Still trying to get it right...Daphne Mk3!

This project has become a lesson in Getting Things Wrong. Getting It Right has followed from the mistakes, but it would've been better not to make the mistakes in the first place. And cheaper, too. Take the fridge as an example. We've gone from freezer bag to electric cooler to icebox and none of them worked for us. The electric box was a total loss and we recouped about 60% on the icebox, so the next attempt had to work, which meant spending a lot more than our original budget. After the usual weeks of market research and scanning the reviews, we opted for one of these:

This is the Waeco Coolfreeze CDF25. We also bought the transformer that allows an automatic switchover from 12v to 220/240v so we can pre-chill it or run it from site electricity. This combination cost more than we'd originally intended to spend but it actually works like you'd expect a fridge to work, and it'll do a pretty good job of freezing stuff too. In fact, if we write a list of Pros and Cons, one of the Cons is that the temperature selector doesn't have much travel (you can just see it on the far edge - the back) - it's a tiny slider, so the difference between perfect Chardonnay and a wine-flavoured icepop is about 3mm. Once used to it, though, it's very good and takes up less room than the other - unsuccessful - options. It's the same width as the kitchen unit so doesn't get in the way of the sleeping plan. The lid opens upwards, though, and because we wanted to fix it along the fore-aft axis and against the OS door this made it very awkward to open..

"Right, that's the essentials sorted, now what are we going to eat?"

The fridge support has been altered a little to make it easier to remove.

You can also see here the "working prototype" - upside down-  of the camping table-cum-bedboard discussed later in this post.

 ...so we made a sliding support plate for it similar to the cooker but using heavy duty industrial drawer runners. This allows it to be pulled to the centre of the vehicle and makes it possible to lift the lid and rummage through the contents without having to half-crouch or need 3 hands. It can also be accessed with the OSR door open which makes it easy to put the groceries etc into it. When the lid's raised it's held open by the bungee net above it. Another "con" perhaps, the lid. It's designed to be lifted right off once opened to about 80 degrees; this means that it often comes off when you didn't mean it to and it's a bit of a faff to re-engage it; we never found a fix for this.Two bits of ally angle keep the fridge in place laterally and the sliding tray locks with a bolt.  A webbing strap passed from front to back over the lid holds everything secure and is tensioned with a cambuckle. We found we needed to build a "bridge" over the fridge controls or the tensioned strap would bear on these. It only needed a tiny amount of unplanned movement to convert tonight's steak dinner into tomorrow night's when we found it frozen solid. The transformer goes underneath behind the gas bottle.

These drawer runners are the "double slide" type which allows the tray to move twice as far.

We now decided to get rid of the HD bedboards, even though they were capable of being used as bridging ladders! Far too heavy for the job they did. In their place we substituted a piece of 12mm ply, suitably stiffened. This was our new table and with fold-down legs made from telescopic walking poles it hooked to the rock sliders. After a little more experimentation we altered it a little more and it became like this:

The support legs became one leg but a little more robust - the lower bit of a hospital crutch - while the other end was supported by the tube we use for extending the wheelbrace. Eventually we arranged a system where this could be plugged into a piece of correct diameter tube welded to the bottom of the roofrack ladder or strapped to the rock sliders.
This gave us several ways of setting it up depending how much shelter we needed. It was, though, still quite heavy for the job it was required to do so we carried on developing the idea.

Eventually, and for our second Morocco trip we combined the solar panel cover - yet to be discussed- with the table, so right to the end we were still improving/adapting or otherwise messing about trying to find the ideal solutions.

At about year 3 of our ownership we visited the Adventure Overland Show at Stratford. This was mainly to see how other people had solved the same problems that we were working on but also, lets be honest, to see what Landrover toys there were available that we could convince ourselves we needed. The show runs over 3 days and is well worthwhile for the reasons we went but also for the number and variety of guest speakers who run seminars or just chat. Remember that up 'til now, Daphne was a weekend kayak transporter that provided a refuge from annoying bugs and for 2 weeks in the summer had been a base for a camping holiday in France. We decided to sit in on a talk by a chap from Canada called James Davis.

This might become a picture of Mr Davis and his interesting car, if I can get his permission to use it.

We'd seen his Landrover "cabriolet" outside, complete with Dulux pink paint job, and he seemed like an interesting guy. He talked about how he'd gone with a bunch of friends and explored the Rekkam plateau in Morocco....by the time he'd finished his slideshow, we were hooked. Morocco. Let's go there. From that moment, everything we did for and to Daphne had one aim  - a solo trip to the Sahara. We left the room with a bigger shopping list than we'd gone in with, in our minds at least. We went straight round to the trade stands....

