Tiller

That's a good idea. I'll have to look at that. I never thought of that. It would be nice when sleeping in the TC to have overhead lights. I'll check that out. Thanks! Tiller

I have the sunglass compartment and the control buttons for the skylight screen up there. BTW: the sunglass compartment looks like crap. The Honda and Acura models have a much nicer and simplistic design for their sunglasses holder. I have thought about putting them up top but was thinking that when wiring up multiple switches, running the wires up in the dash would be easier than up the pillars into the overhead area. Of course it depends on what is being wired. But that was my thought anyway. If it blocks your view have you considered taking it out and and cutting some of it back? You might be able to do a passable job yourself or you might need to cut it and then take it to a shop to have it recovered or otherwise redone.

I settled on the Klymit Static V Recon sleeping pad. The width fit the space right, it got good reviews except for it's R-value and was relatively cheap at $55. Since I would normally use this in the car I wasn't worried about this being directly on the ground. And it can be used for backpacking too but a ground tarp is needed in cooler weather. There is an insulated version of this pad for $100 if anyone is interested in that instead. You might bottom out a bit in these depending on how you sleep and what your weight and shape is. I bottomed out a few times, but primarily when I laid directly on a hip when sleeping on one side or the other. But it was fine for me. If you're around 200 or under you are probably Ok. 215-220 lbs and up will probably not be all that comfortable. I like that it stores small, blows up very easily, (yes, about 10 breaths as claimed). https://www.klymit.com/static-v-recon.html

I spent the past week in VA at a K9 Search & Rescue training seminar. We slept in the TC instead of the cabins. So glad we did! Cabins had multiple people and K9's in them. One little noise and 2-5 dogs barking. Which would get the next cabins dogs going. ? Plus the cabins were often very hot at night as it was unseasonably warm this past week. It took well into the morning for them to cool down on some nights I was told. Having the auto start on the TC was awesome as was the global window up and down. Climb in the back, go to bed and lock the doors, global up the windows, remote auto start the TC and the AC cooled the car down and shuts off. A few nights I woke up and tapped the auto start for some additional cooling. Awesome. While out training I could put the dog up, global up the windows and auto start the car to cool her down. Then global down the windows once she got cooled down a bit. Was wonderful. Here's a couple of pics at night with it in sleeping configuration. (One occupant already in bed).

I've had the LED strip lights for months now, in both blue and white. I just haven't gotten them installed yet. Time.. time.. time... I probably won't screw with headlights at this time. No overpowering reason to spend the money right now. i will wait until a bulb blows out and it needs replacing. Unless for some reason I start having electrical issues and need to lower the overall draw on the system. But I'm not seeing any now. I'd rather spend the money on off-road lights to mount on the roof rack rail and mount the switches on that panel on the dash. I have pulled the panel and found that once it's removed, if I remove the two rear clips from the panel and reinstall it, it is much easier to remove. The fit still seems fine and I'm not getting any additional noise or vibration from having done so. I've got about 1000 miles on it now since I removed the rear two clips and no issues. Once I get the switches in and fully wired, and I don't see a future need to access the panel very often, I'll reinstall the rear clips again.

I'll probably pull that panel in week or two. It might be possible to "modify" and hinge the existing panel so it serves the same purpose. There are some nice dash switches available that I think could be mounted on that panel for easy access by the driver. One of those switched FZ-blocks that Don had posted about would fit in that space I'm sure. It's a short run to the battery for power for it. The wires could be worked down behind the dash maybe. Being able to open that panel easily would be nice for accessing any wiring needs or changes. I'm thinking something along the lines of this, but I'd want maybe even a lower profile. This would be mostly for extras like exterior floodlights, maybe additional interior lights since the stock interior lights pretty much suck.

I wonder if I could order that one part from Europe and if it would be a direct replacement? Assuming of course I order the hinge assembly with it.

Thanks Don!!!

Has anyone removed the dash panel in front of the steering wheel? I understand that in some European models this is actually a small compartment. I'm interested in seeing if I can remove it so I can mount some switches on it and run the wiring down behind the dash. Thanks! Tiller

That's the front window with the electric defrosting?

Going to cal the insurance company today and see about a replacement before the cold weather gets here.

