#HTME #video on the lead chamber #materials process
#video on #vanlife #stealth-camping in #Argentina (channel "Al Mundo con el Mate") in an 02019 Mercedes Sprinter 415 “mixed” van (i.e., with windows, which are tinted), license plate AE 043 BE, about US$31k–US$42k. It’s a little shorter than the 515, which is harder to find parking for, but tall enough to stand up inside, with 5m² inside space. The solar panels on top are quite low, so you don’t see them from ground level; on the outside of the van you can see a ventilation louver on the bathroom, the drinking-water inlet, a power connection, and an extra sliding window which is over the bed. They have a two-burner stove with electric ignition and oven fed from a butane cylinder inside the van, plus a third burner they can place outside, and a second butane cylinder for the hot-water heater. Because the stove isn’t designed for motor homes they have to take the wire top off to drive, and it doesn’t seem to have a countertop option to use it as a counter when not in use as a stove. They have an electronic gas alarm (“Intelligent Gas” brand) next to each butane cylinder. They installed a 100ℓ “Belli” brand dorm fridge, but I don’t know if it’s a compressor type, ammonia absorption, or what. It’s partly blocking the van’s stock sliding door, so it can’t be vented outside. There are latches on the fridge and (25ℓ) freezer doors, suggesting that it’s a motor-home-specific design. The internal furniture is almost entirely wood painted and screwed together with wood screws, probably making it rather heavy. There’s a kitchen sink with two faucets, one straight from their 200ℓ water tank and one filtered. The sink, like the stove, seems to lack a countertop option. They have a 100ℓ greywater tank underneath the van. The indoor paneling looks like white-painted beadboard, with wallpaper around the sink, perhaps to protect from splashes. The dining table is a 600-mm-long slideaway thing between two (600-mm-wide) bench seats. The slideaway table seems like a missed opportunity to put drawers underneath the tabletop. They have two GreensunSolar JFM275-12 gel batteries under the seats (in the video he says “275 ampere” but they’re actually 2500 ampere deep-cycle gel batteries, 275 ampere hours, and also they cost US$600 each) which power an inverter and a large breaker box with six 240VAC circuit breakers. Their charge controller is a 40-amp Aleba BC-1240. There’s a narrow round aluminum flexible duct (100mm?) running, for no obvious reason, from the hot-water heater in the bathroom through a cabinet to a non-obvious chimney on the roof. The ceiling seems to be stained and varnished pine with some wooden crown moldings, and maybe 2cm up to the roof-vent fan, not enough for any insulation. It doesn’t look like there’s any insulation behind the beadboard walls either. There’s a 12-volt air conditioner above the bed, which also isn’t visible from the ground outside. The 130cm×190cm bed, in the back of the van, is normally collapsed to half its length, extending out for sleeping over the dining table and seats and the refrigerator and the sink, a process which takes one person about 45 seconds because the sheet is already on. The bed is about waist height, so underneath the bed is presumably storage space accessible through the Sprinter’s back doors, though that isn’t shown. The 110cm×75cm bathroom has a folding accordion door, a cassette toilet (“portapoti”), vinyl flooring on the walls screwed down under some wooden moldings, the 6ℓ gas hot-water heater, and a shower with a plato de ducha floor like you might install in a house. There’s a curtain hung behind the van seats separating them from the living area, so the cab looks like a perfectly normal van.
#vanlife #video #Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate they ran out of butane to heat their van with in El Chaltén, because most gas stations don’t sell butane or propane there. (I’d suggest that their total lack of insulation may also be a factor.) The front of the van isn’t actually quite as #stealth-camping as the previous video led me to believe; there are two solid vertical gray partitions behind the seats, which doesn’t look much like a normal minivan. They had filled up an extra container of liquid fuel at a gas station, which they store in wooden storage compartments under the bed, which does indeed have rear-door-accessible storage as I had speculated, which also seems to contain foldable camping chairs, a telescoping ladder, a fire extinguisher, the gas cylinder that powers the hot water heater, etc. There seems to be a plywood floor. Also they’ve plastered their van with YouTube promotions, making it much less stealth. Mostly the video is driving around southern #Argentina, going to RV parks, hiking around near waterfalls, a hamburger recipe with homebaked bread, that kind of thing. They report using the app Overlander to find out about free Wi-Fi, and they demonstrate emptying the graywater tank in some kind of parking lot specifically designed for this (“Estación de Descarga”/“Dump Station”). They normally empty out their cassette toilet tank into other toilets, rather than blackwater hookups, but here they demonstrate emptying it into the dump station. Mateo demonstrates how he sets up a desk in the van’s front seats, partly hidden by a sunshield in the windshield, to work on his laptop.
