Today was a day to work on the floor. I started by driving an hour down to my daughter-in-law, Lena’s house to use her planer. I had to plane down some half inch baltic birch plywood strips to use them as spacers under the joists in my floor. That is a lot, so let me un-pack it a little.
The floor of the van has ribs that run down the length (north/south). I am going to use a marine adhesive to glue one inch square aluminum tubes across these ribs to form joists for the floor in my van. Between these joists, I will put one inch thick polystyrene board to serve as insulation in the floor of the van. On top of the aluminum joists will be 3/4″ baltic birch plywood sheets that will serve as the subfloor in the van. It should be very sturdy. Eventually, I’ll put linoleum over the top of the subfloor to finish it.
The problem that I ran into was that the ribs on the outside of the floor are a little shorter than the ribs in the center of the van. A short rib in the floor won’t make good contact with the adhesive and won’t support any weight. So, where that happens, I will insert a spacer so that the aluminum joist can make good contact with the floor of the van. My van design has all my components along the walls of the van. And with all the weight near the walls, it is important that the joists properly support that weight.
The gap from the aluminum joist to the floor (not the shorter rib) is about 0.35″. I had some 1/2″ baltic birch plywood, which wouldn’t quite fit. So, that is why I took a trip to visit Lena. She has a planer in her workshop and we were quickly able to shave down several strips of plywood to the correct height to be spacers. Only took about 15 minutes.
When I got home, I worked with Artie to cut the plywood strips into one inch squares and drill and countersink holes for the screw that will be used to attach the spacer to the aluminum joist. Here is what the finished space looks like.
Then I worked to lay out each of the joists in the van. As I laid them out, I cut them to the correct length, used a sharpie marker to outline where they would be placed on the floor, numbered them, and marked where on the joist needed spacers. As I went through this process, I had to let the van talk to me. The ribs in the floor don’t go al the way through the van, so where there was a break in the ribs, I didn’t want to put a joist. I also wanted joists in certain places. Two joists had to go where I wanted to put L-Track in the floor to mount my bikes. These two joists had to be a certain location, because the L-Track will mount to the joist to give it more strength. I also wanted joists at the very front and very back of the van to minimize stress on the plywood subfloor when people walk into or off of the floor. Finally, I had to determine where the heater for the van was going to go. The heater requires a hole to be drilled in the floor of the van, and I didn’t want a joist to be in the way of that hole.
I had previously measured my bikes for how far apart the L-Track needed to be, so that wasn’t a problem. However, I hadn’t measured out the van for where the heater would go. I knew about where I wanted to put it, but didn’t know if it was feasible. So, I had to crawl under the van and take some measurements to find out the area where I could put a hole in the floor of the van without a beam or gas tank, or other critical component being in the way. I picked th area just below the beam in this picture.
While I was crawling around under the van, I also found where the gasoline line was that I can connect the heater to. It was very convieniently located to where the heater will be installed, so I felt like I got lucky. Here is what the gasoline line connector looks like.
I also marked in the van where that hole will come through and ensured that there wasn’t an aluminum joist in the area. Sometime in the near future, I’ll have to drill a hole up from the bottom of the van through the subfloor to install the heater, but that is for another day.
After taking all these variables into account, I was able to mark out where all the joists would be placed in the van.
Each joist is numbered, its location on the floor marked, and the locations of the spacers identified. The purple sharpie marker seems to work best for me.
That was about all the time I had for the day, and that is a good stopping point. Tomorrow, I’ll prepare the joists by attaching the spacers on each of them. Then I hope to glue down half of the joists to cure overnight….we’ll see.