Step Inside the Ultimate Ambulance Conversion in a 1999 F Series Ambulance!

when I bought this truck it was completely an ambulance they hadn't changed anything so one of the first things I needed to do was paint the truck because uh it looked a little too ambulancy for Encinitas I actually painted it with a raptor liner and this is a tinted gray Raptor liner and then I ran the same thing down here but in black and the reason I did that is because I really wanted to use this truck off-road and if anyone has gone down Trails they know of the desert pin striping oh yes very familiar you can kind of see on the Windows there's lines but no brush has actually scratched through this stuff I've been really happy with it was it hard to apply No I um all you need is an air compressor it comes with a gun and it's so simple to shoot oh wow and so how long did it take you um the painting didn't take long the sanding took a long time that's what I've heard the prep work right yep I had a little orbital sander so that made it go faster but yeah it's a lot of prep work all right this is the garage and like I've said tools is everything I had a breakdown where I lost four lug studs and I almost had a tire come off oh wow yeah but I have the tools to be able to replace it on the side of the road and um that brings me to the next point is make sure you have something with you to go and a bicycle or for me it's like keep my dirt bike with me and it's street legal and just keep it on this rack but I was able to go and get the lug studs and replace it all on the side of the road because I had the dirt bike it's a nice rack on top uh yeah do you want to uh climb up and yeah let's do that yeah so this rock I actually designed in CAD beforehand and I built it around exactly where my fan placement was going to be my chimney stack here and built it around the solar system the idea with this rack is that I wanted to be able to put duffel bags or whatever else up here if I had friends traveling and to be able to just hook right onto this um this mesh here so there's a subframe that these solar panels melt directly to and that subframe is separate from the actual rack it is bolted along this side over here which is where it's hinged so a lot of people when they do something like this they use a linear actuator which is essentially a hydraulic lift system that'd be really nice but I'm not that fancy so it's simply on hinges and then I have a stick over here that I use that just goes on here goes on there and then this is propped up at about an angle like this is on 210 for each panel so 630 total only have 300 amp hours of lithium batteries but I've had starlink for pretty much ever since it came out as soon as I came out I got it shipped to The UPS Store and picked it up on the road and Game Changer night and day what inspired you to get a vehicle like what made you want to hit the road I've been wanting to do this forever my entire life I grew up going to Colorado when I was younger and just always being out on the road doing road trips and then when I was a little bit older well in high school I designed a tiny house wanted to do that and that was a bus and I wanted to do that stuff I never did it always been a goal I just had to commit one day and jump off the cliff yeah and so what was that moment where you're like I'm gonna do it like what what inspired you I guess well it was um right around the pandemic and at that time I had started um I'd been working on a commercial cleaning company for a while and I was working way too many hours yeah and there would be three four days in a row I wouldn't get out of my apartment because I was just working and so this was a way to be able to work and force balance into my life and that it has you know and that's one of the great things about being on the road is that you do you're out this is this is you're out in nature you're this is your office and you have your little office set up right there as well exactly I mean that's looking at the view out in front of us as like this is a beautiful office who who has those kind of office views so so now let's talk a little bit about your rig what what inspired you to buy the ambulance as I said I looked in the buses looked into a lot of different things and platform is everything when you get started with this yep and I chose an ambulance a because of the value I was able to pick my ambulance up with under a hundred thousand miles for nine thousand dollars at the beginning of the pandemic you don't get that type of value typically this um ambulance when the department purchased it without medical equipment it was 175 Grand wow so how did you get it for nine grand it's they come at the end of their use cycle they got a new ambulance it was a small little Department in Utah and they just needed to get rid of it that's perfect and what year make model is it yeah so it's a 1999 and you want if you are looking for an ambulance and you want to go with the F-series platform which is this truck you want to find one with the 7.3 liter diesel and that's a Ford right yes okay 7.3 liter diesel power stroke all right big difference between the power stroke and the IDI okay but the engine is bulletproof reliable not a ton of Maintenance and I'll probably probably go through three transmissions in the life of the engine okay but the engine will be fine the engine's great and the transmission is good too it's just transmissions don't last as long and another reason I chose the ambulance is because of the weight capacity with the F-series trucks this thing can weigh up to 12 500 pounds wow okay so you can haul a lot of stuff and your build can be significant exactly so I was able to have 46 gallons of water and all loaded up with I even had a table saw in the back and all that and oh wow I um I was at 11 000 pounds so 1500 pounds of payload after that it's not four wheel drive okay but the the reason I chose this particular years of trucks is I can actually get a donor truck something that might be wrecked or something like that and all the components for the four-wheel drive actually will bolt right up so you can do that yourself I have done it myself in the past oh this is the inside and the first thing you're going to see on your right is the one part I haven't finished so this will be the shower it's uh not at all done yet but just needs some waterproofing and some additional stuff the idea here is that I have my toilet that's removable and just set right in and then the space I'll be able to stand up and have a shower and it's gonna be my spot to hang a wetsuit okay so I just used a typical cassette toilet from Camco I was originally going to do a composting and to be quite honest with you this is a hundred dollars it works great so who do you who do you travel with I'm that would be my dog Ruger he's been the travel companion for several years now and I don't think I could do it without them to be quite honest he's