Make it warm and bright

by drivingeurope
in Preperations
on June 1, 2018

After some days of absence Oswald found its way back to us. The new clutch works perfectly fine and everything else seems to be pretty good, too. Let’s go for the further steps than!

Insulated vans interior.

Van looking like a shell construction.

Since we are planning to start our tour somewhen in late summer it might not be warm all the time. Plus, we (or at least some of us) are no big fans of freezing. That’s why we insulated the vans whole interior. As insulating material we used Thinsulate from 3M which we got sponsored for our project. A big thanks here!
After putting the insulating material everywhere we stuck plastic bags over it, so that it’s not only warm in the van but also dry. As always we were searching for the cheapest possible way. We were collecting yellow trashbags which should normally be used for plastic waste. You get those for free in Hamburg – so this way we were following our idea of saving as much money as somehow possible.

When we were standing inside the cleaned and insulated van, we realized that it is pretty dark in there. So what to do? Cut a hole in the roof sounded like a good plan to us. So we did that.
We were searching for a roof hatch in an aerodynamic style beforehand – that seems very wise, we thought. So we put the roof hatch in: We switched the common theory “measure twice, cut once” into “measure once, cut twice”. To our all surprise it went well so far. No wonder actually, since we are real professionals in all that we are doing in and around Oswald. Haha, that’s what we thought – until Felix realized that we put the hatch in the wrong way round. If Oswald would be able to drive sidewards we would have done an incredible job but of course – like every other car as well – our van drives forwards and backwards. So there it was, the aerodynamic function. We had to take the roof hatch back out and put it in the right way. You see, we are nothing like professionals in what we are doing here but actually that’s the whole fun about it. We are enjoying it a lot and we are sure that it is normal that not everything goes perfectly fine in any construction. The most important part is, to never loose the fun in what you are doing and just start trying: you don’t need major skills here.

Since everything with the first hatch went so well, we decided to put in a second one as well. Here you can see Felix in progress: