Building the Escape Pod
North American Sprinters have had a factory 4WD option since 2015. It isn’t a go-anywhere do-anything transmission like a Unimog, but it’s surprisingly good considering the van is a long, tall brick that really isn’t designed for offroading.
Continue reading “Four wheel drive in a Sprinter – good, but not quite what you’d expect”
If you’re not careful, the whole van can end up being a dirty laundry basket. And it’ll end up smelling that way too. We don’t live full time in the van, so we needed a way to move our clothes in and out quickly and easily. Packing cubes provided the answer because they make it easy to organize and find clean clothes, and to quarantine the stinky ones.
Continue reading “Packing cubes: a filing system for your clothes”
We’ve been driving around with a prototype sink cabinet made from shipping crate wood for a while now. It was time to finish the job. We used aluminum extrusions with t-slots in each side to make the frame, then slid 1/4″ bamboo ply in to the slots to make side panels.
Continue reading “Sink cabinet built with 80/20 aluminum extrusion”
The spare wheel on a Sprinter van appears to be magically locked in the wheel carrier. You need to know a simple trick in order to release it.
It’s amazing how much useful information you can find in the operator’s manual for your Sprinter. It’s not the most scintillating of reads, but it’s definitely educational.
Continue reading “Get educated: RTFM (read the freakin’ manual)”
If you’re planning a van conversion and you want to run some beefy 120 volt appliances, like a microwave or (heaven forbid) a 120v air conditioner without a shore connection, be prepared to spend a lot of money on your batteries as well as on your inverter.
Continue reading “Running a big inverter from a small battery just doesn’t work – here’s why”
In order to assemble your 12 Volt power system, you’ll be connecting cables between your batteries, your inverter, your solar charger, your fuses, relays, switches and bus bars. Most of those devices have studs and bolts for the connections, which means you’ll need cable lugs to attach the wires to the items. Continue reading “Crimping cables for a 12V power system”
It’s not a good idea to use the van’s starter battery to power the electrical items in your conversion. It’s too easy to leave yourself with a flat battery and no way to start the engine. The van’s charging system can be used to help charge a second battery that you isolate from the starter battery, but there are some constraints. If you’re trying to charge a large house battery, you may need some additional equipment.
Continue reading “Hooking in to the Sprinter’s charging system”
There’s a lot of confusion about the different types of battery that you can find in Sprinter vans, and how to go about connecting to them in order to power things inside the van. Here are some photos to help make things clearer.
We use our phones to navigate in the van, but it’s hard to find a good place to clip a phone on to the Sprinter dash without obscuring the air vents. We finally found a product that works.