Sunday, 21 October 2018

Creating more space for sleeping

The L-shaped bed in the rear provides sleeping space for 2 people - but this is a sleeping for people who do not fancy each other very much... 
So I decided to add some more sleeping space, to build a larger sleeping area, for two people who do like each other very much (I have yet to find someone for this arrangement...) .

And so the new sleeping area will be 1.20 m wide and 1.90m long. It will cover the space where the foldable table is set up. The boards can be stored in the box under the long seat of the L-shaped bench.



The first horizontal support at the read:


The second horizontal support bar at the front:


Both horizontal bars in place:



The foldable board in place:




And everything can be stored underneath the bench:


 

Wednesday, 3 October 2018

Affixing Horizontal Blinds

I like the straight-forward simple look of blinds. They can be turned to let light in/out or block it.

I mounted those blinds at the windows in the "living quarter".











And that is how it looks when the curtains are drawn in addition to the blinds:

 

Monday, 27 August 2018

Cruising on Alpine Passes

I decided that it is time to take the van across the border and spend 2 days driving across mountain passes in the Alps.

First stop was Thusis in Switzerland, south of Chur. A rainy evening. The campground is under trees, nicely shaded during hot summer heat. Now it has gotten a bit colder, but the trees still are nice, providing a good sound dampening from the nearby road, and emitting a nice forest smell.



With the heating on it was quite comfortable inside the van.

Next day through Via Mala across the Splügenpass. Up the mountain goes a nice narrow road, very tight turns, quite challenging for the LDV.  But it drove over it very well. This LDV never had been so high up: 2113m. This was the very first mountain pass crossing of this camper.



On the way down from Splügenpass I had to use the brakes a lot. Engine brake did not help, because the road was quite steep and the vehicle did accelerate downhill, even with the motor in low gear. When I arrived down in the valley, I smelt that the brakes were hot. I touched the wheels, and yes, they were very warm. So I took a break for an hour and let the brakes cool down.

Then driving further across Malojapass and Ofenpass into the Val Mustair. Both passes easy to drive, no challenge there, almost like a motorway.




The next camping site is located at the northern ramp of the Umbrailpass. It began to rain around 16:00 and continued raining the whole evening. I arrived there around 17:30.


Simple dinner in the van - too wet and cold to go anywhere outside.



Then next day the highlight of this weekend: first up the Umbrail Pass, the highest mountain pass of Switzerland at 2503m. Nice narrow road, and very little traffic.





Snow had fallen during the night - there was snow on the sides above 1800m. But the road was clear - the surface sill has stored the summer heat, so any snow was melting away quickly.


Quite lonely on the top of this Umbrailpass, the houses there appear abandoned.


A few meters down from the Umbrailpass-Peak, then up again towards the Stilfser Joch.



Up there at 2760m elevation there is quite a zoo: many tourist stores, restaurants.


These guys prepared my dinner: the highest Bratwurst in Europe!



The LDV is resting after the long uphill climb.
And this would be the downhill slope:


On the drive down I noticed that the LDV exhaust was very cloudy: grey, dark, blueish. And it smelled burnt. This was after a more than 1 hour stop at the Stilfser Joch top. Maybe the motor did not like the high elevation, the low air pressure and therefore low oxygen content, or the low below-freezing temperature. I tried to rev as little as possible, but I also had to monitor the brakes - not too much usage of the brakes, otherwise they would get hot. The smoke was there when I stepped on the gas. So I tried to take this easy too. Quite a balance act, between avoiding hot brakes and avoiding too much smoke.

Once down in the valley the smoky exhaust disappeared. Only one more, at a straight stretch a few miles further down did again the smoke look cloudy, but after that no more cloudy smoke, and the burnt smell was also gone.



Here is the LDV with the Ortler, one of the highest mountain of Italy at 3905m.


Driving further on to the Reschenpass. This seems not to be a real pass in comparison...


And finally across the Fernpass back to Germany.


A nice weekend tour! 7 mountain passes: Spluegen (2113m), Maloja (1815m), Ofenpass (2149m), Umbrailpass (2503m), Stilfserjoch (2760m), Reschenpass (1507m), and Fernpass (1212m). The LDV goes strong. I hope that the smoking exhaust at the Stilfserjoch downhill drive does not indicate any major problem...


Friday, 17 August 2018

At Camping site in Bad Kissingen


Staying two nights at the Knaus Camping Bad Kissingen https://www.knauscamp.de/bad-kissingen.html, for the wedding of my cousin's daughter.
Two other families of our relatives decided to stay on this campground. and in the evening their children (seven of them) decided that they want to celebrate a party in my van - because I have those color-changing LED lights.

And so one of the fathers joined us, and we did have a party, with gummy bears and salted peanuts. And the LED light was set to change through the color cycle.



Sunday, 1 July 2018

Adding a music studio to the van

One of the things I plan to do with my camper is to go to "inspiring nature sites" and try to play / improvise some music. For this I got a Thomann SP-320 keyboard which I am trying to set up somewhere in the camper. I think that the most suitable place would be somewhere in the front, as shown in the picture:


I will need to use a 12V stabilized power supply, connected to the leisure batteries. Also, a laptop computer or a tablet computer will need to be connected, so that I can record MIDI tracks.

--- and here is how this looks a bit later, after I did install a stabilized 12V power supply and connected this to a laptop computer and an external MIDI synth:
https://reinholdsmusic.blogspot.com/2018/07/my-mobile-music-studio.html

Monday, 25 June 2018

Displays


You can never have enough displays... Here is (from left to right): a Windows 10 tablet PC with Google Maps open, a Garmin GPS, and a mobile phone, also with Google Maps. This is well-informed driving.

The dangling cable at the top is from the camera which I had used to capture video and time lapse recordings.

Tuesday, 22 May 2018

Inside Illumination

The living quarter at night:






One can choose the colour in which the room should be illuminated:






Indirect illumination of the luggage tray: