From: Patrick Jankowiak (eccm@swbell.net)
Date: Sun Jun 08 2003 - 17:57:43 PDT
A shop van is an ideal conversion. The deck is wood planks over steel,
so you can drill and cut easily. The inside is steel. The M109 also
has windows, a 4' wide double door in the back which has unequal width
halves, and a minimal installation of 24V and 120V electrical wiring.
Some people have said they have put an air conditioner in the front
window, but I have not seen this and I don't know how it would fit
with the truck's cab top. One thing to beware of is rust. The steel
van body has wood inside. Water gets in the top, and saturates and
rots the wood, and ends up in the floor, where it rusts through.
Several of the ones I looked at, had a real rust problem below the
deck, so bad that it was rusted through and the wood was rotted. I can
only imagine the rest of the insides of the walls was bad as well. The
van body will give you more flexibility as to where to mount heavy
items to the walls, since the walls have wood inside. The shop van
body won't be very airtight, so condensation is not usually a problem
inside.
This is opposed to some shelters, where you have the shelter's floor,
and then space underneather due to the skids, then the tough steel bed
of the truck. Shelters have thin 1/8" aluminum skins over a 3/16" wall
square tubing skeleton and are filled with 2" or so of foam insulation
between the inner and outer walls. On a shelter, there are definite
places where you should and ahould not install blind nuts for
mounting. Shelters are more energy efficient but are tightly sealed
and will 'sweat' on the inside.
At purchase time, I would have preferred an M109 to my m35 with
shelter, but I took what was available. Now I look back on this and
realize that should my M35 ever die to a degree that it would be
cheaper to purchase another truck, I can just disconnect a few
electrical cables, and lift the now-customized shelter off, onto a new
truck. I now prefer the M35+shelter over the shop van actually.
just my 0.02
Ryan Gill wrote:
>
> Who has a 2.5 ton or 5 ton shop van? I'm starting to lean towards
> that as my Military Truck armored car transport. I'll have to get a
> trailer, but that's been a plan for a while now. Are the shop vans in
> the 2.5 ton range, able to only tow 8000 lbs because of the weight of
> the van body on the back? What's the ease of converting one to a
> camper section?
> --
> --
> Ryan Gill rmgill@SPAMmindspring.com
> ----------------------------------------------------------
> I speak not for CNN, nor they for me.
> But I do work there and still like the company.
> ----------------------------------------------------------
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> |s| |s| |s| |s| |x| |x|
> '60 Daimler Ferret '42 Daimler Dingo '42 Humber MkIV (1/2)
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.4 : Sat May 07 2005 - 20:21:43 PDT