16. The Shower Tray Chronicles.

Showers in vans are a contentious issue. There are people who live in their vans full-time, or simply want to have showers when using it as a camper. This is fine, and if you're one of those people, more power to you.

Then there are the other kind. People who think living in a van is some kind of competition of attrition, as if the more you suffer in your van, you are somehow even more worthy. And that's ridiculous.

I first lived in a van when I was in my 20's in New Zealand. I worked day and night shifts at a Mexican restaurant, and still didn't get paid enough to live anywhere suitable. So I spent a few years first living in a 1960s Commer van, which was so small I could easily fit it into the back of this current one. It was more rust than steel, but it served as shelter for 6 months and 11 days.

Then I sold that and bought a 1940s New Zealand Air Force ambulance, which was much bigger but had no water, power, toilet, or shower. Winters in Wellington are extremely wet, cold, and windy, and I survived a few of them huddled under my blankets while the wind blasted through every crack. It was miserable.

For the record I also went on to own a NSW National Parks & Wildlife Service fire tanker with a flat bed, that I wanted to turn into a camper, but I moved to the Middle East and had to sell it.

Now we have all kinds of neat stuff like roof fans, solar power, diesel heaters, and... showers; and I for one will never look back, despite what some shitty losers on the internet think.

I've built power systems for vans before, I've plumbed them, I've built cabinets, but I've never installed a shower before (which is definitely foreshadowing for what comes next). I saw this on eBay-

...and I thought "What a nice price!"

Of course when I got it, it wasn't matte like the picture, and it also held a secret I should have known about but didn't. These trays are fibreglass, and are cast in a mold, so they are a few mm's thick. Because of this, you can't stand on them as they are, because they'll crack. So what the pros do is they lay down a bed of concrete, press the tray in, and remove any squeeze-out. This works great in houses, but I don't have the tools or experience to manage concrete.

My first (dumb) idea was to try to fill the void underneath with spray foam. This did not work.

I clamped a couple of pieces of ply to the tray after I turned it upside down, and left a gap to spray the expanding foam through. It expanded and expanded, and left huge voids of air. I still don't know why it didn't work, but I do know it was an expensive mistake.

Then I had to scrape it all out again.

Once it was cleaned out I had a closer look at the quality of the tray. It was... bad.

There were holes going through to the gel coat all over it, and the thickness was all over the place. That's what I get for buying a shower tray on eBay. Still, I was determined for this to work, so I formulated another plan.

I decided to use epoxy to fill in the gap, and to save money on epoxy (and to dispose of some workshop scraps) I put some offcuts in the spaces also.

It looks bad, I know. But it doesn't need to look good, it only needs to be strong.

I used an old plant pot as a dam to keep the epoxy out of the drain hole. I stuck it down with gaffer tape, and was amazed that it worked perfectly.

Just to be safe I put some bubble wrap under the drain hole, and checked it periodically with this fancy gadget I had lying around.

After a few minutes I realised a much lower tech alternative was to just cut the bottom off the pot.

I poured the epoxy in layers, just to be safe. You can see I made another dam around the edge with gaffer tape.

No leakage!

In the end I used twice as much epoxy as this. It ran into about $300 all up, so the money I saved on the shower tray, I lost in time and cash spent on epoxy. The shower tray edge along the bottom wasn't straight at all, so I poured past the edge in some places (restrained by the gaffer tape dam), and in other places I was slightly under it. The epoxy self-levelled, and that meant I now knew where to trim away the excess fibreglass along the edge.

This was what I ended up with after 4 layers of epoxy, after I had cut all the gaffer tape away. A couple of the pieces of scrap wood were still proud on the epoxy level, so rather than add more epoxy I used a belt sander to flatten them off, and to sand down any of the fibreglass edges that were proud also.

This took under a minute to do. Ready to put back in the van. I had previously drilled a very small hole next to the chassis, so I could make sure I missed it when drilling the drain hole.

That's it in the top left of the drain hole. 

I bought a cheap set of hole saws specifically for this job. They cut through the floor and subfloor just fine, but when it got to the steel of the van floor it knocked all the teeth right off.

I sent the set back and got a refund, but that didn't help me cut the hole in the floor. I tried my jigsaw, but the blade didn't protrude out far enough. The attachments I bought for my oscillating tool didn't fit. So in the end I just drilled a bunch of holes, and cut between them with aviation shears. Then I got under the van and cleaned up the hole with an angle grinder with a flap disc on it. 

I've never had a project go as badly as this one! Once the cut was cleaned up I sprayed primer on both sides of the hole.

Then I cleaned it up, put the shower tray back down...

...and installed the drain.

After cleaning up the sawdust, it's time to move on to framing the wet room. I'll chuck that in a seperate post. For now the tray feels rock solid, and weighs as much as a small horse. It's such a relief to finally be done with epoxy (I hope), and I can start to build the walls and cabinets. This build is really coming along. It's typical that from the outside you would never know how many days of work and how much money went in to the shower tray- it looks just like it did when I bought it, only more dirty.

See you next time!