Van underside all prepped and ready for its final coat of epoxy mastic.
Van underside all prepped and ready for its final coat of epoxy mastic.
I’ve stripped down all of the running gear. Thankfully most of it is in good nick. I’ll need a new drag link, and one ball joint, and I’ll renew all the rubber boots as they’ve seen better days and the bolts.
Ready to go off to the shot blasters:
All blasted and looking like new (shot blasting is such a time saver!)
And back down the workshop for a coat of zinc primer. Very Satisfying!
Keen for us to have a bit of heat in the van I’m installing a propex heater under the driver’s seat.
I made up a little platform for it to sit on in the metal folder:
Then very tentatively cut a hole in the driver’s cubby space to allow the propex to drop into the void:
I packed out the platform with some sections of 20mm and 40mm box section so that the heater sits level:
And then finally cut the holes into the wheel arch for the inlet and exhaust pipes. I’ll be fitting rubber grommets to stop water getting through:
I was keen to fit an underslung LPG tank to our van to free up valuable interior space, and to me it seems safer keeping the gas outside the van.
I opted for a Gasit 20L easyfit tank. This makes fitting the tank really easy as it comes with welded feet that simply need attaching to the underside of the van to ensure the tank is sat at the correct angle. This is the tank:
It comes with all of the fittings pre-installed and pre-tested, with a heavy duty plate covering the valves:
Gasit do sell mounting kits for other vans, and a generic mount designed to attach to the floor, but it seemed easier and cheaper just to make my own. I paid around £10 for a metre of angle iron and a meter of flat bar from my local fabrication shop.
I made the mounts out of 3mm angle iron with a piece of 3mm flat bar lap welded underneath the angle iron (overlapped by around 3mm). Both the angle iron and flat bar were 25mm wide and cut down to match the span of the feet (180mm):
I opted to lap weld to give a bit of clearance under the floor supports that the mounts will attach to:
The mounts then bolt onto the sides of the 2nd and 4th floor support from the front with 4 M8 bolts:
Hopefully in this picture you can see how lap welding the joint allows the mount to sit inline with the bottom of the floor support:
The tank then gets gently jacked into position and bolted to the mounts:
As I still have the van on the rollover jig I also got some pictures with it rolled over:
Gasit also sell the fill point which I’ll be fitting just in front of the rear jacking point.
I’ve finished up the heating ducting this week. Y piece welded in:
Repaired the piece that sits under the walkthrough, and welded back in:
Fabricated a tube to pass through the cross member as the original was beyond repair. I’d thrown the old one out so had nothing to go from, I kept it simple and just made two tubes of the right diameter to match the cardboard tube and metal pipe:
Hopefully we might get some form of heat into the cab now!
I also made up some brackets for our new LPG tank which will run our heater and cooker. I’ll be doing a separate post on how I installed this.
Fitting the heating ‘y piece’ to Iris.
This piece is a right pain to fit so I thought it worth sharing how I went about it as it may help others trying to do the same job.
(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)
