Thread: AJ's Projects

I haven’t posted much here recently as an unexpected project has taken up most of my spare time for the last 6 months. It did have a few woodwork projects involved so I thought I would share what I have been up to here, even though it’s not all woodwork.

we had thought we were going to buy a new hybrid caravan / camper trailer. After looking at all the options we realised this was not going to work for us. Instead we bought an old Tvan camper trailer and I set about modifying it to suit our needs.

here is what we bought, a 2002 Tvan in original spec.

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here is what we have now.

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the early model Tvans came with a double length bed, I am tall so the first project was woodwork. Extend the bed base which is plywood, I used the domino to make the join making it an easy job.

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no woodwork in the next job. Tvan’s claim to fame is their asymmetric independent MC2 suspension originally designed for the military. Unfortunately ours came with the wrong stud pattern, the wrong wheel offset for the rims we wanted and the shocks and bushes had seen better days. So I modified the cross arms and rebuilt the suspension.

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after removing the cross arms I cut out the stub axles. I took the opportunity to upgrade the stubs from B type bearings to parallel bearings and corrected the offset to suit our needs.

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suspension all rebuilt, new stubs, hubs, brakes, bushes, shocks and springs.

Time for more woodwork. Under the bed is a good storage area. We decided that 3 drawers would make the best use of the space.

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the accessory wiring was terrible so a complete re wire was in order. I added a couple of fans, led lights and USB outlets.

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The next job was a front box made from aluminium. It’s surprising how much can be taken from woodwork and applied to aluminium. Most of the straight cuts were done with the tracksaw, I made mdf templates and routed out other parts. I even used a hand plane to finesse a few edges.

first I mocked it up using CAD ( cardboard aided design )

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it is quite a complex design trying to match in with the unique style of the Tvan.

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the dark grey parts on the trailer got a respray whilst painting the box, along with a lot of trim and bar work painted red.
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in the LHS of the front box I mabe some more plywood drawers for pantry storage.

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we weren’t happy with the original kitchen unit so I made a new unit from plywood.

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So that’s a brief look at my main project over the last 6 months. There was a lot more done than it’s practical to describe here, and as usual a lot more work than anticipated or planned when we started.

Cheers Andrew