2) Awning Bracket Upgrade
This one should have been pretty minor, but it turned out to be a surprising amount of work.
Ever since I harvested parts from the 1995 LuLu Island/GTRV back on page 3, (11 years ago.... sheesh), I'd been running the pair of "custom" awning brackets that had been fitted to that van. These were nothing more than a pair of 1/8" bits of steel plate bent into an "L" with the lower limb curved slightly to fit the contour of the van's roof:
On the donor van, these were literally just screwed to the van's roof with sheet-metal screws and covered in silicone. As a minor concession to safety, I fabbed some threaded backing plates to at least spread the load a bit.
These brackets mostly worked, and when I switched to an ARB awning in 2016, I was able to re-drill the brackets to
just about get the awning high enough for the "bag" to clear the van's slider door. Things were also tight when opening/closing the passenger door if the awning was tilted downward at all, but I was at the top of the brackets.
Unfortunately, the "back rail" of the ARB mounting scheme is significantly less rigid over a long span versus the original hard-case "Norseman" awning, and so over the next few years it had sagged in the middle, and the outer cover of the ARB would occasionally catch in the slider. An upgrade was needed.
Step 1 was to fab new, taller brackets. I started with plenty of length to spare, and bent these using a combination of a makeshift bending jig and the bench-vise-and-hammer-and-swearing method. After getting things in-place I mocked up a straight edge and trimmed them to a height that solved my woes and also gave me a little margin for the future:
Since these brackets have to sneak out "under" the bulb seal of the pop-top, they need to be as flat as possible, and cannot have any reinforcement to the "L" shape. As a concession to this detail, I made the new brackets a bit wider. More importantly, since sagging over the middle was the original issue, I added a third bracket for the span (and additional backing plates). Please admire the three differently-shaped-curved-Ells and appreciate what a pain in the ass these were.
Because of the contours of the roof, the backing plates were most easily made in strips to fit each roof segment. These were then given a strip of 3M VHB tape and pulled into place with some temporary studs. Once the tape had secured, I could re-fit the headliner without worrying about the plates dropping out of position.
Finally, after the brackets were painted, I cut some rubber sheet gaskets and bolted them down:
Then it was just a matter of fitting new hardware into the ARB mounting track and getting 12 wobbly screws to line up with 12 holes and the awning was mounted:
Now everything hangs straight and has adequate clearance for both the slider and passenger door, no matter what angle the awning is deployed to.