First day horrible

You set off full of hope and relief that the day of departure is here. The van is as near finished as it's going to be in the next few months, you have everything you need and ahead lies adventure.

Then, a few miles down the so familiar road, the power to the wheels falters. So that was what young Simon at the garage was talking about - something I didn't understand about the air supply. Is it the carburettor? Whatever it is, the van does not seem to be pulling as it did when I had the first test run. The fuel consumption according to the magic gadget on the dashboard, is not what it should be. I'm carrying more weight, but not that much more. There's nothing I can do but drive on, fretting and unhappy. This is my state of mind when I come to a turning I've made dozens if not hundreds of time. For the usual road from Raglan to Newport you carry on past the Monmouth turning. This time, anxious and confused and feeling very old, I turned left towards Monmouth. That one moment of inattention cost me 45 minutes and a big detour - to Monmouth and then over the foggy hills to Chepstow and the old Severn Bridge.

Still I pressed on and stopped for lunch on the M25 southbound. That was when I realised my phone was not getting any data, despite, or because of, the fact that I had just changed to a cheap contract with 500gig of data. Google maps don't work without a connection of some sort and I had no paper maps.

Still I press on and at around 15:30 arrive at the Eurotunnel terminal. You drive up to a kiosk which asks you to tap in your reservation number. I had not made a reservation. "How much is it to buy now?" Almost £200 - twice the cost of an online booking. "How do I get out of here?" He was a kind young man and helped me escape, but now what? I had no way of booking online, so I decided to find a campsite with wifi and see if I could book for tomorrow.

So this is where I am, just under the white cliffs of Dover with almost no mobile signal but wifi from the café. You have to peer through the windows to see the code on a notice at the counter. The view is amazing; it's a beautiful site, but how am I to get to Calais?   

Two Days to go

Wales  has never looked so gorgeous. There has been an explosion of Lady's Smock in the fields around us, and in the woods there are bluebells everywhere.  This evening Thelma and I drove in the new van up to the Dinas, the conical hill near the head of the Towy valley where Twm Sion Catti's cave is. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twm_Si%C3%B4n_Cati) There is a plain little stone church there which has no lights so services are only held once a month during the summer.  

ON Wednesday I set off for the Channel Tunnel on my way to Iceland. I will be leaving this:

For this:

But I know Wales. I've seen bluebells before, many times, but I've never seen Iceland and it's a place I've wanted to visit since I was a student.

Tomorrow I still have a few things to do to the van - a good clean amongst them. I'll also be working on all my lists. This is the one for the photography gear - the bare minimum as I'm sure you'll agree:

Photography list		number	location
Cameras	Sony compact
	Canon 5D
	Canon 70D
Lenses	Tamron 16-300
	Canon 16-35
	Canon 100-400
	Canon x2 extender
Rucksack
Harness
Sling
Straps	male	1	bins
		1	rucksack
		1	70D
	female	1	bins
		1	rucksack
		1	lens
		1	spare
strap adaptors	male to male	1	rucksack
		1	rucksack
	female to female	1	rucksack
Remotes	cable	1	rucksack
	infra	1	rucksack
batteries	canon	2	rucksack
		1	70D
		1	5D
	sony	1	camera
		1	day bag
chargers	canon	1
	Sony	1
mians lead		1
image storage SD cards		1	70 D
		1	5D
		1	Sony
		2	rucksack
camera rain cover			rucksack
rucksack cover			rucksack
glasses +3		2	rucksack
card readers		2	van
allen keys		2	rucksack
pen		1	rucksack
notebook		1	rucksack
polarising filter		1
lens cleaner		1
hide		1

First test run

2 May 2017

Here I am just a mile or two down the dismantled railway which forms the spine of the grandly named Welsh Wildlife Centre aka Teifi wetlands, a beautiful reserve where I once watched an otter fishing, but have never seen anything as interesting since. I still go there though, and will be at the best hide by 6am tomorrow. The site is one of my favourites, but tonight there's nobody here. Even the farm is deserted. Suits me. The former railway is now a farm track but there are still bridges and embankments. One of the fields had a nice mixture of lady's smock and dandelions.

later 

It's an extraordinary experience sitting here, black windows all round me, pools of light on the dark red surfaces, the more rufous upholstery and the deep brown wood. I'm reading a romantic novel by a woman called Jojo and feeling at peace with the world. I've managed to turn a dirty, over-worked van into a thing of beauty. Of course it's gone over budget but not dramatically.

I have a long list of things that have to be done in the next two weeks, but so far I've all the problems have been solvable, so I think I'll get there.

