Kitchen Part 2 - Propane and a Stove

(Mostly just some pictures - see details of the electrical, propane, and water systems here-which-will-exist-soon for more info)

Kitchens!  Part 2.  So everything fit into the camper after initial build (see Part 1).  Propane is mounted externally on the back of the truck, so with the kitchen frame in the camper, we cut out an opening thru the side paneling opposite the external propane box to let us cut needed holes (one for propane, and one for an electrical feed to power the propane cutoff valve.)

Fiberglass!

The external propane box houses a high pressure cutoff valve, a regulator, and some copper tubing for getting everything lined up all nice. We can open and close the valve from inside the camper, and minimize the amount of propane risk inside the living area.

Bits and pieces of the external propane system... should probably do a writeup on that at some point.

The other main part of installing the kitchen was connecting up electrical, and plumbing.  I'll put together a page detailing those systems in a bit as well.

Sadness is working in a hot dark camper on a system that is more complicated than it needed to be but which you designed...

Yellow wires coming in from the side are one 120V feed for the outlets on lower right, and one 12V for the rest of the kitchen items.

Not toooo bad?  All the fiddly bits upper right are the two LED pushbuttons for propane and water pump.

And tada! its installed - ish.  Top needs to be nailed down, which will flush up that overlap.

Kitchen Part 1 - Cabinet Frame and a Sink

We started on the kitchen (well a long time ago... but just getting around posting now...)!  Based around a simple 2 burner stove and sink combo.  Propane is mounted external so it just gets piped in and no need for a propane box.  Water storage is a 7 gal under the cabinet, where a pump, fuse box (for the kitchen area, on a feed from the main battery area), and the furnace sit.

Cutting out some holes for the sink and stove.

The left side of the cabinet has some controls and outlets in it - 120VAC is wired from the inverter in the electrical cabinet on the other side.  There is also a pushbutton for turning on propane, the water pump, and another USB outlet for charging stuff.  Buttons are color coded! Red LED for propane, BLUE for water. Oooo neat.

Fitting up stuff before putting it together/in the truck.  Looks... OK?

The sink above is actually under mounted, but fitted it up on top before actually mounting it.  We went with a Kraus KHU101-14... seemed big enough?  Stove is a Ramblewood GC2-37P which left enough room for the furnace underneath.

Building a kitchen in the living room at Christmas was fun... 

Kitchen fit up just fine in the truck once we carried it out - so we brought it back in to stained and finished.  Part 2... installing it for reals... up next.

Cat Tax

Model Update - Prepping for Storage Cabinet

Updated Model!

In preparation for building our large storage cabinet, I updated the model to both try and get a good build flow for the cabinet itself (fewer unique lengths to cut, screws hidden where possible, etc) and to figure out how the door would work.

Since space is a bit tight, I'm going to try and go with a bifold door... should be interesting to build.

Closed to open

I wanted to check a couple things before building.  First - make sure that when the door is open it leaves as wide an opening as possible.  This means making one of the panels slightly longer than the other, as I'm going to connect the root (right side) if the door with a piano hinge to minimize door gaps when closed.  The left panel ends up about one door thickness longer than the right - almost.

Second - I had to make sure the door would open and close without interfering with the frame.  While opening the overall door width gets bigger before it gets smaller due to the width of the door.  The second from left view above shows the critical position.  I took 1/8 inch off of the left panel, and will route the leading edge with a 3/8" round over... seems to remove interference without leaving too large of a gap when the doors are fully closed.

Not a fan of the router... so this should be fun.

The doors are a bit thick - partly so I could add a place for some coat hangers which would be a little bit inset.  The inner panels are 1/4 inch plywood - I'll route out a channel for them and they'll get captured when I screw the door frame together.  I was going to wallpaper the panel since that seems... fun... but I think I'll just paint them instead.  I might put cork over the right one to give us a message board type thing as well.

Inset the hangers a bit.  Only added these on the left door - the right door will nearly lay flat on the wall when open so no room.

The bottom of the shelf I'll cover with the nice rubber mat stuff that was used on the bottom of the shelf over the batteries.  There is a step in the camper where it hangs over the edge of the truck bed walls - I'm adding a removable panel that will extend that over the full depth of the shelf if needed... or we can remove it.

The front 1/2 of the upper black shelf is removable.

I think I can get away without metal guides for the upper and lower roller guide things.  I'll buy some standard 3/4 inch top guides for both top and bottom, and route out a channel in the upper and lower pieces of the outer door frame.

Door guides!

If it seems like that will be too fragile there is some aluminum channel stock I can get which is about correctly sized... or just buy one of those closet door kits.

The inner two walls which will just be the existing camper siding I might still wallpaperto make it look a bit nicer... sort of not sure but also seems neat.  

Athena wanted adjustable shelves on the inside.  Since one side where the shelves would mount is the camper side, I'm not sure how to do this cleanly (other than some of those metal shelving rail things... but one bump and I think all our shelves would fall down).  So... I'll install the full cabinet before staining and top coating.  We can take it out for a weekend and see where we might want shelves, and then I can uninstall, add a couple discrete shelf options, stain, top coat, and re-install.  

