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Hello from Florida!


stanger_missle
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Hello all,

I have been lurking for a bit so I thought I'd finally say hi to everybody. I bought a 2015 XLT Van in March of this year. The van had a little higher miles than I wanted (108k miles) but it was local-ish and seemed to be well maintained. I bought it from an automotive shop that used it for an in-town roadside assistance vehicle. It was very dirty but in good shape and drove well. I paid $8,000 for it.

 

My plan is to clean it up, use it as a daily driver and slowly convert it to a micro camper. I bought this over a pickup since my commute is about 60 miles a day and a truck would kill me in fuel costs. I've already cleaned all the decals and residue off of the exterior. I pulled the entire interior out except the dash and scrubbed everything. It was FILTHY and smelled pretty terrible. When I pulled the carpet out, I discovered the van was infested with cockroaches, which was a nice surprise (yay Florida!). I have all of the interior reinstalled now but had to throw away the rubber cargo mat because it was contaminated with ATF and was moldy on the underside. I bought a Bedrug kit from Amazon for $50 (no way was I paying $200+ for a piece of carpet). It will be a slow moving project.

 

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Edited by stanger_missle
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If roaches & insects are a concern, you could dust with boric acid.  Won't hurt you.  

 

It looks like you had the perfect opportunity to add some Dynamat  

 

I would have gone the cheap route.  Spray foam and carpet tiles.  

 

Looks good.  Good job.

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Welcome, I see you chose the most popular color :-) same as mine.  

 

Nice van, a fair number of miles but shouldn't be too bad as it probably spent a lot of time on the interstate and not stop and go.  I've had good success with diatamiatious earth (Im an engineer so can't spell) for roaches and bugs.  

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Great van and nice start on the conversion. Looking forward to more pictures as you progress. I have spent a long time head scratching in my conversion process trying to keep as much open floor space as possible. Have finally come to a conclusion on the layout. I'd be interested in your discoveries along that line as you work through it. Keep it going and enjoy the journey.

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I bought a 4 pack of Raid bug bombs. I used 3. I probably could of gotten away with just using 2 but I wanted to make damn sure nothing was still moving. Roaches gross me out more than anything.

17 hours ago, Fifty150 said:

If roaches & insects are a concern, you could dust with boric acid.  Won't hurt you.  

 

It looks like you had the perfect opportunity to add some Dynamat  

 

I would have gone the cheap route.  Spray foam and carpet tiles.  

 

Looks good.  Good job.

 

I really wanted to go nuts with soundproofing. I was planning on using Noico 80 mil sheets on the floor, walls and ceiling but I got impatient. Plus it was like my van turned inside out inside my garage:

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I'm still planning on installing soundproofing down the road. This was just practice taking the interior out haha.

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7 hours ago, PhotoAl said:

Welcome, I see you chose the most popular color :-) same as mine.  

 

Nice van, a fair number of miles but shouldn't be too bad as it probably spent a lot of time on the interstate and not stop and go.  I've had good success with diatamiatious earth (Im an engineer so can't spell) for roaches and bugs.  

 

Haha, yeah, I think like 98% of the van versions are white. Although, I did find a really nice 2015 XLT Van in Miami that was dark blue and had the 1.6L Ecoboost with about half the miles of this one. The dealer wanted over $16k for it though. Too rich for my blood.

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7 hours ago, Bill Jackson said:

Great van and nice start on the conversion. Looking forward to more pictures as you progress. I have spent a long time head scratching in my conversion process trying to keep as much open floor space as possible. Have finally come to a conclusion on the layout. I'd be interested in your discoveries along that line as you work through it. Keep it going and enjoy the journey.

I kinda bought this thing with a rough idea in my head that I would convert it to a camper but with no real plan. There are a lot of very nice builds out there but this will be like a 5 year project for me. So it will probably be a cot and some plastic totes for awhile haha.

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14 hours ago, stanger_missle said:

 

Although, I did find a really nice 2015 XLT Van in Miami that was dark blue and had the 1.6L Ecoboost with about half the miles of this one. The dealer wanted over $16k for it though. Too rich for my blood.

 

Since that other one had the 1.6L Ecoboost, it was a SWB instead of LWB - you would have lost roughly a foot in length (I forget the exact amount now). The 1.6L only came in the SWB versions. Good job on the cleanup of your new van! I'm not a carpet fan, but that looks pretty spiffy now, lol.

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