Building the Escape Pod
Several people have asked for the exact specifications of the sink cabinet we built. It fits really well behind the sliding door pillar and in front of the bench seat in the third row position. Here’s a detailed look at the design and the parts you’d need to order to build your own.
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”
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.
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”
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.
There’s a physical constraint to how much solar energy you can gather from your van. We thought we had it pretty much maxed out until we came across this Advanced-RV build that added even more panels. Continue reading “How to size a solar system for your van”
It’s a long way up into the van. We added a handle in the sliding door area, but we were fed up with using a folding step stool to help us get in and out. We installed an electric step that is activated when the door opens.
Mercedes don’t make it easy to “borrow” their cable runs that go from the van body into the doors. We wanted to put power cables through into the rear doors for powerful work lights. It was more effort than it should have been. Continue reading “Running cables into the back doors”
Because the van was late arriving (or rather, our van got sold to someone else and the dealer lied to us about it), the garage started filling up with parts we’d ordered.
It’s really frustrating to have a ton of things to put in the van and no time to work on it.
The Fedex and UPS drivers want to know what our special project is. We really got good value from our Amazon Prime membership this year!