Daphne Mk2 - a few improvements

 If you want to register a vehicle in the UK as a "motor caravan" - which is The Law's term for what we've tried to create, you have to meet these design criteria:

A door that provides access to the living accommodation.
A bed, which has a minimum length of 1800mm or 6 feet. This can be converted from seats used
 for other purposes during the day but must be permanently fixed within the body of the vehicle.
A water storage tank or container on, or in, the vehicle.
A seating and dining area, permanently attached to the vehicle. The table may be detachable but
must have some permanent means of attachment to the vehicle. It is not good enough to have a
loose table.
A permanently fixed means of storage,
A cupboard, locker or wardrobe.
A permanently fixed cooking facility within the vehicle, powered by gas or electricity.
At least one window on the side of the accommodation.
If the vehicle has all of these features present, permanently fixed and installed properly......then it's legally a "motor caravan". If you're really interested, the full brief is here.

 So, job done, then! Perhaps the DVLA might raise an eyebrow or two at our interpretation of the rules, but as far as we can see, everything's there that should be. However, lets be honest, the limitations of the back of a 110 make it more akin to Backpacking-on-Wheels than having a Home-on-Wheels. You can't stand up in it, you can't really sit comfortably in it, there's no loo, heater or satellite TV but there's plenty of condensation, cramp and clutter....well, it doesn't have to be that way.....

There's not a lot that can be done about the roof height unless you cut it off and make it into a "pop-top".

There are a lot of these around and very smart they are too, but they come at quite a price. They also mean that the roof rack can only be used for light items, if at all - certainly not for carrying 4 kayaks at 20+kgs each. Some of those I've seen don't give a full 6 feet of bed space either, so the taller folk amongst us will still have to sleep "downstairs" and have our faces stepped on in the middle of the night. Bit like being in a bottom bunk in a submarine's bedroom. We briefly toyed with the idea of converting a Landrover military ambulance, but apart from the initial cost and lack of provenance, the ones we've seen seem very top heavy, rock around a lot so not really suited to Moroccan pistes and very difficult to use as a boat trolley due to the extra height. That standing room is tempting, though, not to mention the space for a massive beer fridge.
 

Not practical...but I still really want one!

As far as the other downsides go, we decided that while the solutions may not be to everyone's taste or budget, we could overcome them. The design philosophy (DP) was always to make each item do at least 2 jobs, otherwise it wasn't going to find a home in Daphne.

So, basics first - "What do you do for a loo?"was one of the first questions we'd be asked. Our first attempt was a Bog-In-A-Box (That's what it said on it, I think), basically a flat-pack cardboard box with a large hole in one side and a supply of biodegradeable plastic liners. These no longer appear in a Google search and I can guess why - 1. don't get the cardboard damp or it won't hold your weight (or anything else 😞) and 2. the bags will auto-degrade to a point where they won't hold water - to use a nautical term - nor anything else either. Only you won't be able to tell that the bag has reached the point of imminent failure until after you've used it....Good job we had that rubber floor, eh? The second attempt was a proper PortaPotti. We got a good lightweight one from Germany and managed to find room for it next to the coolbox or instead of the cubby box.

This didn't get the chef/co-pilot/navigator's Seal of Approval though. Having it as an armrest/alternative tabletop when cooking didn't appeal, somehow. The chemicals used in it are heavy and the noise of a prepared cistern  -  not to mention any contents -slopping around while we drove would tend to put us off cooking anyway, particularly if anything spilled out. A roll-over would be even more unpleasant...All in all, and compared to a shovel, a waste of space. We carried it once, used it never, flogged it after a year. And - apart from the Alternative Table idea, it didn't meet the DP, so out it went....
To be replaced by one of these. Weighs less than a kilo, stows away easily and fulfils the DP - it can be used as a stool (eh?) as well. It's compact and easy enough to set up inside and, with the window blinds fitted, provides for this basic need pretty well under "public" conditions. The bags don't crumble away to nothing after a few weeks in storage, either, which is reassuring, and there are no chemicals involved.

Heating? Get a Webasto! Well, when our numbers come up on the Lottery we'll consider it, but until then the cooker does a good job. I can hear the howls of protest already. No, we haven't poisoned ourselves with carbon monoxide yet but yes, it's a major consideration. Luckily the gaps around the doors, a well-known Defender design feature, means that ventilation is always adequate. However, we also installed an extractor fan made from an old computer CPU fan (12volts) to deal with fumes and cooking smells, steam etc.

We made a plate that filled the gap left when you open a Defender rear window to the first"click", cut a hole in it and bolted the fan in place. Then unbolted it and turned it around so that it would suck, not blow. I suppose I could've just swapped the power leads around but I'm not that clever with 'lectrikery. A small swing-aside plate on the back sealed it off when not needed, and a little shroud kept the rain off it. Worked a treat.
A Webasto or Ebersbacher heater would be good, but to be honest the noise they make cutting in and out all night is a bit annoying, apparently, and anyway we've slept comfortably enough even in a Scottish winter with a decent sleeping bag and mat. Getting up in the morning could be a challenge though...but of course the cooker/heater is only an arm's length away. We can make tea in bed without getting out of it. Luxury.
We bought a small fan heater that'd run off a campsite power outlet without tripping the CBs and we have used it occasionally. Not sure that it's really worth the space it takes up though.