That's sad. I can't say I'm impressed with my dealer at all. After having a bunch of Toyota's the difference between the Toyota and Ford dealerships is night and day. I'm glad they finally got it done. I just don't understand it. I might try another Ford dealership for future service and see if they are any better.

I just noticed a crack in my windshield this weekend. I didn't notice it because it is close to the top behind the black frit at the top. It started from a tiny impact I guess, I can see a small "star" of about 1/4" about two inches from the top. The crack runs to the top of the window. It also runs down behind the where the mirror and sensors attach and then behind my EZ-pass. It's why I didn't see it until yesterday. I'm guessing I need to replace this before running the front window defroster probably. Tiller

As n update to the global windows issue. My dealer FINALLY got the global windows up option to work. It only took three visits to the dealership along with the dealer submitting two tickets to FORD. Along the way they claimed a board was issuing an error had to be replaced so they had to order it. I believe they said it was called the BDU? That accounted for the third visit. Once that was installed they had to reprogram all my keys, (which they didn't realize in advance and it required us making a special trip over to take the other spare keys to them while the TC was there). I love having this feature available now! It only took a year!!!

Thanks Windguy. I still need interior lighting yet and under the floor lighting. Planning on using LED tape underneath. No porta-potty for me in the van. I carry a folding spade in the TC or in my backpack with me if I'm really camping somewhere with no facilities. Otherwise its campground restrooms, roadside travel plazas and truck stops or a fast food joint. I'm rarely in beach areas where I can see it might be hard to find the necessary privacy. In the woods of PA, that's usually not an issue.

Any time! Happy to share. Looking forward to future posts.

You could also try finding a spot for one of these in your van! 2.5 Gallons. You pressurize it with air. The pressure is pretty good! $80.00 https://www.webstaurantstore.com/buckeye-2-5-gallon-water-class-a-fire-extinguisher-rechargeable-untagged-ul-rating-2-a/47250000.html?utm_source=Google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=GoogleShopping&gclid=CjwKCAjwl_PNBRBcEiwA4pplRd2ZczebTiu2azcHusNncBmpr5xOTw3JkMcGBcZv3VxHdrM3pdzXrhoCf_sQAvD_BwE

I test ran my pump on the 12V AUX to test the fittings. Ran it for a bit on it. You shouldn't have any problem with it. I see in your van, panels on the inside of your barn doors. How much space is behind them? The dimensions on the pump are 8.5 x 4.9 x 4.5. So you only need 5". Even if it extends out an inch or two, you can probably fashion a guard around it. For a tank, get a spare tire bracket for the exterior door and mount a 2 gallon jerry can on it. If you really want to go cheap and try something different, you can try PVC pipe. A 4" PVC pipe, will hold approximately .65 gallons for each foot. Mount a 5 foot section of pipe to your roof rack and you have about 3.25 gallons. That's about 25 pounds of weight to the rack. I don't know what the limit is on your vehicle. Being on the roof it will probably always be heated! I would also make sure you either drive with it full or empty. If it's not full, the movement of the water is likely to rip off your rack with the constant starting and stopping of the vehicle. Also, you can use smaller pipe as well. Like two 5' sections of 2" one on each side of the rack. Looking at your van, it might be very easy to slide in a 6' section of 4" pipe on the floor between your boards and the the plastic tubs. That would hold about 3.9 gallons of water for you and could be easily removed once you're home. You'd just have to glue up both ends and drill it out to attach the proper fitting for a connector on top at one end. You'll also need a small vent tube for it as well to let air in. The vent tube needs to be on top of the pipe when in use. Probably opposite the main connector on the pipe. Tiller

