Feb 12 2020
Our van still doesn’t look like much but it’s starting to look more and more than a simple cargo van. The attention at this point is beginning to turn toward getting sound deadening (killmat) installed and the majority of the insulation for the wall glued on.
As you can see we already got the insulation on the wheel well. We used a product called Reflectex. The basic tactic for them was to think about it like wrapping a present. This is where it’s definitely best to let your super artistic wife just take over and make this shit look good. We used some aluminum tape like you would use on duct work to keep the reflectex in place.
Since we had such great access to the walls it seemed like a great opportunity to go ahead and purchase and apply some killmat. This stuff is wonderful. There were several trips to the hardware store that were made after this material was added to the walls and the van was SIGNIFICANTLY quieter.
This note is in the instructions that come with the product, but take note that you don’t need or even want to apply this stuff to the entirety of the wall. The way that this product works is by limiting the motion of the metal. If the metal doesn’t move.. it doesn’t make any sound and all you need is a small amount in the center of each “square” in order to drastically reduce the metals ability to vibrate.
Once the killmat is installed we used 1” thick insulation board and some construction adhesive to adhere it to the walls. We didn’t take a ton of time getting these perfect as the plan is to get most of the space covered with the boards and then fill in the gaps with “Great Stuff”.
We also heard that a lot of people neglect to really pay attention to the drafts that can come through the wheel wells. I mentioned previously that we wrapped them in reflectex but as you may or may not know, this stuff isn’t great insulation by itself. However, if you can use it to create dead airspace between two sheets you can pretty quickly ramp up the r-value: There is additional information on this on their website:
So, as you can see we built a really cool box then covered the entire back side (aside from what needs to bolt to the wall in reflectex. This should result in a pretty well insulated wheel well.
While building this piece we had to keep in mind how we’re were going to support the bed frame. This will be a continuing theme for any van builder, especially while you’re in this phase. You need to know how everything needs to interact with each other.
Lets take a quick look at how we chose to support the bed frame. I’ve seen several tactics used including, deploying rivnuts, using aluminum frames and even just purchasing some Ikea furniture and putting it in the van without even securing it to the floor. Here’s what we did.
Now the only thing left to complete the base of the bed frame is to add a board across the top of the vertical supports and then put some 2×4’s across to actually construct the bed. But it’ll be a bit before we get to that step.
So we finally had the original floor out and now it’s time to prepare the surface for the application of floor. During all of our . . .
We knew that this was going to be difficult and decided to start with a relatively easy task of removing the wall paneling as it’s . . .