Entertainment? Not really an issue for us as the view from the campsite is usually interesting enough. A laptop DVD gives us something to watch if we need a distraction but we've found that after a long day, a good meal and a glass or two we're ready to sleep rather than go to the movies. Music, on the other hand, is always welcome and we carried our preferred sounds on MP4 and laptop. Moroccan music is fine in the souk, but otherwise the radio didn't really provide what we wanted in some places we've been. In some parts of Scotland we go to, all you'll get is static anyway. We never really got around to doing a proper job of sorting this out though, until Willoughby came along (more on this later, obviously). We had some little portable speakers but these backpacker's solutions needed to be improved. We sometimes used Daphne's onboard CD player etc if we needed some decent volume, but this meant having the main battery switched on. I was always wary of doing that for more than a short time.

Condensation. Get rid of the moisture, you get rid of the problem, so see above. Actually, just breathing at night created a damp atmosphere and the occasional drip from anything metal overhead. We took the headlinings out at the very start of the conversion and lined them with camping mat closed cell foam so this stopped the cold bridge of the roof struts, but everything else that got cold got a thin sheen of condensation on it. Dapne's sunroof was generally left open a crack providing it wasn't raining and the windows were all covered with insulating foil or left open but with midge nets over them. In the end we suffered no more than when we slept in the Oz tent (see later post on tents etc), roof tent or when backpacking. I've never slept in a caravan so I can't compare the experience with that, but presumably the extra volume of a caravan reduces the problem? Dunno, and a moot point. We've got the space we've got and we'll deal with it.

Cramp. Get shorter legs? In fact the legroom wasn't a problem really, although the only way I could get really comfortable was to sit with my back to the door and stretch out. The biggest difficulty with the seating was being able to lean forward at the right angle or far enough to attend to the cookery or wash in the sink. Hard to describe and imagine, perhaps, until you've tried to do both at arm's length because there's no room to stand and get on top -  literally - of what you're trying to do. Most folk do both while standing, I think. We took the sink out and moved the whole business of washing to the back door (see next post). The prototype sink was nothing more than a large dog bowl but I made the mistake of plumbing it in. This meant that to fill it we had to bring the water container -and up to 10 litres of H2O -  to the sink, and it would've been much easier to do it the other way around. Using it to wash face and body was awkward, too. I like to get my face over the bowl when I wash it, and this couldn't be done without assuming some contorted crouched position. It did take quite a bit of work to fit it in though, and I was otherwise quite pleased with the result. However, in the end another unforeseen factor decided the issue....

The cooker. The original stove had an inlet on the righthand side and this wasn't moveable. This meant that in order to get a reasonably short run of hose from the gas bottle, the latter item had to be kept in the cupboard under the sink.I designed the space to fit a 904 Camping Gaz cylinder. Then they stopped making them. The next closest size is the 907. It wouldn't fit in the space, being 3 cm too tall. This meant the bottle had to be moved somewhere else and the only place I could find to put it without tearing everything else apart was under the offside passenger seat. This left the bottom of the sink and the waste pipe etc taking up a lot of  what could now be empty, ie useful, space in a large cupboard. So we moved it.

The gas bottle should really be in a "ventilated compartment" but the gaps under the door probably do a reasonable job of that. The yellow thing with the hose is our pump-up shower...but not for long, as you'll see.

The bottle is held by a Quickfist clamp that is bolted to the seat support at the back and the vertical hinged support at the front. This keeps the whole arrangement pretty secure without too much difficulty in removing it as the support leg folds upwards out of the way.

 This view shows all the mattress supports in place. They were made from quite thick blockboard, because that's what I had left over from making some wine racks - hence all the holes. They didn't need to be this heavy. The 2 battens fit under the coolbox and help to stop it sliding about .

The "bedboards" sit on small battens on a bulkhead piece that runs the full width of the cab at wheelarch height. The nearest board you can see here is held up by a hinged leg described already. The centre and nearside boards are supported by storage boxes and prevented from moving forward by the seat backs. All lift out but they don't have any other use...DP not met on this occasion so we need to do something about this when we do Daphne Mk3.

Note the strap that stops the storage bin lids from jumping up when we go Bumpy. The clips on the shelf hold an LED striplight for the hobs.

The long reach to the cooker was solved by mounting the whole thing on a pair of drawer runners. This allowed it to be pulled forward far enough to make cooking more pleasant, and the extractor fan actually works and quietly too. If we'd worked out this modification a bit earlier we wouldn't have melted the light!A short length of wood at the back stops the runners from sliding backwards since they don't lock.

Extra storage is provided by the shelf that hooks to the channel above the windows but we had to provide a number of bungee loops on it to keep (light) things in place. There's a bungee net across the roof that lets us air the bedding during the day while keeping it out of the way (but not dust free!).

 

 Here's what happens if the kitchen storage isn't fastened down off-road. We thought about catches, clips, bolts or some other way of holding it all together, but opted for the simplicity of a strap in the end. This allowed us to use the bin lids as trays for reading, writing this blog or for eating (DP👍). The gap at the near end is to let me get at the housekeeping stuff - brush, head torches, loo paper and anything else that we didn't want to go digging for when loaded up. This was all kept at the end of the bin.

 .

Under the nearside and centre bedboards are two "tall" Wolf boxes. We picked these up at the Adventure Overland show and have never seen 'em since. A pity, because they are exactly the right height to support the bedboards in line with the tops of the storage bins/seat. The little bit of wood under the front edge is a batten that gets the box level and "square" to everything else - a Defender has some very odd angles in it.

 - and in the nearside box is one of these gadgets.....

This photo will appear again in"Daphne Mk3" as the table was the result of doing a design re-think of the single-function bedboards. Everything must do at least 2 jobs....

A Cadac grill-cum-BBQ. These really are excellent bits of gear. We've cooked everything from pizza to roast chicken (with all the trimmings) on this and it's great. In fact if we're away from the Midgies it's our preferred method of cooking. We only used the on-board facilities in Morocco, for example, if it was too windy (sand in the stew? No thanks) or cold. The downsides? It needs watching or shelter if it's breezy as the flame tends to blow out and the grill pan can be a pain to clean for those of us spoiled by non-stick cookware. We've just (Mar 2017) bought a non-stick liner for it - we'll review it once we've had the chance to use it.

Then there's the liquids. Refreshments, that is. We tried to do this on a budget at first. Daphne Mk1 had little more than the coolbags available at any High Street Store. These might be fine for taking sarnies to work or bringing the frozen peas home, but useless for our purposes. We bought a very cool-looking  - sorry - box clad in aluminium that ran off 12v and was advertised as being able to keep things cool down to "ambient -23 degrees C". It didn't/couldn't. Not only that, it was power hungry and packed up completely one year and a week after we'd bought it. This was, of course, one week after the warranty ran out.

A pity. It held such promise, not to mention plenty of wine and beer and provided guest seating. Our next attempt at keeping the essentials cool was one of these:

I've disguised this one a little as, to be fair, it did what it said it would do. The problem with it was that it needed a constant "re-chill" with ice. Now, in the wilds of Surrey that wouldn't be a problem but where we often -and planned to - find ourselves, it Really Wouldn't Do. We used ice packs that are normally used for keeping medical stores cold, so quite efficient and they would stay frozen for 24 hours in the box provided it wasn't opened. Bit tricky, that last bit, considering why you'd buy one. Once they'd defrosted they would take a good 8 hours to refreeze. Some campsites (where else could you do this?) would be quite happy to let us drop our "slabs" into their freezer overnight but others wanted to charge 5 euros each for the facility. At those prices, we drank a lot of warm wine, sadly.
The ally box was useless after it broke down and the Ice Box we sold on when Daphne was being reinvented to Mk3 standard. In the end, we had to spend what for us is serious money to resolve the problem. Buy cheap and buy twice....or 3 times, in our case. Ho Hum.

And that brings us on to the proper way to power the fridge. We had a leisure (auxiliary) battery but it wouldn't fit inside the normal Defender battery box unless I replaced the huge starter battery that was already in there. The solution was to build a box on the floor in front of the centre seat since this was never fitted, and make it the right size that it would support the bedboards. After a failed attempt using a relay recommended by my local caravan shop, we bought one of these:

A Voltage Sensing Relay together with all the bits of cable, fuses and connectors to wire it all in properly. This took a while as I didn't want to make any expensive sparkly mistakes but also make the system easy to maintain and as I'd inevitably find that I'd done something wrong, easy to fix when it broke.




Most systems like this are built into the battery box but, as we knew we'd be changing the seats for ones that didn't have a removable seat cushion we wouldn't have easy access to an arrangement like that. This is what we ended up with:

 We built a small box into the side of the battery compartment and reinforced it with angle. Open at the top and bottom, the cabling was easy to route and modify and the fuses were all easy to get at. We protected the system with two big bar fuses before and after the VSR and then led the output through a fuse box to the back of the truck. A cheap "battery condition monitor" from Aldi was hooked up and let us see how the aux battery was doing and check that the VSR was working correctly. Some of these let you know with a loud "clunk" that they've woken up, but the one we chose doesn't make any discernable noise at a volume audible in a Defender, anyway, so we needed a means of checking it was working. This turned out to be quite useful....The cover was held on by velcro and had a circuit diagram stuck to it as I'd inevitably forget what wires did what. One potential downside to this arrangement would be the result of prolonged wading in water that rose above the door sills, but I think we'd have more important things to deal with at that point - like breaking out the lifejackets, perhaps.

Since I'd got the saw out, I did the same on the driver's side and made an alternative access to the box under the seat. Otherwise the space wouldn't be useable with the new seats...

 We haven't really talked about the sleeping arrangements in detail yet as these would depend on where we were, whether I was solo, the outside temperature and weather and if we were intending to be static or travelling. We'll cover these options later but enough at the moment to say we've used the inside space as designed and an Oztent, a Decathlon pop-up tent and two different sorts of roof tent and they all have their pros and cons. Next instalment: Daphne Mk3.