Building the Escape Pod
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!
It starts innocently enough – a space in the roof, a wooden template to get the right hole spacing, then out come the power tools and all of a sudden there’s a 14″ hole in the ceiling. Continue reading “Adding a fan, voiding the warranty”
It’s really easy to take the inside out of a Sprinter van. I’m not sure if that’s a compliment. There are lots of plastic pieces that just unclip.
We bought a Crew van, so it comes with a headliner, rear door inserts, and plastic panels on the walls up to the mid-line. The areas that would be windows in the back are just bare metal. The passenger van comes with more paneling, covered in vinyl. The passenger van also has more windows, which we didn’t want. Continue reading “Stripping (the inside of a Sprinter)”
We ordered a four wheel drive sprinter on the day they first came available in North America. The dealership completely screwed up, and sold our van to somebody else – probably on purpose. All I’ll say is, never use Wilson Motors in Bellingham, WA. They are dishonest and care more about how much money they can save than about customer service.
Luckily, they’d found a replacement 4×4 which kind-of sort-of was OK for our needs. We took it rather than waiting another six to ten months for a replacement to get built in Germany and then shipped across.
We didn’t end up with most of the options we’d ordered, like suspension seats or the Active Safety package, and the van we took home had several things we’d never have ordered – what use is an alarm system if you’re parked in a forest? Or alloy wheels on a dirt road? Or the crappy Becker GPS system.
Still, it was a crew van (one row of passenger seats, windows in the sliding door and behind the driver) and had 4×4, which was our primary reason for waiting so long for the van. Plenty of room inside for the conversion we want to do, and hopefully the 4×4 will look after us when we’re heading to remote mountain bike trails.