LET THE FUN BEGIN!!! Starting on a new and exciting project. Building an ultimate off-grid tiny house on wheels. It’s a 2014 ProMaster 2500 with 22K miles on it. The van will have a full-size bed, indoor and outdoor shower with hot and cold water, stove/oven combo, Dometic fridge, lots of storage, and so much more. I hope these videos will inspire you guys to build your own van one day. My goal is to post weekly, giving you updates on the progress of the build. Hope you guys enjoy following along. It’s not my typical surfing content but I love doing it and it’s a big part of my life so I thought I would share it here.
All right good morning guys so we’re getting started on a new project this is our 2014 uh 159 inch wheelbase high roof promaster pretty stoked on it i just went up to uh oakland area to come pick this guy up and it’s set up as a passenger carrier which is pretty unique it’s got 22 000 miles on it thing’s a baby and it’s got these really cool seats in it which
I get to pull out should only take a little bit and the ceiling is like this fake leather i’m sure there’s a professional name for it i can’t think of it but that’s what it is and it’s got a dvd player and a big old tv screen there um i’m going to utilize as much of this stuff as i can but i’m probably not going to keep a lot of it obviously these chairs have
To go ah tv yeah probably got to get rid of people don’t use tvs in van life so as many of you guys know i just got back from nazareth and uh spent about a month out there film and surf and getting some cool footage but i’m gonna get back to uh kind of what makes me money and that’s building vans and it’s really fun i love doing vans and traveling in them
So i’m going to take a little break from chasing 12 for a little bit and i’ll be posting videos of uh these van builds i just figured that they’re a big part of my life and i have a lot of fun doing them and i still like uploading videos so if i’m not chasing surf i don’t have videos to post so now i do so i’m going to be posting some of this stuff if you like
It stoked if not that’s fine too i’ll be posting surf too down the road but not right now so like i said this is a 2014 uh dodge promaster and it’s set up as a passenger carrier and these seats are just mint condition and check this out each one of them has a little usb plug each seat has these things it’s awesome and yeah a lot of stuff’s already done so
Like these window bezels are already trimmed and look great and they all have windows i mean look at all these windows there’s one back here too it’s got a little slider back there i’ll be able to utilize windows everywhere even the slider door has a window which is good and bad at the same time because the insulation on this is going to be a little tricky it
Might be a little chillier in in this van but that’s fine we got a diesel heater coming out uh and all the seats have these seat covers on them so underneath the seat is like a brand new seat i already started taking this thing apart this is an inverter with a battery in it and that’s to power the dometic air conditioning unit which is sick now you can see
I already pulled this thing off it’s got an inverter in here it’s a 5 000 watt modified sine wave it’s kind of a cheap inverter um i got another one coming that’s a pure sine inverter which is what you want for uh electronics and stuff i mean this this these work for basic things like a air conditioning unit but as soon as you start putting in uh microwaves or
You know you have to charge your laptop that’s when you want a pure sine wave because the pure sine wave mimics your house uh elec your house’s uh power output or a modified sine wave if you put it on an oscilloscope a pure sine wave is more of a nice gradual dull uh rise and fall in the power band and a modified sine wave is this big square wave they also call
It a square wave too so um it’s cheap gets things done but it’s got to go craigslist coming up i got a little battery too so i can get probably fetch like 50 bucks for that thing it’s like look at the interior on this thing it is just mint no scratches no dings it’s not dirty and crusty like you’d seen like a 100 000 mile vehicle that somebody just didn’t
Really care about i mean they cared for this thing it was just a baby like i said it’s got 22 000 miles on it so okay let’s let’s get to the time lapses and we’ll start yanking these seats out all right so now coming over here to the center console unit this is actually a nice little unit i just was taking it apart to get access to everything but we got to
Get this battery out we got to get the inverter out and it’s all wired down here and the battery on these vans is right here so it’s super easy to get to so i’m just gonna have to unwire all that stuff get that center console out all right now we got the battery all unplugged here there’s these big old double lock cables came down here to the battery and now
Come back here just be able to pull this thing right out and good we got the center console out so we got an inverter here we can sell that for two or three hundred bucks we got a battery that’s about 50 bucks and then we can use some of this cable again let me pop out here we can definitely use this cable for further down in the project here this is double lot
Uh cable this is about four gauge and they got lugs on there i got a whole bunch of lugs coming but yeah the cable here is cable is expensive so that’s nice stoked all right so next on our list here we’ve removed this panel one of those panels right there we’re gonna replace those with wood and we’re gonna put some insulation in there there are a ton of windows
So we’re just going to insulate it as best we can and so yeah now that we’ve got access to that then we’ll do this side afterwards just running some spray foam or some foam board foam board i’ve had a lot of good uh experience with but i’ve heard good stuff about the spray stuff too so i don’t know i’m still on the fence which one i’m gonna use so it’ll be a
Surprise but for now let’s get cutting and duplicate those out of wood and quick pro tip uh i don’t know how many you guys do this but i put masking tape on the surface of my jigsaw here glides so much better over uh plywood and um and it leaves less of a mark i don’t know if you guys ever noticed if you’re running a jigsaw sometimes you’ll have like a little
Track where your jigsaw went along your cut and uh this really reduces that so give it a shot so another good thing about these panels is they make a great template so we’re just going to trace it out and cut it uh the plywood is a birch plywood it’s a three ply with a birch veneer on it i use birch for all of the plywood stuff so if you see anything like that
It’s plywood it’s birch it’s the strongest and most cost effective paints well stains well so if it’s hidden great if it’s not you can paint it it’s great stuff to work with and it doesn’t chip i used a redwood veneer before and that stuff sucked it just chipped and just absorbed paint like crazy so we needed to use primers and so anyways yeah birch get some wow
That turned out great all right well let’s uh let’s see how it fits yeah this turned out really good too has a nice little recess here for the door i marked out some spots here where the probably putting some screws let’s set it up see if it fits is look at that it’s perfect first try oh that’s cool all right well our template worked and uh just gotta screw
It in now i’ll probably leave it open for a little bit because i gotta run some wires but oh of course and i gotta put insulation in there but dude look at that it looks red so this side is obviously going to be it’s going to be the back of the refrigerator and the sink so you’ll see it when you open the sink if you pull the refrigerator off you’ll see that and
Then from here back will be the wall where all your electronics are on sweet all right well that’s it for today’s video uh tomorrow we’re going to be putting those rails on top of the van stay tuned we’ll see you guys in the next one
Transcribed from video
FIRST DAYS OF VAN LIFE BUILD | ProMaster Van Conversion Begins By JacuzziSurfer