...continued from "Going Boondocking" in the intro section

This is where this information belongs. I will start taking pictures and showing how I will cram a full bathroom, a mechanical room, a tailgate kitchen, a bed, a swamp cooler, a two door refrigerator with a large freezer section, a 700 to 900 watt solar system with no panels on the roof, and plenty of storage. This is including dedicated walk space that will accommodate a folding camp lounge chair and a couch. It will have cooking inside or outside at the rear of the van. It also has a work bench for my portable music studio. 

I'm building a hybrid foamy & plywood pop up roof with cabinets down the bed side of the van. This will have 3 1/2 " Owens Corning  pink foam on the top and 6" foam in the sculpted sides. On top of the whole thing will be "Poor Man's Fiberglass."

I'll start posting photo shots as I get going. All I have now is the very interesting tear out of the passenger van walls. That will keep people riveted.

This will be very interesting. I for one am looking forward to it. Seems like you have something to teach us old timers.???

nature lover said:

This will be very interesting.  I for one am looking forward to it. Seems like you have something to teach us old timers.???

Click to expand...

I just love this "Escaped from a nursing home."

Well I'm turning 70 in a few months. So I'm not sure about teaching any new dog tricks.

I have years and years experience full timing in a very long Holiday Rambler trailer.  This was all done in membership parks where I even worked as a park ranger at the front gate at times. I drove for the last few years of my parents lives. So my reference to vehicle camping is with full or partial hookups. I even built my own pop up camper on a harbor freight trailer and lived in the Thousand Trails (TTN ) system of parks traveling north and south for 30 months. I'll post a picture of that fold up platform tent. It was very cool. It had an 8ft long counter on one side and a 30 inch wide bed on the other. I had a satellite TV and induction cooktop heat plates with a small convection oven. There was fresh running water and a sink. I dumped into an external blue tank on wheels. I have to post a few pictures of that. 

For years I was around people that talked about Slab City, Quartzite, and public lands near Pilot Knob ( Yuma ). It was that movie. I must have rented it five time on Dish Satellite TV.  You know, with Francis McDermott in "Nomadland."  That was my first exposure to Bob Wells. I have been a hybrid Nomad / Lost in the so called American Dream personality ever since I got my first pay check at 19. Every weekend, when I was off work, I would leave the apartment and go on an adventure. This started in 1971. First it was skiing and backpacking. Backpacking led to me climbing my first mountain. That led to rock climbing and winter mountaineering. I became a prolific skier. I was an above average rock climber. I then through in SCUBA and did some crazy dives in Lake Tahoe in February, some times down to 200 feet deep. I took up golf, Archery, Karate, bowling, while keeping all my mainstay activities going strong. I reached a point in extreme ski mountaineering that I could ski a 70 degree face and make it look graceful. That's typically do or die skiing. There are many hair raising stories of that younger period. I got hooked completely on windsurfing and did that 7 days a week after work or weekends for 4 months straight each year for ten years running.

The point is that I have managed to avoid pets, lawns, house paint, property taxes, community group meeting and obligatory activities. I was completely use to the thinking of minimalism. I would not spend much money on clothes. But a new $1,000 mountaineering outfit was a must have. A new North Speed Spider sail was just a must.  My priorities were focused 100% on living it up with adventures on weekends. I was already a maverick escaping my own expectations from my own self imposed socially implied cliché. I had to have that apartment & storage unit  as a home base to trudge off to the daily grind.

So minimalism is in my DNA. Having so much camping experience I know what I like the most from a minimalism stand point. When I wake up at night to go I want it RV style. When I tailgate I want a barbeque, a commercial flat griddle, and the wonderful capabilities of my Ninja Foodi pressure cooker. I can make restaurant quality chicken wings from the freezer to the plate in 30 minutes. I make awesome street tacos from marinaded bottom round thin sliced beef. I'm powered by meat proteins and beer. If anyone wants me to do what they want me to do then I invite them to follow me. My goal is to scare them to death in hopes that it will work. Free soloing some granite face usually does the trick. My favorite was to tell them not to follow me or else.  I have been a free thinker since 1972 when I took up ski mountaineering. I was crazy to evey one that I know. So I put a mental wall between me and so called normal expectations. 

Now comes my building experience. I served a full apprenticeship and journeyman period in the carpenter's union. This included training at the local community college for four years. After that I quit the union and took a cut in pay so that I could work for a custom builder that did everything. I mastered foundations, residential plumbing, residential electric, and Heat and Air. I built cabinets, did all the framing and finish carpentry, drew house plans, got loans from banks, met with county design and plan check, zoning, land purchases. Built spec and turn key houses. Built very large apartment complexes, designed and built a world class recording studio in Clearwater Florida. So I'm well versed in building and designing.

When it comes to RV work, I replaced two gas / electric water heaters, one 12vt DC water pump, two RV toilettes, one set of trailer leaf springs, numerous flat tires, two awnings, tons of window shades, not to mention a bunch of work on the tow vehicle. And I drove that long beast for three years in snow, heat, rain, tight parking spaces, wild city traffic, and a lot of great places too.

So the lifestyle, -- I get it. I just never looked at boondocking very much.  So when I had my pop-up, that took 90 minutes to assemble or pack up to leave. I dreamed of a unit that was ready to camp in five minutes. That's the van life. No slide outs, no full hook-ups. No satellite dish to set up and aim. Just park and style yourself. Kick back, have a beer and a burrito.  No park ranger and an assigned site. No camping membership dues.

Go! Go! Gadget!!! Lol!! Can't wait to see how well your vision performs and hope it is attainable for those of us that have been waiting for a working system to be developed at a cost most can afford. Best wishes! I think you are on the right track with PMF and thick foam.

Thanks bullfrog

I'm doing this on a $1,000 SSI check. I just spent the Covid 19 banishment from activity on getting into the Eurorack music scene. I had put together $7,000 worth of equipment that I already had and sold to get this rig together. I used the covid 19 bonus checks to build up that system.

Guess what? I hated that junk. It's not fun. It's just blips and bloops and sequenced ( look what I created for a computer music sound )

That was when I found the "nomads." Also they were opening back up. I made a deal with my brother to build a barn they needed for gifting me a van they were letting me use. I've just about completed the barn. All it needs now is lap siding. But it's already functional for what they need. I'll post a picture.

Meanwhile I looked up an old thumb drive of an earlier phone's picture library. I found some pictures from that pop up I lived full time in.

So here are a few pictures of this pop up that I moved into for 30 months.

Looking for pictures

my pictures are too  big

I'll have to edit them

OK, this will take a few hours.

This is what I did after the first version was destroyed in a storm ion the Oregon coast.

I built these rafters and made a vinyl top.

So this is what it eventually evolved too. It all fit inside the main folding walls and was lockable.

Here is what it looks like open. It opened the same on both ends.

Here it is when all the rafters were packed on the out side. Eventually I found a way to have solid ends and all the rafters fit on the inside. I really loved that rig. But it was a pain to set it up and tear it down. It was designed for full hookups. Yep, that's me at Palm Springs TTN surrounded by megabux rigs. Hahaha! Some people loved what I was doing. They were cool old guys riding their new electric bikes and doing burn-outs.

Here it is at the park where the trailer Nazis told me to take the rig out. No more home built rigs. That park flooded 50 ft deep the next year. But that's OK. Thousand Trails is safe from "Rif-Raff."

This is looking right through it in the picture. I was desperate so I switched to tent camping under my membership. I use the trailer's lifted base to store camping equipment. I still had the big time three week stay membership. But then the camping Nazis came up with all tent campers must move every week no matter what membership you had purchased. In a sense I was driven out of TTN. Actually that's a good thing.

That is where I burned the rafters and trashed the folding sides in the parks burn pile. It was now a camping trailer holding my tent camping equipment.

Here I was bringing down the neighborhood in the first year in an earlier version.

Here is a lousy picture taken with a crappy phone I had back then. It's the kitchen area. It actually looks fairly neat. I'm a happy slob.

So that's enough of barging in where you don't belong. I sold my father's TTN membership for $4600 while he was still alive. This $5,000 plus membership was my own. I got out of the contract after they pulled the fast one on hundreds of home built and tent campers. Full hookups is for the birds. And getting flooded out is not fun either. "Self contained." The BLM mandate. That's more like it. I'm just waiting until we will all be forced to live on a Beet farm and pay rent. You people avoiding property taxes are looking (TOO ) free.

Just kidding. I like baloney doom and gloom.

BTW, that river now costs $100 to park near.

I can only hope this nomad life will continue. Perhaps there are smarter people than me that know it will. I've had my fill of camping memberships. It's the same trap as owing your life to a mortgage.

NOW! on with the build.

My contraptions have looked like so much like Ice Machines that I've never had a problem, most people think I'm just making a delivery LOL, but I don't usually stay more than a night in a pay RV park. National and State parks don't have requirements other than the occasional tent requirement. I highly recommend camping on nearby free campsites or BLM land that border parks that have all services offered to day use visitors. A Lifetime National Parks Pass or even an annual pass is a great deal when you consider the services they offer.

This van build offers me a new place to park. At these places you can't deploy your slide-outs, typically. Having only my solar sails will cramp my style a little. But I will be able to dangle them straight down for a few hours if I need to. I've spent decades working on a method to make a few bucks off of casinos at a time. The simplest explanation is that in any game of chance you get waves of good patches and waves of bad patches. It then becomes a simple game of waiting for a good patch and using it to your advantage for a short stretch of your time. Most people gamble with the notion that they might win a jackpot. So whatever they lose along the way is alright. Just as long as that ship comes in one day.

