 Old Coot van adventures. Selecting the van that you want. Hola woodworkers, Paul Croson here. This is our new channel called Acva OCVA. Old Coot van adventures. It'll be a playlist on the Small Workshop Guy channel. So doing a van conversion. Promise people I'd film some of it. Let you follow along. Be a little adventure. This is not going to be a precise, very detailed, how to van build. There are lots of those on YouTube and I don't see going to the effort to try to duplicate that. I just want to bring you along on the adventure of doing a van build. So you can call this van build 101 which is about doing it. Not how to do it. We'll show you some things but not a lot. All right. Well the first thing you got to do if you decide to do this is really realistically think about is it something you want to do. I've done a number of virtual workshop tours with guys across the country. I haven't done any gals yet. Looking forward to that. And one of the things I want to do when the pandemic is kind of over, since I can't go traveling overseas anymore, is to visit some of those workshops and do a filming where I'm in the actual workshop. The other ones were done through software with a guy holding up an iPhone or something to go around his shop and I would question him and he would answer me. So I want to visit those people because I've made pretty good friends out of a lot of them. So that's why I need it. I'm also obviously going to go out on the road, do some camping, mountain climbing, trails, forest trails and things, and shoot some drone video and shoot some photography and put that on my old Kuvan adventures playlist as well. So that will be coming up some time in the future. The first thing you got to do is get a van. Now I didn't want to choose an RV. Originally I was going to get a Ford F-250 or something and then pull a small airstream behind me. But then I realized now I'm stuck pretty much with going from RV park to RV park because a combination of the length of the truck and the airstream is super long. It wouldn't have to be an airstream. It could be something a lot less expensive. And I wanted to be able to go in and park in somebody's driveway and not stick out in the middle of the street. I wanted to be able to maneuver easily. I wanted to get around on small roads and I want to park in the city. A lot of time I'll be using this van relative to my woodworking in the city and so I wanted it to fit in normal city spots. Now you can look at primarily there are a lot of things you can look at but the primary ones that people use to do a van conversion would be this Mercedes Sprinter either 144 or 176 length of wet of a wheelbase. I think 176 is right. Mine is a 144. You could look at a Ford Transit of several different lakes. I think whatever you look at you would definitely look at a high roof not a medium roof because by the time you put in the flooring the insulation the roof panels and so forth even if you could fit in the van when you originally buy it if it's a medium height you won't fit in it after you have to do some work on it. And so unless you're 5 foot 5 I'd recommend getting a tall van. So Ford Transit is something you could look at getting pretty popular. The kind of the original one that a lot of people did was the Dodge ProMaster and I prefer the look of the Mercedes. It's a little hard to find vans. You know you think oh I'll go buy a $30,000 used van you know with 15,000 miles on it. Well good luck the van conversion people bought those up two years ago so you're not going to do that. So probably going to have to maybe get new maybe not. There should be a lot of people burning out having done their van conversion a couple years ago and now deciding to do different things with their life so you want to be very active on the used RV market to see if you can find something but I don't know if you want something already built out by somebody else. The big manufacturers Winnebago, Airstream, they produce class B vans as well but they're loaded up to the hill with all the bells and whistles and they're very expensive. There's I see a neighbor in my neighborhood here who's got a Winnebago revel and I looked it up but I have no idea when people say MSRP right now in January of 2022 whether class B vans are going somewhere near MSRP or if you go to a big RV show are you able to get one for $30,000 less. But anyway the MSRP base on his van is at least $203,000 so I'm not ready to spend that kind of money and and if you spend that kind of money and then drove it off a lot then you get depreciation you probably never get back when somebody else buys it from you used so depends on how much money had how much skill level they have whether or not you're going to buy a raw van and convert it yourself or or buy one already completely done or do kind of what I'm doing which is buy the raw van do what you can yourself but then use a van conversion company to do some of the things that either you can't do because you're in a homeowners association and you're not allowed to work on your van in the driveway or other reasons and so I'm doing a hybrid approach so I'm using a firm out of Santa Cruz California which is where I live called Levity vans fellow named Jimmy Gray he's got a staff of about eight right now he's built about 10 or 12 vans and worked on a lot of DIY vans helping people out he's awfully awfully busy a little hard to get in and get your van scheduled for stuff but really really nice people and the pleasure to work with so I'm using that approach as I give you a tour of my van I'll tell you what I've done and what I've hired to be done if you're going to be a family or maybe even a couple I've heard a lot of people highly recommend that you get the extended wheelbase because you're going to start to feel claustrophobic with all of the things that you want in there the spouses if they're gonna travel you they probably want the built-in shower if you're a 20 year old 25 year old you're doing this in lieu of renting an apartment you're gonna travel around the country and go snowboarding and mountain biking then you may not want the extended wheelbase but that's a big decision for you to make like a shorter wheelbase therefore less room inside the buildings or you're going to do the extended wheelbase which makes it more comfortable less claustrophobic and give you more room for for your build out so those are considerations the Mercedes comes as a diesel and I was a little hesitant for that originally but I've gotten over that once you buy something you start rationalizing and say well that was the best decision so so this is a diesel with a small diesel engine there's larger ones available I basically got lucky and went to a Mercedes lot to look at one that was listed in inventory that I didn't really want and then found out that a lady had ordered one eight months ago it had arrived and then she had denied or or declined to go ahead and buy it so it happened to be on the lot that the day I was there so I got really lucky I didn't want a white one because most of the you know the commercial vans for the plumbers and other people are all white for some reason so I wanted this I got a gray one white it's best for really for heat and for insulation because it's going to be cooler when you go into the deserts and stuff if you get black you can count on it being you know maybe 10 degrees hotter when you're out in a hot environment and so but of course maybe it'll be a little bit hotter when you're cold environment so there's trade-offs but I I wanted to get something I guess middle of the road so I went for a silver I got it August the 1st of 2021 worked on some things basically took out the factory floor took out the factory panels they do these little bitty panels that cover all of these openings it's good to have a little pry tool for popping off those little plastic pins that hold the panel up so I stripped it of the panels and I stripped it of the factory floor did some insulation on the floor I'll talk about in a separate video put in some more insulation on top of that put in Baltic birch half-inch Baltic birch plywood as my basic permanent subfloor I decided not to glue that down yet I'm gonna come back and do it down now that I'm happy with what's going on and then I put the factory floor back in just to protect things while doing the build out now I can't I have to take that back out when I'm start working on the inside because it's thick and that would throw off all of my cabinets and everything well that is my very very brief introduction to van selection I will put some links down below whenever I do these short videos to resources that I have found in some of these areas and so I'll put a link to one called far out ride and then that's a website faroutride.com and over there he's got all the dimensions of the various vans and some layouts and so forth so I recommend that to go see what the differences are in the sizes and so forth well I hope you will enjoy these if you think you might then please give me a like a comment and a subscribe and we'll see you in the next old Coot van adventures van conversion build series small workshop guy signing off