9. Now we're getting somewhere.

 Just being honest- at this point everything inside the van looks awful, and that makes me sad. Because there have been so many repairs carried out to the roof fibreglass, and because it's all going to be covered up by cabinets and nice panels eventually, there is bondo smeared halfway up the passenger side, un-sanded fibreglass layers everywhere, and some welding burns/spatter too.

I was going to work on something else today, but I realised I could kill two birds with one stone. The highest parts of the walls/lowest part of the roof still has pockets that need to be filled with Earthwool insulation. This one is easily the tidiest one, because it didn't need any repairs...

...but there are 9 others that will definitely look a lot better after this. I made a little net of painters tape, and sprayed some headliner adhesive on the area behind it:

Then I filled it with Earthwool:

Once the Earthwool was stuck in place, I removed the tape, and added a couple of lines of Selley's Liquid Nails. It looks like this:

It has a holding strength of several tonnes per square metre when dried, so it is a bit overkill for simply holding back some wooly insulation, but it's what I had on hand, so that's what I used. It looks like peanut butter:

Then I added some panels I cut with a jigsaw from parts of the vans original panels that I don't need any more, like the bumpouts in the bunk area, and where there was metal on the sliding door before I installed the window:

While the liquid nails was drying I applied pressure with a big T square and a vacuum cleaner tube:

Modern problems require modern solutions:

Once all 10 of those panels were up, I went around the edges with aluminium tape. It needs to be said that vans are basically impossible to fully insulate unless you put a refrigerated box on the back, so everything I'm doing is to mitigate heat coming in from the outside when it's hot, and heat escaping when it's cold. There are guaranteed to be little gaps here and there, so I have designed my insulation strategy to take advantage of that. The idea is that all of the insulation in the walls has small gaps that allow built up humidity to to rise up and out the big fan in the roof. There is no moisture barrier- the key is airflow. The fact the roof is fibreglass and the body is fully galvanised helps too.

I finished all 10 panels in about 5 hours. Here's what they look like at the end of the day:

They're not a pretty colour or anything, but I'm so relieved to have covered up all of those fibreglass repairs! It might be grey, but at least it all looks tidy.

Next job- wood roof beams to hang the ceiling on.

See you next time!