When we satin and top coat this we can also do the door above the storage above the batteries.  I made a quick cover for this but left it bare wood until I had more to stain.

Inside view, with the Helen the SketchUp Lady for scale.  I miss the old dude :(

Small Cabinets Passenger Side

Climbing! Took the camper up to Vedauwoo 

Finished up the cabinet doors for the passenger side and installed them in the camper.  One of these is the electrical panel... super nice to close that out!

Front.  Turns out the cheap switches I got have the little key tab that keeps them oriented slightly inconsistently clocked... which is super lame.  So if you look close the three switches are not totally aligned.  Screen cover plastic to be removed once installed in vehicle.

One again... hardest part was poly finish... Athena is doing a lot of the work on this while I do electrical and other stuff.  Definitely getting better but we both don't quite know how to get a super nice finish.

Back.  Chain will keep it at 90deg when open on the electrical panel only.

I used female wire disconnect things on the meters, will add male ones on the other side. The inline switch for each should save a fraction of a Watt per meter.  I'm assuming that I'll want them all on initially, then as we get more comfortable with the system start turning them off more.  Also I have hopes of building a custom controller to telemeter and control all of this... but not really enough time now so that will need to wait.

Plywood edge with veneer stuff... looks good for a first try.

Since the doors are all plywood, we tried some veneer stripping for the visible edges to make it stain a bit nicer and look better.  Turned out way better than expected - only issue with the edges now is we need to figure out how to get the top coat smooth over the corner. Some painters tape along the under edge did a good job removing most drips but the side is still not as good a finish as it could be.

For all of these we just put top coat on the outer face and the edges, but not the inner face.  Made it easier, and also seems odd to semi-gloss the inside of a cabinet.

Electrical cabinet.

The electrical panel fit was a bit tight - I wanted this.. but did not account for extra height when you open the door due to angle.  It rubs some when opening.  I'm sort of OK with this as we don't plan to open this almost ever.  The other door fits wonderfully... so that is nice.

Still need to fill in screw holes and do some finishing touches.  End of cabinet is open... since the large storage area will close it out when we add that.  

Also hooked up the USB charger on the back benches - seems to work?  Final stuff to do in this area... the inverter remote button came with like a 15  foot cord or something.  I'm running it about 1 foot.  The extra is super lame.  Will want to order a shorter cable for this at some point (probably cheapest since I don't have the crimpers or terminals at home for RJ type connectors.)

And finally... gave another top coat to the gear cabinets, and mounted them to the truck.  While they were out took another picture of the upholstery since I didn't grab one before.

Cabinet backs.

We took the camper up to Vedauwoo for the weekend. Power system worked well, seemed like we didn't get under 90% or more with the fridge running the whole weekend.  We did set the fire alarm off while cooking inside since it was raining... so that was interesting.  Fan should be showing up soon I hope.

Athena cushing

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!

Cabinet Doors - Inlaid Cam Test

Things to spruce up some cabinet doors.

Inlaid old cam lobe test.  Looks ok... did this one without the router, will probably try to remove the bulk of material next time not manually since thats a pain.

Have two small lobes and one big on laying about... will probably use the small ones on the small back cabinets and the large one on the front cabinet if I can get this to look nice.

CAMPER! Cabinets that are almost done.

So we got a camper.  New to us, and almost new for reals... camper and truck setup from a nice local guy.  Camper is an All Terrain Camper Puma model, on top of a regular cab Silverado.   

Camper! City of Rocks.

Its a shell model with solar prewire - so basically the interior walls are finished, it has a bed setup, and wiring is run thru the wall for solar. Otherwise its empty.

Removed some carpeting on the riser things.  Athena taking out carpet staples forever.  Turns out McGuckins sells like a $30 little Japanese tiny nail remover.  We did not get that.

First item was to make some gear storage cabinets... seemed like a relatively easy first project to make sure I still known how to saw stuff.

Test Fit! Looks good. Passenger and Driver are different sizes.

Cabinets are... sort of simple.  For storing cams and gear, so we added some aluminum bars across the top to hand stuff off of.  Then a simple door, padded back, and should be good.

Testing Cams... moved upper bar up an inch or so since it had too much space.  kept other bars in place - new separation seems good.

We opted to stain most of the interior wood, and add a top coat to help protect it.  Tried a spray top coat polyurethane thing... coating is too thin.  Will use a brushed something for benches and other high use stuff.

Staining... and then top coat. 

Cabinets! Still need backing with padding so Cams don't rattle, and dooooors.  Also going to try and inlay a cam lobe into the door so that might be cool if it works.

Model for now. 

Next is finishing cabinets and starting fridge/electrical cabinet.  Turns out respirators for painting are hard to buy now days... so waiting a while on that.  Ordered most of the electrical stuff... should have working 12V system in a couple weeks.