3 May

It would be good to end my relationship with Castle Garage in Newcastle Emlyn feeling that they were a fundamentally decent bunch, but alas they are just car salesmen. It's easy to leave the place feeling cherished, but the charm is skin deep. Both the partners, Paul and Mark are native Cardies, very laid back, easy going and charming. Karen the office lady is English and also has a pleasant manner. She is marginally better at answering emails than the men, but that's not saying much. I found it impossible to convince them that for me email takes the place of the phone. If you ask a question on the phone you expect an answer. If I know the person is online when I email, I expect the courtesy of an answer. To simply not answer a question at all as the days go by, is the equivalent to me of putting the phone down. This continual lack of response led to weeks of delay in buying the vehicle and getting the work done on it, delay which has meant a hectic and stressful schedule to get the conversion done on time. 

I had a 3 month warranty. "Can you send me the warranty terms?" Evasion. "What does it cover?" I asked Paul. "Everything" he answered and that was it. Twice I took the van there for warranty repairs. Nothing was done properly. Should I have expected more? I don't know. They clearly thought I was a pain in the arse with my nagging emails, but I was always greeted in a friendly fashion and always left feeling I had been looked after. Then came the realisation that they had only done the minimum to get me out of their hair.

So goodbye Castle Motors. At least I got an excellent respray from the man who does their cleaning and painting - Geraint. He has real pride in what he does, and I'm still pleased with the paint. I'm not really angry with the garage either. In some ways I am a pain in the arse.

Saturday 6 May

Yesterday the van was at the garage in Llandovery. Simon, the boss, has always looks after us well, and his namesake, a younger Simon, seems to be a real expert at camper vans. I took it in for them to check for faults - anything which might cause a breakdown. I used 8mm copper pipe for the gas supply. It leads from the underslung tank up through a 10mm hole in the floor and on to feed the 4 gas appliances. I'd gone to a lot of trouble to ensure that the joints were sound, but had not realised, until Simon the younger pointed it out, that the pipe would rub against bare metal of the hole in the floor. Eventually it could wear through with potentially disastrous consequences. He said I need to enlarge the hole and fit it with a rubber grommet. I couldn't enlarge the hole without removing the pipe first. That meant taking up the whole of  the raised section of the floor under the sofa where the batteries and all the electrical gear were positioned. Bollocks.

Having begun my woodworking career as an antique restorer I know the value of making, as far as possible,  everything I do reversible, and there was nothing in the van which could not be unscrewed and removed if necessary.

I began at 7am, first removing some wiring from the sofa box, then taking the box out. This was something I wanted to do anyway because I could not fit the hinges on the lid in its fixed position and I wanted to make it 20mm lower. By 7:30 the box was out, the batteries disconnected and removed, the inverter, fuse box, solar charger and mains charger removed and the wiring pushed to the back. Then I could unscrew the floor section and get to the copper pipe. Before working on it I had to drive the van up onto its wedges so that I could crawl underneath and turn the gas off at the tank. Then I had to make sure the pipe was clear of gas before I could cut the pipe, remove the section going through the floor, enlarge the hole, fit the grommet, cut a new piece of pipe and reconnect with a compression elbow joint. By nine the whole job was done.

Good, but it had not been on my list and the next job was a stinker - a very fiddly fitting job which involved making several templates, and innumerable trips to and from the van and the workshop. So it went on - brief stop for lunch  - double espresso and back on a  high. Bad move: working too fast and making mistakes. Belly ache; slowing down, exhaustion but I keep going. Total exhaustion at 5 - stagger to the shower room.

Friday 5 May

It's late and  I'm looking at my route to Denmark in more detail. The first day will get me from Wales to Folkestone or Calais. Could I get from there to Bremen in a day? I'm not good at long drives and can only manage if I break up the day into roughly 2 hour sections, starting the first before breakfast. I look at campsites - prices better than in Britain. If I can't make Bremen I could get to Munster. The direct route from there to Copenhagen involves an expensive ferry crossing - 78 Euros. To avoid the ferry I need to take a big detour north - more driving but the same time and cheaper.

Nine days to go before I leave.

End of Week 10

25 April

There's a week missing from the blog - the pressure to get all the work done was too great. Early starts, full working days and complete exhaustion - what an absolute blessing a glass of wine is then.

So, this is it: week 10 - the last week. I've set next Tuesday as the date for the first trial run, and I'm pretty sure I'll make it. This afternoon (Tuesday 25th) I spent a very uncomfortable hour re-connecting the gas - this time with a regulator. I suppose I should have known the LPG tank would need a regulator but the firm that sold me the kit did not say anything about needing one so I assumed it was part of the tank. Another £60 , More pipe bending, joint making and grovelling under the van working at arm's length: I got the joints tight but decided not to test it this evening - I'm too tired and it's too important to be fuddled by exhaustion.