#vanlife #video channel "AmericAndo" of a couple from #Argentina entering the #USA in their van (SXZ 125) after four years of driving, at the McAllen, Texas (and Reynosa, Sonora, and Pharr, Texas) border crossing on the Anzaldúas bridge. The border folks searched their car with a drug dog and looked up their YouTube channel, but they said it was “one of the easiest borders” they’d crossed, and they can stay 6 months. They camped overnight in the Wal-Mart parking lot, got stopped at a police checkpoint, marveled at the lack of pedestrians, visited some friends in San Antonio, threw an opossum in the garbage, and added a new removable wood desktop to the middle of the van.
#video #Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate the #vanlife shower floor (plato de ducha) ended up not being level and therefore not having proper #drainage, so instead of fixing it, they decided to put a wood floor above it so they wouldn’t have to step in the cold puddle. But they were trying to do this in a corn field in Misiones with power tools (run off the van battery?) and ran out of sandpaper. Then he kind of screwed up the bottom of the vinyl accordion door with a reciprocating saw to make space for a threshold to stop it from scraping holes in the vinyl flooring.
#vanlife #Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate #pricing of the stuff for their motorhome conversion. Demonstrates some of the techniques they used: pop-riveting wooden stringers to the van’s steel rafters, varnishing knotty softwood while kneeling on cardboard, etc. They said they planned the whole thing for five years. Or maybe three. This #video is a waste of time, a guy talking to the camera interspersed with shitty stock footage. Fortunately the costs he provides are converted to dollars, and using the blue dollar rather than the official one. The van itself runs about US$31k–US$42k, I think (though he doesn’t say), but the conversion involved electrical installation (US$2900), water and gas plumbing (US$3164 including, for some reason, the fridge and air conditioner and maybe the stove?), and the building stuff (US$500, including wood, insulation, etc.), and they also had to buy tools (US$340), plus paint and screws. The electrical installation involved two humongous 275-amp-hour batteries, an MPPT solar charge controller (“Epever” brand?), a 40-amp battery charger, and a 1500-watt inverter. They did actually put a tiny bit of fiberglass and polyethylene foam insulation in, contrary to my previous speculations, but we’re mostly talking about millimeters of insulation, not centimeters. As I speculated, almost all the interior is wood, but it’s not pine as I’d thought, but the super-lightweight kiri (Paulownia tomentosa), technically a hardwood but extremely fast-growing and abundantly produced in Misiones. The two of them spent three months working on it.
#vanlife #video of carpenter Daniel Metrailler (IG @callejer0s_viajer0s) from Caseros, Entre Ríos, who built a 1400kg wood-siding-covered trailer out of phenolic to live in with his three dogs, pulling it behind his 01974 Peugeot 404, license plate UQX 538. The trailer’s brakes are activated by compression into the car, and it has a 6ℓ hot-water heater on the front of it. On top it has two 110-watt #photovoltaic #solar panels for electrical #energy and a “100 ampere” (probably erroneous) battery. The sides of the trailer have architectural-salvage windows with screens, so it’s about as far from a stealth-camping trailer as can be. The interior furnishings (drawers, cabinets, kitchen countertop) appear to be wood. He’s removed the stove he used to have in favor of a small gas burner next to the sink, powered by a gas cylinder under the sink; vinyl fake-ceramic wall tiles line the kitchen wall. He still has a 220-volt fridge, but his inverter is insufficient to run it. The bed is a loft level about head height which can be moved aside to allow you to stand up, ceiling height 192cm. The air conditioner runs off 12 volts. Mateo of #Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate reveals his height as 176cm. There’s a bathroom with a sink and super-luxury shower, with cuerina (naugahyde) to keep the water vapor in. The toilet is a baño seco, a separating toilet with sawdust to dehydrate the poop; he made the urine separator out of PVC pipe.
#Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate gave up on #vanlife according to the title of this #video, buying a house in El Calafate, but it’s a #clickbait lie; they’re just hanging out at a friend’s house. There was reserved motorhome parking made a good impression on them, but it costs $9000 per 2 kg for milanesa de pollo, and they had to spend the night at the YPF station. Every single motor home in the YPF parking lot has solar panels. This video also shows the storage accessible through the back doors where they have their 30-liter liquid fuel bottle. Apparently flying drones in national parks is forbidden. Mostly just a travel tourism video, bleh.
#video on problems/regrets #Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate had with their #vanlife build: shower drainage when they’re not parked on level ground, the vinyl flooring on the bathroom walls (because there are places where it isn’t really stuck down), the bathroom accordion door tearing up the vinyl floor, not having space heating, putting the stove in the middle of the door (because the wind can blow out the fire), not having a place to sit next to each other and watch a movie, and not having a desk in the cockpit (which he evidently later added). However, having the air conditioner panel straight over the bed is a big win.
#video on Luis’s #vanlife in #Argentina in his 01957 jeep (?) Simona, license plate XCK 003, nickname Estenopo Viajero, which has two gas burners to cook on (powered by a 3kg propane bottle, of which he’d used 500g after 6 months cooking on it), a box for a bed, some cabinets over and under the sink, all made apparently of 19mm particle board framed with welded square steel structural tubing, cheap hinges screwed into the cabinet doors, and curtains hung in the windows. Not quite tall enough to stand up in, with a wood ceiling. No bathroom. He plans to set it up as a mobile darkroom; his old enlarger is installed already. 1.5m² of floor. The water tank to feed the sink is in the rooftop rack, connected through garden hoses, and is just a long piece of (150mm?) PVC pipe. Kitchen things are in a milk crate in the over-sink cabinet, like a drawer. Very rudimentary but seems reliable. The passenger seat folds up and forward to expand the space behind.
Martu and Colo/Gonza (#drvelazquez) live in #Argentina in Martu’s grandfather’s 01994 Ford F100 pickup, with a truck bed cap (“cúpula”). There’s a couch which unfolds into a bed, woodgrain wallpaper, a 12-volt-pumped kitchen sink draining through plastic accordion pipe out the tailgate onto the ground, mounted in a wooden counter painted white, a couple of ultralight portable camping stove burners on the counter (which run off the little spray-paint-sized butane cans), a polyethylene carboy (bidón) of water. The couch/bed bed is apparently two pieces of particle board hinged together so they can unfold to twice the couch’s width, extending up to the counter and eliminating the floor space, presumably supported on parts of the cabinets. Underneath the bed, which seems to be made of 19mm particleboard screwed together at butt joints, is the clothing. There’s enough headroom to kneel when the bed is folded up to expose the floor. The kitchen counter has curtains on cables which slide open to reveal the dishes, foods, shampoo, tiny fire extinguisher, etc. No bathroom, no graywater tank, and I think not even privacy curtains or air conditioning. They have rolls of aluminized polyethylene foam instead of privacy curtains. The water pump and LED lighting are powered by one of those little gel batteries used in motor scooters or home security systems, which they say came from a UPS, and which they recharge with a car battery charger when they can plug in, or just by hooking it up to a cigarette-lighter socket hooked up to the truck’s starter battery, without even a diode. They also use this for a USB charger. When parked they can use a jack to raise the truck bed cap to make enough space to almost stand up in, with vinyl fabric filling up the space. The furniture is built from wood they found in the street, including discarded broken furniture. They’re trying to survive by selling Colo’s book, “Vendo Todo: Me Voy a la Mierda”, author Gonzalo Velázquez. This is the lowest-budget #vanlife #video I’ve seen yet.
Gonzalo Velázquez, the #drvelazquez #vanlife “Vendo Todo: Me Voy a la Mierda” author.
