After meeting another van-er (?) (one of them from far away Canada) out in Moab near Yuma I was able to fully understand his concept of a platform build. This style is where the van is built in two or more layers the first being your "footprint" in which case our footprint will cover much of the floor base or about 8' from the rear doors to just about the side door step well. This seems like a lot of "real estate" to consume at the beginning, but much of this plan gives back a greater amount of storage and a very simple living and set-up for both sleeping area and dining all able to be completed in under two mins or less.
A big part of this type of build is the use of an out-rigger style to the main support frames passing through the center section on the van. This build design will be mostly 1/2 inch and 3/4 inch cabinet grade plywood, our choice is oak facing.
There will be no doors just open spaces that will have a raised framing as an opening to help "contain" items while traveling, we used part of this system in our old van and after thousands of miles it work very well for us.
These photo's show that the frame cut-outs are used to form the out-riggers, an important note to take from these photo's is that the outrigger's are kept back from the plastic side panels to help keep the noise of rubbing down, The 3/4 inch plywood works well for this task, and again no waste!
