Take it how it is, make it how you want it

[DylanBCS]

Hey Guys!
I've been lurking for a while now and now I'm very happy to finally be contributing to this forum!
So, before I had the van bug I spent a few years building and daily driving a 1993 Jeep Cherokee. I brought the Jeep home while it was bone stock. I wheeled it that way, alot. Then I did the traditional bolt on lift kit thing and then things snowballed from there; lockers, tires, broken parts, and so on, until I ended up with this


35s, dana44/9inch combo out of a 77 pickup, limited slip in the rear, bumpers, and more of the usual Jeep stuff. I had a blast in the Jeep at this point and learned alot about what I wanted in a vehicle and what I wanted out of my outdoor adventures. The culmination of these learnings lead me to feel that Jeep was inadequate for what I wanted to do (plus I kinda wanted to move on to a new project anyway).
So, during this time I was helping a very close friend of mine, and former wheeling buddy, build a tin top Subaru powered Vanagon. This is where I caught the van bug; the craving for long open roads, plenty of room inside for a girlfriend, a dog, some gear and a place to sleep in urban environments, or in unsavory weather! My mind was made up, I knew I wanted a van, and after helping my friend with his, I knew that I did NOT want a VW. I wanted something domestic, something with parts available at every parts store and in every junk yard. I also wanted 4 wheel drive and a manual transmission, but I knew that these wish list items would be harder to acquire.
So after some obsessive craigslist scouring, I stumbled upon a deal that seamed to good to be true (and it was), but I brought it home anyway!

I found this 5.4 equiped 1999 E350 with 150,000 miles for $1,200 in May of this year and have since put 6,000 trouble free miles on her. So, mechanically, very sound. The body is in decent shape despite being a midwest work van. There was some significant rust around 2 of the rear body mounts that I had to cut out and repair (no pictures of this since I didn't have a phone at the time, but I will take some pictures of the repair and post). There is also some rocker panel rust that I'm deal with currently, but I feel like rust repair is a small price to pay for a steal of a van.

Anyway, so far I have done little to the van other than basic maintenance/rust removal. It has been on several camping trips and I have been boondocking in it 3/4 time to get a feel for what I need and what I want to do to it and I plan to build accordingly! I'll give a more in depth view of what I want to do in future posts, but for now I'll leave you with a few more pics! (everyone just wants pictures :ylsmoke

This was the most recent camping trip with just a futon mattress in the back. I took a mildly sketchy forest service road to this spot in a successful effort to convince the lady friend that 4 wheel drive will be a useful upgrade :sombrero:

Sorry for the sideways pic, but this is just to show one of the few upgrades that I've done. I installed some new doors with pop out windows for some natural light and some air flow!

Thank you for reading, until next time

 

[packmule]

Great intro... looking forward to see where you take this. Looks like you have a solid platform to build on. I have a few questions....

1) What did you do with the windowless doors? They're pretty rare and might be easily saleable to another Expo member.
2) Where did you find the doors with the pop-out windows? They're also pretty rare these days. Were the pop-out windows in the doors or did you acquire those separately? I'd love to find some rear pop-outs for my RB passenger van to provide more airflow options while at camp.

If you haven't yet figured out how you want to do a manual trans conversion, check out naterry's great Ute II build with a ZF6 manual. The Ute has a 7.3, so I'm not sure if it's directly applicable to your 5.4, but there's lots of great info there. http://www.expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/112027-The-Ute-II-E350-RB-7-3-ZF6?highlight=Ute

My wife and I just finished a week-long trip cruising up and down 101 in Oregon with a futon in the back of our van. Simple, cheap, easy, and a great way to get miles and time in the van without locking in to anything specific.

 

[ujoint]

Nice price nice van!

 

[DylanBCS]

Packmule, thank you for the words of encouragement. To answer your questions
1) I still have the doors and will be putting them up for sale on here and CL as soon as I figure out how to swap out the locking mechanism so my key works all the way around.
2) I had to scour a few junkyards to get the doors put together. Each door came from a different white cargo van, and the pop out windows came from a conversion van at a different junkyard. It was a lot of running around, but it was well worth the effort and I highly recommend the swap. I think you can still order the window and pop out frame from Ford stealership for less than $100 then you don't have to remove any butyle tape from them

And thank you for recommending Naterry's thread! The Ute II build was what first gave me hope that a manual swap in a 4th gen econoline was possible. I plan on emulating that swap with a gasser zf5! His thread is what actually what lead me to find this forum; double win!

 

[DylanBCS]

Thanks Chris! Your vans are an inspiration

 

[DylanBCS]

So I've busted out of the planing doldrums and am doing my best to get things done in my limited amount of free time (I'm a full time student and I work full time). I've decided that my first priority is rust repair and second is my interior build out. Then once those two are completed I will begin working on the fun stuff :smiley_drive:

So I'm looking at a few rust holes that are worse than I had thought, but not unmanageable


The first picture is of the passenger side right behind the barn doors, and the second is the driver side rocker panel between the wheel wells. I've gone back and forth a lot about what to do about these holes, from forming my own sheet metal and welding that in, to ordering replacement panels and using body panel adhesive. What I've decided on is to take a cordless angle grinder to the Junkyard and just guy out some rust free panels from a foresaken van and use those as my replacement panels! I'll weld those in while the interior is wide open so I can rust proof thoroughly from the inside and outside.
I'm open to any advice on this topic as well!

And I've been up to some other things while I was figuring out what to do about my rust.
So this was my semi blank canvas. The van had been sprayed with a bed liner and there was a makeshift bulkhead put up. This was nice for noise blocking, but the bulkhead limited travel between the front and back.

Now I new that I wanted to insulate the van pretty well and also sound deaden the inside so I won't have to listen to road noise while driving or while boondocking
So my first step for the above was to paint the whole interior of the van with latex paint and Hytech paint additive. My understanding of the paint additive is that it is hollow ceramic beads that, when mixed with paint and applied, provide a small thermal barrier and increase in overall R value.

The white paint definitely brightened things up, but I'm not convinced that it did anything noticable for insulating properties. I'll investigate more, luckily I have 130 square feet of Thinsulate that will go on soon, in addition to some fat mat to reduce all the vibrations :wings:

Also, I'm not sure why my pictures show up sideways. I'll figure that out before next time. Sorry about that, haha