The one I have was in stock at Eastern Marine. I'm not far from there. But I believe it is discontinued. But it is now replaced I believe with this one. http://shurflo.com/marine-products/fresh-water-pumps/aqua-king-ii-fresh-water-pumps/164-aqua-king-ii-standard-fresh-water-pump-12-vdc-23-0-gpm The "E" model number (aftermarket), comes with barb fittings (seen in the pump pic you posted), which make it easier to hook up. You won't find white arrows on any of them like in the pic. I used white-out to highlight water direction arrows molded in the plastic. You need to make sure whatever pump you get has an internal bypass. Otherwise at the low volume flow with the mini-reel it constantly shuts on and off. This one won't until you get to really ridiculous low water flow. I didn't pick a pistol grip style as I wanted to minimize it much as possible. The standard home pistol grip one I tried, (from my garden hose), really didn't flow right. I think it's because of the low volume due to the hose reel diameter going into a nozzle meant for a 3/4" hose. You get a pretty good pressure drop. The "Little Big Shot" nozzle is available at Home Depot or Walmart. The 5 gallon collapsible container I use takes about 4-5 min to be emptied if I flow it at the maximum it can go. Plenty of water to bath a dog or two in an emergency. It was funny cause last Sunday was the first time at training after installing this. And we had a young pup find something gross to roll in. We were able to bathe her on site and the handler didn't have to ride an hour in her car with a smelly dog. This is the hose reel I used: http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200658814_200658814 The wiring was straight forward. A red and a black. I ran the red to a switch on my panel. The black to ground. You can see the switch panel here on page 2. The other switches are explained there as well. Let me know if you have any other questions. Tiller

Some interesting ideas. Not opposed to some type CCC style service for non-violent offenders.

It has nothing to do with equipment. Most places can get equipment. We already have access to surplus stuff. Federal fire gear is not all that available. Most of it is used and used hard. Not that much surplus on the firefighting side. It rarely goes obsolete cause its siting in a depot. The fire lobbies are still quite strong but not like they used to be. But that's an outgrowth of the real problem, which is volunteers. We don't have the numbers any more. You are not an effective lobby unless you have the votes. Plus, there are two lobbying interests now, the paid fire unions and the volunteer fire services. Yes we agree on a lot and lobby together a lot. But on personnel issues we differ a lot. The unions want growth and more jobs, i.e. less volunteers. So we do split on some things. And of course the politicians want to walk that line between supporting the unions, volunteers and increasing paid jobs against raising taxes. So nothing will ever happen fast. Volunteers are dying out and America better get ready for it. There are an awful lot of volunteers in Houston, Florida and serving at the numerous forest fires in the west. Keep in mind that while deployed, the forest fighting teams get paid. So do FEMA teams. But back home, many of these folks are volunteers that have trained in forest fire fighting. States in the east rotate teams to the west, usually for 2 week intervals. They get paid when deployed. Not back home. Without volunteers, many of those state teams are finding it harder and harder to have people to fill that "buffer" of Wildland teams. Paid departments and state forestry departments can only provide so many people to go out on deployment on those teams to the west. Those paid people have to be backfilled with part-timers or overtime. Your local service levels can be impacted. As volunteers decrease, it will fall more on those paid people. Taxpayers and state officials are only going to let that assistance rise to a certain level before limiting it or wanting more money to send it. California is supplemented every year with out of state wildland fire fighting teams. Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, we've all sent teams to CA and other western states. That will eventually dry up to a set level as our volunteers drop off in favor of paid departments. Wildland firefighting costs will go up drastically in the years to come as local paid departments demand more $$$ to send their staff out west. The same applies to hurricane and other disaster responses. Most members of the FEMA teams are made up of paid personnel from career fire departments. That number will continue to increase. And that's fine. But the costs of these teams will continue to rise. I don't see an end or fix to this. Eventually there will be almost no volunteers. The training requirements have become tremendous for many departments. The time and effort to maintain equipment increases every year, often due to liability, new regulations, and insurance requirements that keep getting pushed on departments. At the same time, demographics have shifted. People no longer have time to volunteer while working 40-60 hrs a week, often in two-income families that require child-care and household chores to be more evenly split. We've raised kids that don't have the same volunteer spirit or desire, (with exceptions of course). There's a marked shift with the younger generation to renting and not buying homes. With out home ownership they are less connected to their town. More mobile and likely to relocate. Less inclined to get involved in the long term commitments required to get trained and stay trained. And then a move to a new state often invalidates a lots of your certifications and requires you to retest and recertify. Things they are a changing..

There are still some subscription style fire departments around. Not many. Most states have some method of providing some funding to volunteer departments. But it's usually no where near enough to cover salaries for paid departments. And volunteer departments are now often sending bills for responses. Especially for vehicle accident responses where the bills go to the auto insurance. It's only a matter of a few decades until the majority of fire personnel and other first responsders are all paid. Taxpayers will ultimately pay for it, either higher taxes, higher insurance, less service, or a combination of all three.

