skylight

Oups! Long time no posts, although quite a lot has happened on the van. Not many things got finished though, but here's one.

I installed the skylight back in June. It's the smallest Fiama: it needs a 28cm square cutout. It sits near the cooker, on a flat part of the roof.

To cut the roof, I lay a sturdy plank and a ladder over the roof bars. I then drilled a hole in each corner and used a pair of nibblers for the straight cut:





I used sika 221 to glue the skylight in place and to glue soem re-inforcing wooden battens on the inner side of the roof. I re-fitted the ceiling, then finished the instalation by fitting the bottom part of the skylight. I do not have a picture, the a cross section would have shown: top part of the skylight, sika, metal roof, sika, wooden batten, original roof, bottom part of the skylight with screws linking the top and bottom parts.

This failed during our holiday in the Alps. The skylight leaked badly during a stormy night. It turned out that the skylight was not glued to the outer bed of sika! Once I removed the screws holding the bottom of the skylight, the top just lifted off from the roof with no effort!

We retreated to my parent's in sunny south of France to escape the rain, to dry and to repair the van. A local caravan specialist sold me this:



No brand name, but it's the mastic he uses to replace skylights. He buys it in rolls of 12m, and was happy to sell me 1.5m. He didn't know of sika 221, in fact he thought I had just used silicon sealant. To be honest, by that stage the sika looked like silicon sealant!

Most importantly, he thought that I had made a mistake when I installed the skylight. He advised me to build up the wooden batten so that when tightening the skylight screws, the top and bottom parts would compress the solid battens not the vito's ceiling, which is made of foam. Here are the extended battens:



I then laid the mastic around the top skylight, and fitted it. I had to enlarge the foam ceiling cutout, and it doesn't look as tidy now that it isn't fitted under the bottom skirt of the skylight. But so far, it hasn't leaked.

Auxiliary heater

The second thing i bought for the van was an ebespacher heater. It was cheap (<£200) I've spent many weekends trying to make it work and had to admit defeat last sunday evening. With only 5 days before out only possible campervan weekend this winter, I bid and won a nearly new, bigger, more recent heater, within driving distance. I picked it up during the week, fitted it and tested it before the weekend. Here are the pictures:

I used a tool to fit threaded inserts to fit the exhaust and air intake. Here's the silencer:



The intake has a silencer of some kind. Not sure if it makes much of a difference...



I placed the silencer and exhaust where an electric loom used to be. This was relocated on the crossmember:



Here's a picture of the D1 underside (the non-working heater). It is mounted on an aluminium plate fitted on a piece of plywood, the overall thickness of these is the same as the plywood floor plus floor insulation (= 2cm). This means that the heater is flush with the floating floor. On the underside, there is a 2cm recess. It's grey on the picture, as i've sealed it with underfloor sealant to protect the ply.

Rust

Rust became a concern soon after buying the van. The paint must have got damaged at the edge of the stickers when they decommissioned the van and removed the police stickers. Rust bubbles appeared along the sticker lines too quickly to wait for the end of the winter for a proper respray.

I did my best sanding off the rust, then 2 coats of primer and 2 of paint. My best wasn't good enough as rust spots appeared 2 weeks after coming back to England on the back doors only, the side panels are OK so far.

I also straightened a dent in the back door. No rust is showing on the repair yet, I keep my fingers crossed!