28 April 

I'm  usually pretty critical of my own woodwork. I see all the little faults, and I'm constantly making small mistakes (and occasionally big ones) which take time to put right. Today though I managed a very difficult job as well as I could have hoped. If you've no interest in woodwork skip the next paragraph!

Having decided to use a mixture of cherry veneer onto poplar ply and solid, locally grown cherry wood for the edges and corners, and having rounded the vertical edges of all the bits of furniture where sharp corners might be a problem, and having decided on a rounded corner on the worktop, I (pause for breath) wanted the table to have rounded corners. I decided to use a burgundy coloured hard laminate for the worktop and the table, glued down onto poplar ply and edged in solid cherry. It's easy enough to do the straight sides with a half-round cherry moulding, but getting 4 clean symmetrical and identical curves on the corners of the table can only be done with a jig and a router. The jig was simply a piece of scrap 6mm plywood with an accurately  rounded corner. It was cramped to the table top 3 mm in from the edge. The router is fitted with a ring fence, 6mm high, surrounding the cutter and offset by 3mm.  More difficult is the matching jig to make the concave curve in the solid cherry wood. My knowledge of geometry is rudimentary so I had to work it out mostly by trial and error. I'd been thinking about this problem for 2 days, but it still took most of the morning to work out all the angles. Once the jigs were made and tested the actual machining time was in minutes. I was hugely gratified to be able to glue the whole lot together with no gaps.  

Sunday 30 April

 The big event yesterday was installing the kitchen and testing the gas water heater for the first time. It didn't light and there was a red light flashing, but reading the manual I found a procedure to clear what they call a "gas lock-out" and ping! A green light! That was a great moment, only partly down-graded by a smell of gas. I quickly switched everything off and turned off the gas, but I was too tired last night to try to identify the leak.

Now I've lit the heater again but shut off the gas to the kitchen area where it will feed the hob and the grill.  So far no gas smells. Then I turned on the kitchen area and soon found the leak - one of the compression joints not tight enough. Now everything is working and there is no gas smell, but I won't use the van until I've installed a double gas alarm which can pick up carbon monoxide and narcotic gases.

Now the mattress is in, the sink and hob are installed, there is hot and cold running water, blown air heating, hook- up power, spotlights, fridge, toilet.  There is still loads to do - it all looks untidy and messy still, but it's on track.

End of Week 8

Just two weeks to go until road tests must start and it's a Bank Holiday Weekend.  Bank holidays - the bane of the self-employed! Why would anyone, if they had the choice, want to go on holiday when everyone else does? Nothing will be achieved until all the traffic jams have been dispersed, the crowded shivering camp-sites deserted, the short-haul flights back and landed, and work can begin again.

In my case, important questions in emails to my suppliers will go unanswered.

And that's another thing. Why do so many people in business simply ignore emails? I use the general term "business", but I had not really come across this until I began buying from people in the motor trade and the offshoot camper and caravan trade. It's a lottery. Some are good communicators in any medium, but far too many simply assume that if you want a question answered you will ring them. A few don't even offer email as an alternative.

I have made good progress this week, but "behind the scenes" as opposed to in the van. I can't install the furniture until I've got the water connected and running, and it took me over a week to find out what fittings I needed and get them ordered. I finally got the order in on Thursday, and got a machine generated email proudly declaring that my goods would be delivered next Tuesday.

I got the gas all connected up and leak tested, but couldn't get the air heater to ignite. My question to the suppliers about this hit the bank holiday wall, and will probably have to be repeated on Tuesday.

Meanwhile I've been making and fitting drawers to the kitchen unit. This is easily the most expensive and time-consuming of all the furniture, if for no other reason than my decision to fit four wooden inset drawers. Most modern kitchens go for the easy option of lay-on doors and drawers, metal drawer runners, ready-made metal drawers with screw adjustments for the wooden drawer fronts, and those big metal sprung hinges which control the movement of kitchen doors. These fittings are designed to have plenty of adjustment potential - wriggle room. Not mine:  all the adjustments are made with plane, sander and screws - you shave a bit of here, test, shave some more, test. If you take a little bit too much off on one drawer it throws all the rest out. If a screw hole is slightly to one side of the optimum position you  have to fill the hole and make a new one. At present all I can see are the faults. I just hope the final appearance will justify all this fiddling. As you can see, more fiddling will be needed before I can do the final coat of varnish:

End of week 7

The workshop is full of nearly-finished pieces of furniture, but I can't install any of them until I have all the electrics, plumbing and gas up and running. Apart from one of the switched spotlights, the electrics seem to be OK, but though I have the gas tank installed under the floor, I made a nasty mistake in soldering up the piping without a cut-off tap, and I still don't understand how to connect the pipes to the tank - that is a high priority this week.

