So we are wrapping a long work day now. This is one of the first times I am posting on the actual day the action happened.

I promised to tell the story of finding the workspace for us to finish the van, and I will keep it short. It was a horribly difficult task, no one wanted to rent short term, and/or their garage door was too short. We finally lucked up and found a nice woman who would take a chance on us for a one month rental. The downside is that it’s VERY expensive and a lot more space than we need, but beggars can’t be choosers.

Everyday we have been attacking the van. The first order of business was to tear the front end apart and get the front differential out of the van and have it shipped back to Daryl at AAtransaxle to have a look. We thought this would be an easy one, but it was tough to get out and we had to dismantle a lot of the front end. And of course the drive shaft decided to seize to the nose of the diff as well and that mandated alot of “massaging” to get the two apart. But finally it was apart, and then to UPS for the $285 trip to Washington state. Ugh.

The past couple of days we have been working to prep and clean the body so we can add sound deadener and insulation to the van. This is the type of stuff you only do once in the van’s lifetime, so we want to do it right. We have decided on a fairly comprehensive approach.

1. Scrub and clean every panel and piece of interior metal
2. Add dynamat to tame rattles and vibrations
3. Spray cover panels with Noxudol 3100, it’s a spray sound deadener used in the fancy cars 😉
4. Insulate the panels via closed cell insulation

Listing it out doesn’t sound bad at all, but the actual work is painstaking. The workspace doesn’t have running water, so we have to use spray bottles and rags to clean. And it’s back breaking work. But today we basically have the van ready for the floor install and additional coats of the spray sound deadener and insulation.

This has been a tremendous amount of work, but we are about to get to the fun stuff of wiring and putting in the cabinets and all of the elements that really start making it feel complete. More later. Sleepy now.