But I use the simple waves of ups and downs to get me a small sum. Typically I'm looking for from $20 to $50. You see they offer free parking in a very secure location in their parking lots if you can pop in with your player's card and show at least an hours worth of play. If you are a slot player than they want to see a certain amount of money in play per day. They will let you stay two days most of the time. Some casinos have their own RV parks and can let have comped free nights with full hookups.

My new van build has a 31 gallon black water tank and a 30 gallon fresh water tank. So I can use an out of the way pay RV park once a week and use their dump station and top off the water. These parks don't mind a person just dropping in for one night. I get a full shore power charge too. So it remains somewhat stealthy.

A huge question I have is if these privately owned and operated pay RV parks allow van conversions in for one night at a time? It's even worth it to me just to use the dump station and top off the water.

I can run the west coast circuit of casinos from Coos Bay Oregon to Ocean Shores Washington with several casinos within 100 miles of the coast all along those stretches. It's a way to stay cool along the coast all summer. You just check in with security at most of these places to see what they require to stay a night. They get your vehicle license number and you are good to go. It helps a lot to know how to win and do it every time. Even breaking even is good enough once you have enough points added to your player's card. Some places just let you park for the night. And all of those places have a patrolling guard watching rigs.

In winter I go south like a snowbird. Then there are the casinos from Palm Springs to San Diego and east to Phoenix Arizona. For me it's a game to go out and get gas money. I also rack up comps where RV parks are offered. Some times you get enough points for meals too. It all come down to using a skill that took years to perfect. It requires a perfect skill of self control. Most people are not aware that they can control themselves and do this.

I'm not some scam artist selling this to unsuspecting van dwellers. I gave it away on the internet two years ago in July for free. It takes the acquiring of skill and self control. Most people lack this. They all want an easy, for sure, way to treat a casino like a personal ATM machine. Life does not work that way. Skills take time and work. They can be acquired without wasting any money. But the work must be done by the individual wishing to master them. I spent decades inventing and perfecting this. I found a simple way to make money while RVing. So I will not teach anyone. I built a thread at a forum to do that job. If you can't do it then don't blame me. If you can't do it then don't take money you need for other things into a casino and try it half prepared. It took more than 25 years of losing to perfect this. You can't pull it off with a few hours practice. Unless you are some kind of genius. My experience is that 99% of you are rightfully skeptical. That's good. If you want to discus it then do that at the forum where it is presented and let's leave this to the "Nomad" lifestyle. Please.

So here is the starting point. I stripped it down, took out all the seats  and flooring.

I got this 2006 E-350 Super Duty with the 5.4 Liter engine, less than 70 thousand miles, for building this barn out of scrap materials left behind from another barn that was torn down.

Here is the van: 



Here is the Barn I built:

 

Here is the van stripped:

I have the 31 gallon black water tank, the shutoff valve and vent valve, the fresh water tank, and the shower pan and a very low profile drain fixture for the shower pan. So I'm ready to design the floor and bolt it down using the seat hard points already embedded in the van. So I'll clean it all up and use rubberized undercoating, then 2 x 4 laid flat so I can add 1 1/2 inch thick solid foam insolation between the 2x4's then 5/8 inch thick subfloor plywood directly to the 2x4's. This will allow me to run the 8 inch tall black water tank below the finished grade by 2 inches.

This was planned so that the riser to hide the tank will be 6 inches above the shower pan. This is all planned because I'm installing Thetford's real porcelain low profile residential style RV toilette which is 14 inches tall. The tall version is 19 inches tall. So it should come out real nice like a toilette at home.

The entire van build is built around having a common bathroom feel. A normal bathroom with an inserted toilette in a cheap track house is 30 inches wide. But the best shower pan for my use was 27 inches long by 24 inches wide. I can fudge the shower dam where the glass shower door will go. So the room can be from 27 to 30 inches. Just trying to see what the 12 inch mechanical room, the 75 inch bed leaves between the back doors and the driver seat pedestal. 12 + 27 + 75 = 114 inches. I think there is enough room for two 1 inch walls. I will sandwich together two layers of 1/2 inch plywood to make up these partitions. That way I can make walls 7 feet tall on one side and 53 inches tall on the existing part of the roof that will remain side. These walls can be as wide as I need them. I'm just guessing about the height right now. I don't need 7 feet tall. But plywood is 8 ft tall, so what the heck.

[font=Tahoma, Verdana, Arial, sans-serif]Here is a quick and dirty floor plan on a clipboard:[/font]