The lack of space adds to the pressure. I feel it most of the time - the stiff neck, the gut-ache. The whole body feels worn. It's obsessive what I'm doing, and I feel I'm pushing this old body to its limits. I can almost hear those septuagenarian  bones and muscles saying

" Hey- give us a break. We've been around for a long time and need a bit of rest." But the mind says

"Nonsense, you're getting fitter. Against the odds you are building muscle. Keep at the exercises, they are keeping you healthy and holding back the inrushing tide of decrepitude."

Such obsession is a selfish thing. I neglect those I love, miss birthdays, I'm not giving attention to the cares of others, but I am not condemned. What I am doing is comparable to the selfishness of the athlete whose only care is to push the body to its limits, to be the best. We love them for it and we applaud the old person who can still run a marathon or go surfing or cycle up mountains - not that I can do any of those things.

And yet, we all must accept that as each decade passes, each faster than the last, there are things which we can no longer do. We can maintain and improve skills we gained in previous decades, but we can't learn new languages or craft a 6-pack stomach.  I can't cycle for 50 miles - I just don't have the muscle for it. We can't win at anything in competition with younger people. Winning is not a concept that sits well with old age. We have a great contribution to make, but it is a subtle one - that of inspiring, consoling, helping, restoring.

Who knows if this project will inspire anyone. It will be as good as I can make it and that seems to be a worthwhile end.

End of Week 6

It’s a lovely day and the conversion job feels a lot better this week. I’ve even taken some time off to do some gardening. Most of the furniture is now under construction and some almost finished. Many self-builders make their furniture with a softwood frame covered in thin plywood. I’m building glued carcases which can then be removed if necessary later.

My first attempt at veneering (as reported last week) did not end well, but I’m getting into the swing of it now and actually enjoying the work. One big time saver has been the decision to treat the inside or unseen surfaces with linseed oil. It darkens the bland poplar plywood and makes it look almost like proper timber. It’s an easy and durable finish which I have used a lot in the last 10 years. At present the solid cherry parts of the structure look very different from the veneered. This is partly because the species is almost certainly different, the veneer being American cherry and the solid our local version. There are two more reasons though: modern veneer is cut on a huge lathe which takes a continuous sheet of timber from the circumference of the trunk. This gives the grain a much more spaced out look compared to the old sawn veneers. The third reason is that the veneer has been exposed to the air for all the time it has taken to be coated with glue, packed and sold. My cherry timber has only just been exposed to the air this week so it will take a time to darken and mature.

One of the most difficult jobs with the furniture has been fitting it neatly to the vary varied profile of the sides of the van. This involved 6 different templates, each of which took about an hour to make. The technique is usually called “scribing” but that process is for profiles without too big a variation – you position your template (or the actual object) perpendicular to the wall, measure the largest distance from the object to the wall, make up a block of wood to that size and then, keeping the template perpendicular, use the block to guide a pencil mark. With the van the widest point was something near to 100mm so it’s really a question of estimating the distance by eye, drawing a rough profile on the template, cutting it to the estimate and then drawing, cutting bits off, drawing again, cutting again . . . and again and again. They all seem to fit within a couple of millimetres.

The other great difficulty with working in a vehicle is that you can’t use a spirit level. What constitutes upright? You can only use vertical elements like the back doors or the main struts. Sometimes the only way is by eye.

The big black water tank finally arrived this week. It’s just a sealed black plastic box so I will have to drill holes and fit caps to it – not sure quite how yet! I also decided on the lining carpet which will go on the ceiling and any exposed walls – a medium to dark grey called Anthracite.

Today I finally brushed on the first coat of polyurethane varnish on the two overhead cupboards. One of these – the one above the sofa – will be the first piece to be finished and fitted because it will have the switch panel in it which controls most of the electrics.

The really difficult but rewarding work next week will be in deciding on the sequence of finishing work. The carpet will go onto the walls before I fix the lockers, and all the doors will have to be finished and fitted in the workshop before it is screwed into place. Then I install the switch panel and make all the connections. Then I can test most of the electrics, and if all is well I can then do the whole ceiling and at least some of the walls with the carpet material.

The water and gas are more difficult. In normal kitchen fitting you would bring the pipes to an approximate position, fit the worktop, sink, hob etc. and then get the gas and water connected. The problem here is that I need to test the system before things go too far to be easily reversible if there is a fault.

So, next week should be fun!