of all the cargo vans that you're going to get that are designed for business are white. I don't know why. I guess it keeps it cooler and makes it cheaper to paint them all at one time. But anyway, this one is Iridium Silver, which is really what I would have ordered. I had also convinced myself that I wanted the shorter wheelbase. I actually have on order, and I'm trying to cancel it and get my deposit back, a Ford Transit with the extended wheelbase, meaning the long wheelbase plus the extra extension. But I realized that, or thought about the fact, I'm going to use this probably 80% in town at my home as my one and only vehicle, at least as a certain time in the future. And so I needed it to fit, to get around the city easily, get on the freeways easily, go down the city streets, and I needed to be able to fit into normal parking spots, probably not any parallel parking, because the rear view camera on this thing, frankly, sucks. And I didn't get a super, you know, specked out, glamorous, glorious Mercedes. I got kind of an entry level with a few things on it, air conditioning and some storage and some other things, and this floor was in there already, and these side panels. But probably the floor may or may not work. I like it. I'm going to try to make it work, but I got to get insulation under it. Anyway, the only point of this video is to say that the process has started. So here's the way it's going to work. I've got my primary YouTube channel, and that's called Small Workshop Guy. And I'm going to have a playlist on that channel, which is the Old Coot RV Adventures. Let me take that back. It's going to be the Old Coot Van Adventures, not RV. The reason I say not RV is I'm not going to stay in many RV parks. I'm going to be mostly in Bureau of Land Management places. I'm going to be in National Forest. I'm going to be in Boondockers' Welcome. I'm going to be at Harvest Host. I'm not going to be in regular RV parks very often because they're crowded. They're hard to reserve. They're expensive, and they're crowded. Did I say that already, particularly now? So I don't want to be in that. I want to get out and see nature. I want to photograph nature and so forth. So I will have a playlist, which is all about the van conversion, and I probably will have a playlist as well about my travel logs and so forth. One of the things I'm going to do in traveling is visit workshops of friends that I've made through both YouTube, Facebook groups, Makers Mob, and small woodworking community, which I started in August of 2019, which is now 100,000 members. So I've met a lot of really, really cool people through that who have been generous and helped each other, and I'm going to go out there and meet those people and shoot videos of their workshops. And that will be on my regular channel, my Small Workshop Guide channel. Even though I'm not going to do a second YouTube channel, but rather have a playlist, I am going to have a second web page. I've got a web page now called Small Workshop Guide.com, and over there I've got links to all the videos. I've got links to a tool store for all the things that I've bought and that you might want to consider, Amazon affiliate link, and I've got links over there to some plans for my sauce dyons and my pop-up work bitch. So in that old, cute van adventures, that's going to be more for the people who are interested in RVs and Class B vans, and they'll get to follow my adventures of both doing the conversion and then later when I hit the road. So that's the concept. Sign up, subscribe, and we look forward to seeing you as we start working on this van. It's August the 3rd, or maybe 4th, I don't know, 2021. We'll see if we can get this done by August the 1st, 2022. Small Workshop Guide and Old Coot signing off.