....and bought some of these:

These are Wolf boxes. They stack together, are very robust and can be used as seats, hop-ups, and bed bases if you're prepared to do a little carpentry to modify the then existing arrangements:

 As you can see they were exactly the right size once we'd raised the side bins by about 2cm - a strip of wood under each long edge did that easily. This gave us more storage and allowed us to get rid of the shower-slat floor. We now had a flat sleeping platform which could be used as the bottom layer of a load stack as the boxes interlock with each other. They aren't waterproof like the previous boxes but they are a lot stronger. Cons? ("Oh, you're soooo critical") - they aren't transparent so need labels if you don't want to spend all day searching for your spare socks, and the little clips that lock the lids on can be a pain to engage and can be easily broken unless you take care. We bought some spares in metal but, to be fair, we haven't needed to use them but the design weakness is there.

Given that we'd now interfered with the geometry of the kitchen unit by making it higher, the whole lot needed redesigning since all the little corners and angles that were critical to keeping the structure stable by wedging it in place didn't work any more. In short, we'd messed up a lot of things by improving one. It wasn't exactly "back to the drawing board", but in working out the way to fix what we'd just screwed up, we could get rid of the useless sink and re-invent some other things that'd not worked as well as we'd thought.
We started with the kitchen storage. I'd thought - not being the chef - that the floor level bins and the spaces under the cooker and the the sink would be adequate. I was, ahem, advised that this was not the case. Not only was more space required, it had to be in better places and easier to access.

We still needed a sink, but in a more useful place, which turned out to be hanging off the back door...

 First, we just did this. Quick and simple, and like most things Quick And Simple, it didn't work. The bowl protruded too far and with the new Wolf boxes inside, the door wouldn't close.
This was a pity, because I put a lot of effort into making this into a proper "stainless steel" kitchen sink (OK, polished ally, but it still looks good, eh?) and broke 2 jigsaw blades doing it, All this was done before we bought the boxes....One step forward, two steps back.

So we redesigned - again - and finished up with this:

We got rid of the cardboard-and-vinyl trim and replaced it with a sheet of aluminium rescued from the bin at work, hinged a flap off it and cut a hole for the sink, which is now a collapsible plastic/rubber bowl. This allows it to fit neatly into the space at the end of the boxes. We might've got away without the bother of cutting the hole, but it gives a nice solid anti-spill place for the bowl and brings the top of it down to a good height for all sorts of uses....

We moved the first aid kit to the back door as we reckoned that to have to go searching for it inside defeats the object of having it. Likewise one of the fire extinguishers. The security grill for the window was made of the stuff used to make chicken cages. The odd bit of welding - my first project with the MIG - and some P-clips and the window is as secure as it can be without spending a lot of money. The cost of commercial grilles is ridiculous given that if someone really wants to get in they won't stop 'em for long, so these admittedly flimsy alternatives might at least discourage casual glassbreakers - the true nature of the thing can't be seen from outside. It's also a really useful place to peg up the washing. I tried the same thing on the side windows but these had to be on the outside and so a lot stronger. In the skip outside work was an old mattress base which when cut in half happened to be just the right dimensions.....

and with a bit of cunning the mounting points could be hidden. The grille was bolted on using anti-tamper fixings and some "streamlining" added to the square ends just for aesthetics. Once fitted I tried hard to pull these off and couldn't so, short of bolt cutters and a lot of time we reckoned these were at least as good for keeping the Undesirables out as the commercial alternatives.

The storage problem was less easy to fix. Obviously a more vertical arrangement was necessary but building cupboards was going to be difficult given that the whole unit was going to flex. I could see doors either jamming or flying open, turning Dapne's back end into carnage. Luckily I had these in the back of the shed:

These were delivered to an aircraft I took into a south coast of England airport one lunchtime many years ago. The local handling agent used them to deliver our sandwiches and didn't want them back. Some folk might recognise their origin. They kicked around the hangar for a few months before I used them as garage toolboxes. Although they were a little too deep to be ideal, they're very light, well made with secure door closures and internal ribs that allow shelves to be adjusted. Too good to ignore for the project, and provided extra shelf space on top as well.

So this is pretty much the final version of the kitchen. We've hidden the main water container away in the aft cupboard and added a magnetic tool holder to the edge of the cooker to keep utensils off the (dusty) flat bits. The extractor fan with cover is above the cooker. The flap/door to the middle-level cupboard has been redesigned to fold out and lock into a double-sized table which is also removeable and can be used like this:

...which gives even more flat bits for the chef to cover with stuff.

So, that's the interior mods covered and is how Daphne was when we sold her last year. Now we'll move on to the outside and show you what we did about tents, awnings, roofracks and all the rest of the clobber that we (thought) we needed for our Saharan adventure.....