#drvelazquez #video explaining that they use the showers and bathrooms in campgrounds and service stations and hostels and hotels because their #vanlife has no bathroom in the actual truck, and they get 8–10km per liter of fuel (19–24 “mpg”), with an 80ℓ tank. 1.5m² of living space, like living in a tent, with a bed occupying 120cm × 190cm when open. They’ve started using a 6ℓ water bottle as a graywater tank. They’re spending about US$30 per day between the two of them, which seems pretty expensive for #Argentina.
#video #drvelazquez and Martu are taking a break from #vanlife and renting a house because for days it hasn’t stopped raining and snowing in San Martín de los Andes, and everything in their pickup truck bed got wet! Their “snorkel” system didn’t work as expected. #DRAINAGE
#Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate #Argentina #vanlife #video of being “EXPELLED” from Salto Encantado park in Misiones. Mostly they went camping and swimming in the 5° waterfall and played with a dog, made some food, worked on their laptops, etc. Micaela took an afternoon nap on a blanket on the greensward. But apparently the reason they got EXPELLED was that they asked a park ranger if they could spend the night parked in the park parking lot, and he had to ask his boss, and finally they were told to park across the street. They just drove to a YPF station to park for the night so they would have internet access, then returned the next day.
#Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate #Argentina #vanlife #video in Posadas. Giant Andrés Guacurarí statue. International Bridge to Encarnación, Paraguay. Beach. 30° hellish heat (posted 02023-09-07, but probably several days earlier). There’s a place reserved exclusively for parking motor homes. They spent a day on their laptops in the van, in separate spaces, during a rainy day. A bit dull.
#stealth-camping #video in a hammock in a green space along a foot trail between two neighborhoods in, I don’t know, Edmonton, Alberta, or something, “disguised” as businessman in a thrift-store sports coat, with all the camping gear packed into a naugahyde suitcase that vaguely resembles a briefcase from enough of a distance. Almost out of sight of the trail, about 30 seconds’ walk away, he strings up the dark green hammock between two trees with a tarp over the top, some time before nightfall because of an incoming thunderstorm. With the tarp and hammock, he reports being “bone-dry” despite the heavy rain. He has some kind of butane-powered insect repellent, which he then switches to a butane camp stove to roast hot dogs over on a telescoping fork, and then zips a mosquito net onto the hammock for sleeping.
#vanlife #video about toilets. She didn’t like the “Bivvy Loo” or the “female urinal”, but did like the “Trelino” brand “Evo” separating toilet she’s being paid to shill, described as a #composting-toilet, even better than the “Nature’s Head” brand she’d used previously. One of the things she likes is that it doesn’t look “as much like a toilet” because it’s square and dark gray. It kind of looks like an ice chest, with finger notches near the bottom, and it has a dashpot soft closing mechanism. The pee bottle has a sort of soft funnel membrane which lets pee go down but without remaining open for gas exchange when there’s no pee, sort of like a check valve. She mentions a bag or liner for the poop bucket, as well as a “carbon-rich cover material” such as sawdust; other alternatives are organic cat litter, fine bark mulch, peat moss, or coconut bricks. And she rinses the pee funnel with dilute vinegar and wipes it with “a tissue”. For carrying the poop bucket and pee bottle at a campsite, she has a bright yellow reusable shopping bag so it doesn’t look like she’s carrying a poop bucket and pee bottle. She prefers the composting toilet to chemical cassette toilets, because it’s easier to clean and requires less maintenance, among other things.
50 liters of bark mulch, as used for a #composting-toilet, costs US$6.60, 13¢/ℓ.
The Trelino Evo S (small) #composting-toilet is 296mm tall, 330mm wide, 390mm deep, and holds 5ℓ of urine and 6.5ℓ of “solids”, weighs 3.9kg, and costs €304.
10kg of sawdust, as used for a #composting-toilet, costs US$4, 40¢/kg, comparable to bark mulch.
