Camper interior and interior pannels......

[Snowgeek]

I am in the planning stages of my van interior and headed for a westy weekender type interior. As i have looked every one seems to leave the interior pannels in place an build around them. From my looking at my van there is quite a bit of space that is lost back there. I know i will want to cover up my ac and heat but other than that i am planning on pulling the pannels, insulating and marine carpeting the walls. Am i missing a reason every one leaves them in place.

Thanks for your imput.

Ryan

[JHenry45]

I have an 84 Westy and I am planning to use as much of the camper interior as possible in my 2004 passenger Astro. I agree with you that the side panels have to come out to make room for the "Z" bed and the cabinets. I'm a pretty good carpenter and cabinet maker. What I think I want to do, is to use the hinges and pulls off the westy cabinets and make all new cabinets for the
Astro. The one thing I'm not using is the dometic propane fridge--It just doesn't have enough cooling power for Ga. Summers.

I'd like to know where you plan to put your propane tank, fresh water tank, porta-potty and house battery.

I am toying with the idea of getting a junk yard raised roof off an Astro/Safari and mounting it on the Astro with the VW poptop hardware and canvas.

As I get farther into the project, I'll post some drawings and renderings on this site. Please take lots of pictures of your project and post them on this site.

Good luck,

John

[1Gary]

I took off a conversion top from a van I scrap to put on my project van.First off I want to tell you that it is somewhat heavy. It took two of us to lift it off the van. It doesn't have a direct rubber seal either.








That channel in the pictures is screwed with more drywall screws than god intended to be used for anything.The top is sealed/glued to the body. Then a rubber seal is down the center of the channel that covers the screws. For any of the bents needed to go around the top,"V" cuts are made to the side to make the channel bent.




I found out that size of channel is no longer available and the replacement is a thicker harder to work with material.

I think I found out that the screwed/glued top does play a role in the overall structure of the van.When I cut the van to install the top,I'm going to leave the roof bows in place until I have the conversion top screwed down and the glue cured. Then after that,cut out the roof bows at that point. You can see in these pictures how the van shifted by the rear doors which where not like that until I took off the top.







Now if you got yourself into that situation,it would be very hard to get it back to where it was. Also there are wooden shims to help stiffen the top along the cut roof.







Because of the wt,no real rubber seal,and that fact this is major surgery,I suggest you take a very hard look at a conversion involving the Astro conversion tops/canvass pop-ups.I will tell you that I could almost stand straight up with the conversion top alone.

[1Gary]

One thing I wanted to add to this. When I do cut the roof to put the top on Ole Yellar,it won't be with a saws-all. We made templates for the curve cuts and the outside rib is going to be used as a guide for the straight cuts. But it will be made with a plasma cutter for clean straight cuts. I'll probably(sp) temporary weld in "X" braces in the front,middle,and rear for extra insurance it doesn't shift on me.