
With the floor laid in the back of the van, my attention over the past few weeks has turned to building the inside of the van into a comfortable camper.
It wasn’t as straight forward as a normal camper would be, as I had to accommodate climbing equipment that I will be wanting to carry. Chief amongst the problems was were to store the bouldering mats.
I have 2 bouldering mats, which are used to cushion falls when rock climbing at low level (around 4metres or less). They are approx, 1 metre in width, 1.4 metres in length and 10cm thick. It took a couple of days of trial and error to decide where I was going to store them.
In the end, I opted to put them across the back of the van, just inside the rear door. This meant that I had to start the bed/seat build at least 20cm further into the van than I would have done had I not had to accommodate the mats.
Anyway, it has all worked out in the end, with an “L” shape seating area, which will sleep 1 person without modification, and sleep 2 people with the aid of an extra board to extend the width of the bed.
The seat/bed cushions I had left over from a previous VW T4 build about 10 years ago, and based the dimensions of the build around these, and its worked out pretty good. The seats lift up for storage underneath, and just behind the drivers seat is the place where I will be fitting a leisure battery – will show this in a future blog post.
All that’s left to do is sort out a “camper/kitchen” pod with gas stove and sink.
So here is the photos of the build so far.