#vanlife #video about problems she encountered in France: locked herself out of her van from paranoia, lost her credit card, had the diesel space heater break down in the middle of the winter (using a hot-water bottle and wishing for an electric blanket as backup), had the sliding door break stuck open (terrible in midwinter), one of her headlights broke, she sliced her leg open on the cabinet handles inside the van, she slipped on some ice at a historical monument and fell and hurt her collarbone and shoulder, and finally got attacked by a dog, though it didn’t break the skin; basically her vacation in France sucked shit. She’s using a rechargeable battery pack with a built-in inverter that she’s being paid to shill.
#stealth-camping #vanlife #video from Cheri, a woman in late middle age. The US$120k van, Mungu Bariki, is an RV conversion by Embassy RV, which puts in air vents that don’t look very air-vent-ish for added stealth. There’s a rear-view camera, a plugin on the side, and some inconspicuous tubes hanging down. But the license plate is a Wisconsin motor home license plate: D L4376, and the Embassy logo is on the back door. She uses a rather large “Sea Head” brand composting toilet hidden under the bathroom vanity, which swings up; the toilet uses hemp bedding and a poop-stirring crank. A “Premier” brand 12-volt air conditioner protrudes from the top. Standard ground clearance (rather than lifted), no solar panels. A 32-inch flat-panel TV swings down from the ceiling. The air conditioner is rather noisy. The interior is all plastic, vinyl upholstery, and steel structural tubing, no wood. Cutting board with a hole in the middle covers the kitchen sink. Touchscreen control panels for the lights and stuff. There’s a DVD player mounted on one side, a microwave above the sink (running off a 110VAC inverter), and an induction burner for cooking. The space heating burns the van’s gasoline. The fridge is a Nova Cool model, almost full height, mounted near the ceiling.
#video about paperclip paddles for Morse code, hooked up to an iambic keyer; three jumbo paper clips, bent to shape with needlenose pliers, are screwed into a wooden block that the cable is stapled to. The nickel or chrome plating on the paper clips has kept them from oxidizing in storage. #electronics #hardware
#stealth-camping in a forest with a tarp, camo netting, a bivvy sack halfway into a bush, a space blanket, etc. Also different kinds of small, well-hidden fires. #bushcraft
#Al-Mundo-con-el-Mate #video #vanlife about the electrical setup in their van. They use a US$350 “Daza” brand “pure-sine-wave” 1500-watt inverter which consumes 33 watts when idle, mostly to charge their laptops, and had to replace one of its MOSFETs at one point (though he misleadingly displays a 2N2222 at this point in the video), which was a huge problem because the particular US$5 transistor model was unavailable in #Argentina. (A commenter says he overpaid for the big inverter.) So he replaced it temporarily with a small 300W modified-square-wave inverter which “only” consumes 3 watts idle. The electrics boxes (built under one of their bench seats) are wooden, which I don’t think much of. Their #photovoltaic #solar panels are 380 watts peak, which is all they had space for on top of the Sprinter. The solar panels connect to an “Epever” brand 30-amp MPPT charge controller, and then they have a ridiculous 6-breaker 240VAC panel through which they’re running their 12-volt power (because 240-VAC breakers are much cheaper than 12-VDC breakers, like US$35 each?), plus some car fuses. He’s still confused about the difference between amps and amp-hours, again incorrectly describing his 2500-amp 275-amp-hour (each) gel batteries (GreensunSolar JFM275-12 if the photo he showed in a previous video isn’t fake news) as “275 amperes”. Again he shows the “Aleba” BC-1240 40-amp battery charger they use to charge from “shore power”. They chose lead-acid batteries instead of lithium so they could afford them without selling the van, although I think probably they could have gone with a much-lower-capacity battery, which he seems to agree with. One time he forgot he was charging the house batteries from the van’s starter battery (he has a switch) and drained it halfway.
#vanlife #video about a minivan conversion by "Alyssa Vanilla", whose video about being stalked went viral. Stained plywood and painted pine boxes screwed together on stringers and hinges with leather handles, with a yoga mat on top of a box as a bed, plus some open-cell foam as a mattress, cut to size with an electric kitchen knife. PVA glue to attach wood trim on the outside of furniture. Flooring seems to be prefab tongue-and-groove (?) laminate (?) paneling with pressure-sensitive adhesive on the back, laid over painted plywood (?) on top of insulation foam. Very IKEA look. Wicker baskets under the bed work as very lightweight drawers. No toilet, no stove, no fridge, no electrical, no air conditioning, no sink.
