Electrical, Start of First Benches

Lots of stuff in progress since last time... nothing finished but some stuff close I hope.

Taped out the floor-plan to check how stuff would look... Apollo came to check it out!  

We re-painted the internal steps.  Top part that used to be under carpet was just bare plywood.

Paint paint paint.

Electricals!

12V woot.  Getting some electrical stuff done so we have a fridge and some lights and such for some early trips.  Also... batteries are so expensive.  I had no idea.

 

Everything arrived!  Mostly.  Some 4AWG missing, plus a bunch of ring terminals and such.

The back of the camper (near the cab) is split into two sections... one for the fridge and one for the batteries.  Above the batteries is a small dry stuff storage area as well.  We built out this back section first so that I could orient the batteries and electricals.

Batteries and battery-to-battery charger lives here... under a small storage cubby under the back row of seats.

Door pops up! 2x 100Wh batteries.  30A charger.  Little left black panel also pops off if needed to take the batteries out.

There is a little cutout to pass cables hidden under the cabinet floor/door, passing to the main electrical area under one of the side benches.

Main electrical stuff... bus bars, fuses, inverter (right of image) and a larger fuse not connected yet that will feed power to the kitchen area.

There is the inverter!

Most of the electrical stuff went fairly smooth.  8AWG ring terminals are annoying to buy since they always seem out of of stock.  The little shunts that came with my meters had no mounting provisions... other than that... sort of OK.  Just a lot of stripping and crimping and trying to figure out where to put stuff. 

Installing into the fuse/inverter area.  This will all be nicely hidden by a bench later.

We have tree meters at the moment... 1 for battery charging, 1 for all the 12V stuff, and 1 for the inverter.  They meter V/A/W/E separately, and will be individually turn-off-able eventually.

It's alive!  Ran the fridge for a bit... works fine.  Tested charging from the truck... also works fine.  Woot.

All the meters will live on an electrical panel thing that is really just another cabinet door.  So three meters, three enable switches for them, and the inverter control pad on the door face.

Start of the electrical panel.

First cut of the electrical panel door was slightly too large.  Without a table saw its sort of difficult to trim off 1/8th inch from a long edge... so rigging some guides here.  Worked out fine in the end.

Since its the same height, I also cut the door for the under bench cabinet that will live right of the electrical cabinet.  Tried out some birch veneer for the edges of the plywood... it looks so amazing.  For open/close of these we are just going with a finger hole that you can pull.  They will be under the seats so I didn't want a handle that would be annoying on the back of a leg or something. 

Electrical Panel and the other cabinet door of this side getting some stain.

Cabinets and Benches

The cabinets got some upholstered backing. 1/2 inch foam cut to internal size, over a 1/4 ply cut to a larger size (1/2 inch around the edge) routed out on the back of the cabinets. Then spray adhesive canvas contoured to the edges. Gives a nice soft back so cams and gear won't bang around too much while driving. The padded back is removable for now. Why is this paragraph formatted differently?  Only blogger knows...

Cabinet backing stackup for #2, and finished #1

We also started to attached the benches on the right side.  These sort of had to be done early, since the electrical control panel lives under them and I need them finished to mount to meters and such.  These benches were our first time trying to apply a brush on polyurethane top coat.  Very hard to get it to look nice... seems there is a learning curve here.

Benches getting attached.

Up Next

Next up... finish top coat on the electrical panel and other door, install both, wire up the electrical panel... and that side should be mostly done! Then I need to figure out what to do about doors over the fridge and the storage above the batteries... some difficult geometry and want to be able to open these up while the kitchen table is there.

Old picture since we didn't travel last weekend... but look at that camper!