I can't say I disagree with you. Unfortunately that is not reality in the vast majority of our country. So you might not want to venture to far out of CA. :-) And if you do, stick to the bigger cities. From wiki: (take it for what it is). As of 2014, there are around 1,134,400 firefighters serving in 27,198[1] fire departments nationwide and responding to emergencies from 58,150 fire stations. Of those firefighters, 31% or 346,150 were career firefighters and 69% or 788,250 were volunteers.[2] Keep in mind that career firefighters are concentrated in high population area. Career firefighters represent 15% of all departments but protect approximately two thirds of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, 85% of fire departments are volunteer or mostly volunteer and protect approximately one third of the population. If you are interested, you might find this link interesting: https://apps.usfa.fema.gov/registry/summary You should note that even in California, more then half of your fire departments are considered as mostly or 100% volunteer. My statement earlier was incorrect. But I suspect, that as in the rest of the country, the majority of your population are in the metro areas and mostly covered by paid departments. The number of volunteers are however, drastically dropping. There was something in the area of 1.5 million volunteers just like 10-15 yrs ago.

I don't really know to be honest. I love working with the dogs. I loved fighting fire when I did that. I loved the mental/physical challenge of vehicle accidents/entrapments. I can't say any of the bad stuff really bothered me. I never lost sleep over any of them. Maybe I'm a bit of a sociopath, I don't know. For me its more painful to see the pain of the living then the dead. Trying to work on a child when the parents are crying next to you was the hardest thing for me. As a parent I empathize with them more then I actually do the pain of the child. I can usually do something for the child. Or in a few cases, I knew it was impossible to do anything. I can't do anything to help the parents in those moments. That makes you feel helpless. And I'm not a person that does well with feeling helpless. For the searches though, you really do it to bring closure to families. Yes, you hope to save someone and sometimes you do and that's great. It's awesome. But it doesn't really "balance". There's no reason to be bothered by the deceased person. As we say, they can't get any deader. I've never been bothered by the gruesome side of it. But as a parent I can't imagine not knowing what happened to my son/daughter. Not understanding what happened at the end. And as long as you don't have that body, the parental mind is a terrible thing and it always wants to believe that there is a chance, however tiny. It is very difficult for these people to get through all the stages of grief like other people do, who actually have a body to grieve over. So for me the emotional side that impacts me the most is the family left behind. That's why we do the searches. Fortunately, I'm usually not the family liaison. I could never be a J. J. from Criminal Minds! The real life people that do that have the emotional hits if you ask me. Bodies are just bodies. Their pain and suffering is over. Hope that wasn't too heavy! But honestly, thank you for asking.

Yeah, if you're talking about a full blown FEMA style deployment. If you are talking about injured hunter or hiker in the woods, no. If you're talking about a kid or Alzheimer's patient then no. You don't get those fancy toys unless it's a multiple subject incident or large scene. I do wilderness and suburban. No city work. They don't have woods for the most part. Most searches are lucky to get a communications van or command post sent out. If it gets newsworthy you'll get more resources. 90% of the searches we do are not newsworthy. Many of them are suicidal persons that choose their last spot to be a national, state or local park. The rangers find a car left at a trail head after dark. We have to go figure out where they decided to do themselves in. Most parks departments don't have those kind of support services to start with, including many if not most national parks. I was just on an Alzheimers search a week ago. One command post, a bunch of fire trucks, a couple of ambulances. No K9 services. And definitely no mobile showers!! LOL I drive fire engines myself too and run with two different companies in two different states. Trying to use the booster reel on an engine to hose a dog isn't going to work well. The vast majority of fire departments don't have any mobile showers unless they have a serious hazmat team. And those aren't rolling out to searches. So no, our emergecny management team doesn't have one. In fact, we really don't even have emergency management teams to start with. And if you think we get that kind of equipment at training? That'll be the day. We train EVERY week with the team plus 1-2 other times a week ourselves with other handlers. It's usually during training that you'll get the muddiest and smelliest. And usually when you find the skunks. Never seen a dog skunked during a live search yet. Probably because at live searches it's mostly certified and experienced dogs that are used. Ones that got skunked in training once before and know better now. It's the pups and new dogs that usually get skunked. No one is rolling that kind of equipment to training's. The vast majority of the country is covered by rural and suburban volunteer fire departments, especially east of the Mississippi. California where you are is kind of unique in its mostly fully paid services.