#video by #Alyssa-Vanilla about giving up #vanlife due to migraines, copper IUD problems, and other health problems. A cold, windy hike kicked her ass back to Love’s Truck Stop. Lots of footage of hiking around in the desert.
another super low budget #vanlife #video, this time from the #USA: a PVC pipe frame and a silver Harbor Freight tarp over a Chevy pickup bed, with some rubber mats in the bed, which also contains a couple of ice chests, a portable generator, an air compressor, some gas cans, a toolbox, some nylon strap tiedowns, and a plastic tote. But they didn’t actually succeed in sleeping in the bed because their bedding got soaked in the tent before they even got it set up, so they went to a hotel. After they got back home they did tie the tarp down with some ropes and it looks pretty okay.
#stealth-camping #vanlife 26-“foot”-long Freightliner bread truck DIY-converted into a motor home (truck license plate Pennsylvania ZTK 4042), designed to look like it belongs to a construction crew when the bulkhead door is closed. Very fancy: 19 “feet” long inside, almost 200 “square feet” of living space, leaded-glass cabinets, wood cabinets, multiple beds (a twin and a queen), high ceilings, ceramic-tile counters, tile floors, tongue-and-groove ceiling with 10cm or so of spray-foam insulation above it, ¼-“inch” birch plywood walls with two-“inch” insulation, ¾-“inch” plywood floor over “inch” and a half foam, cassette toilet, 32-“inch” square shower with graywater tank, kitchen sink, birch butcher-block countertops, PEX plumbing, two giant gas burners, 1000-watt microwave, propane instant water heater, separate sink graywater tank, coffee pot, 12-volt chest-style fridge under the bed, bikes and wetsuits and whatnot under the other bed, 600 watts of solar on the roof and a 300-amp-hour “Ampere Time” brand LiFePO₄ battery powering the “Renogy” brand 2000-watt inverter, tool chest, propane and electric space heaters and then a US$125 diesel space heater too. 2000-watt backup generator and Coleman portable stove and portable grill. Looks like mostly pine construction over the ¼-“inch” plywood. Construction cone rack on the front. The propane tank is external for safety. Various external ports result from the installations: hot-water-heater exhaust, fresh water fill cap, LPG door for access to the propane tank, “shore power”, diesel heater exhaust. Vise mounted on rear bumper. 6-inch air conditioner exhaust port on rear. Solar panels are installed on parts of a ladder installed on the roof rack, so it looks like ladders from the side more than solar panels. He says his budget for the build was US$10k, but it came in under US$15k, plus another US$10k for the used truck itself. Most insurance companies will not insure a truck! But you don't need a CDL because it’s under 19000 “pounds” and has hydraulic brakes.
#Philippines #gun-control and gun culture #toread #video
black oxide coating of fasteners #video #toread #machining
#HTME #video on #bootstrapping rubber #materials from wildflowers, specifically native Minnesota goldenrod. Dried, pulverized in a blender, Soxhlet (?) reflux extraction of unwanted compounds with acetone, then solvent extraction of polyisoprene in toluene. For scaling up, improvised a reflux apparatus out of paint cans, glass tubes, and silicone caulk. Got about 3% of the mass of the dried leaves as rubber goo. Then they vulcanized the raw rubber with sulfur in a toaster oven.
#HTME #video on making glass #materials #toread
#clickbait #video on “turning a truck into weapons with the Mayans” #toread #machining
one of the last gun factories in Kashmir #machining #video. Basically #India’s #gun-control wiped out the industry
#Stories-from-a-Van guide to living in a car to save money. Recommends 5%-transmissivity blackout limo tint for rear car windows and curtains hung behind the front seats. Recommends parking on busy streets, in residential neighborhoods with apartment complexes where other unfamiliar cars regularly park, but never parking in front of a house, instead parking next to open spaces or churches or public buildings, or in the overnight parking lot of a train or bus station. In San Francisco he would exit his minivan through the driver side door to go to the gym to work out and shower. But he was wasting US$800+ per month on eating out. He suggests using a UPS Store or similar “CMRA” mailbox address. #video #vanlife
#vanlife #video of UCLA med school student Ethan, who did a US$14k conversion of a “2015 Ford Transit”. To save money, in his van (California 9GQK477) he has two gas burners (with electric ignition), a double bed (parallel to the back door), drawers, cabinets, bookshelves, sink with restaurant-style sprayer partly blocking the sliding door, all inside a van tall enough to stand up in. Behind the butcher-block countertop and stove is real ceramic tile (6 rows, 9 per row in running-bond pattern, 75¢ each). A US$900 “Indel B” CR130 130ℓ 72W truck fridge, using 60 grams of R134a, is under the counter which he cut down from a US$300 8-“foot” slab. Curtain hung between cab and living space. Insulating opaque panels cover the windows, giving the false appearance of a dark window tint. Warm-white LED lights shine down from the knotty pine ceiling and from the bottoms of kitchen cabinets. Floor seems to be tongue-and-groove “Home Decorators Collection” brand plastic laminate fake wood laid directly over plywood over foam, with no foam over the plywood. Nothing is visible from the left or right side or rear of the van, except that there are two domed skylights/roof vents, which is slightly unusual, and two small added sliding windows near the rear. With more attention, or from above the van, you might notice the three solar panels on top. Therefore, this qualifies as deep #stealth-camping, as long as all the doors are closed, but sometimes he hangs out downtown with the sliding door and curtains wide open. The bed, really a US$50 memory-foam mattress topper, is at the back of the van with ample storage space underneath, accessible through rear doors, including a bicycle, stored with its front wheel taken off, and the 200Ah battery, 1000W inverter, and charge controllers (dc-dc from the van’s alternator, and solar). Fridge, fans, lights, water pump, and propane-valve solenoid are all 12V. Two bench seats between the bed and kitchen, exactly like Al Mundo Con el Mate. The front seats swivel back to provide more seating, and there are opaque panels to put in the (untinted) cab windows and windshield too. 120VAC sockets in the wall. Walls and ceiling of pine screwed to thin studs, with thin flexible foam insulation behind the wood. Very minimalist IKEA vibe. The sink water is pumped (with an electric water pump he must manually turn on with a lightswitch inside the sink cabinet) from two 7-“gallon” water tanks which have dual carrying handles, similar to what we used to take to Burning Man, so they can be refilled away from the van, in a friend’s bathtub every week or two (since they won’t fit into a sink). There’s a dish drainer in the bottom of the sink. He says the water hookup took hours and hours and hours at Home Despot and Lowe’s. One of the roof vents has a working fan. One bench seat has the 5-“gallon” propane canister and its regulators and valves, and also his pants and shoes. The bench seats and drawers are butt-joint plywood construction, painted white, with dado joints for the drawer bottoms (though he calls it “dodo”); the bed and sink also seem to be plywood, but with stringers at joints. No regularly used toilet, just a pee jar, plus a folding toddler potty for emergencies that takes a bag, which looks much smaller than any #composting-toilet I’ve seen. He reports he can stay parked in one spot until Friday street cleaning. He and his dad spent two months at the family farm in New Jersey converting the van. The video also shows his friend Justin’s van, with similar screwed-pine construction and a somewhat similar partly-blocked-sliding-door layout, but a wall and pocket door between the living space and cab, and with a shower and bathroom. Justin has the cutting-board top for the sink that Ethan lacks, as well as a three-burner stove, an oven, a floating Lagoon-style table, a fridge under the bed. Then they show the van of another friend; I’m getting overwhelmed.
#stealth-camping #vanlife #video of an old woman #toread
#vanlife toilets #video considering cassette toilets and blackwater tanks. Finally at the end of the video he talks about composting toilets. Mentions the risk of thousands of bugs hatching in your composting-toilet medium overnight, something I hadn’t heard of (but apparently happened to a friend of his).
new #Nixie-tube #machining #video #toread