a great dog oh yeah he's uh great to have in here but there's definitely troubles traveling with the dog sometimes national parks and that type of thing yeah but worth it absolutely worth it so um with the insulation out and everything this was five ten in here originally now it's down to five eight I'm six three so yeah it's not it's not quite ideal I've kind of learned just how to be able to stay low I'm working here I typically sit on the seat here and that's where I cook and all that the wood burning stove is my first heat source so this is from cubic mini they make small wood stoves for um for sailboats for RVs and they make a really great product this thing here it takes little tiny chunks of wood that are about this big and a little chunk of wood like that will last an hour and a half or so and that probably Heats it up very quickly in here yeah it does more than enough the problem with something like this is is that it's not doesn't have a thermostat obviously and it's not going to work when you want to go to bed or anything like that no since we're talking about Heating and Cooling uh what did you insulate this yourself yeah so it did come with insulation the company wheeled coach that made this ambulance they did fiberglass bat insulation took that out and I ended up using XPS foam board I would not recommend that and pretty much any other application except for something like an ambulance because it's so Square um you can put the foam board in here super easy oh nice so now I have um r value is how they actually measure um how effective insulation is so r10 is what I have in the ceilings as well as the walls and I have R5 on the floor oh wow okay so you stay pretty toasty in here and probably pretty cool too in the Summers yeah um I don't have an air conditioning yet but I have it wired and ready to go for this summer when I will add one before yeah the two fans really creates a really nice draft and that's been that's been great I can open up those back doors I haven't had an issue in here perfect so I built my kitchen into just this entire side here and if you haven't seen my fridge it's because most people don't see it it's built into the counter space here oh wow so I actually removed the hinges for this and velcroed it to this um so this Maple board that I made and then now it's just hinging here and same thing with um same thing with the fridge oh that is super cool and I did not know that's a refrigerator most people don't hidden I do carry propane on board so I have this um three burner stove top and oven and that's that's been great really enjoyed that and it's been really nice to be able to cook cookies and pizza which is kind of like kind of the I enjoy my pizzas and cookies every once in a while I bought the rig for nine thousand dollars uh how much do you think you spend on the build itself there's two answers to that question um the real answer for me is it was probably in the range of like 45 or so and the and pretty close to that I did a build out in this and it was decent I did one trip in it and I came back and tore it all out and started from scratch oh wow yeah so I so if I didn't do that I would be in it for about 30 30. does that include the 9000 or is that that includes the purchase price of the truck okay so you spent about 21 000 roughly in there yeah all right yeah here is that wherever you can have wherever you can store things where it doesn't actually take up um just moving space so this space if these weren't there it's unused space that's why I put these here it's been super easy to just get into whatever I need they're screwed in just take them off and then put a little seasoning on them have you had any issues going down bumpy roads they like Come Undone or anything no nothing yet I've had people tell me that but I've I've taken this thing down a lot of places I shouldn't have and nothing yet so I just used a um it's on Amazon it was a bar sink it's a 15 by 15. it's the only thing I could fit into this little tiny space but it works well for me and then you know cold water hot water all that fun stuff and what do you use for hot water so since I have propane on board already I decided to use a propane instant hot water heater there's a con to that that I found out is that it takes 10 13 seconds or so for the hot water to actually heat up what that equates to is that if you're going to run a shower means you're going to get cold water and you're going to waste it until it gets hot yeah or same thing here yep there's a hack for that that I figured out all right tell me about it so this right here is my fuel switch so when I switch this on it flips a solenoid in one of the outside compartments and turns my propane on allowing propane to flow freely okay then this is water pump the water's back here and it flows to the sink and then flows to the shower and what I did is I have a water presser switch on the back when this happens turn on my hot water heater the water's flowing now through the entire system and goes through a check valve and then Loops back into the tank so it's happening now is water is getting heated up it's 75 degrees 86 90 and now hits 100. so at this point it's traveled through and I can turn my water pressure off and in a couple seconds have hot water oh wow so you don't waste the gallon or so of water that you would use I think it was 1.7 gallons is what I measured it to be oh that's huge yeah when we're on board when we're in these rigs water is a commodity yeah so as for storage um these are all food related um I keep my plates and silverware up here don't have any shelves still stuff that I need to add I'm kind of thing I found is when you build this you have to know what items that you're going to put in here first and then design around that so this is all just food related stuff and you build all those cabinets yourself no one else has touched the truck that's great wow and did you know how to build cabinets before you just learn as you go YouTube is great we live in an age where everyone has the capability of uploading their knowledge to one place you get some um get some bad content but then if you sift through it yeah there's good advice out there one thing that's really rare with the ambulances for the truck style is getting a pass-through so I got one to pass through it's great when you're in the city and you wake up you just want to get out early in the morning and just go right through there and there's the cockpit oh that's super cool and then for this little kitchenette Dash work area um there's basically just two benches there's storage underneath both of them and then there is a slide out right here and this slide out I had a lagoon wasn't a fan of it this one here I can put up to I think like 250 pounds I believe so these slides are rated for so it's really stable when you're working with a laptop it's what I hidded with the Lagoon it was just bouncing oh so that works great and then you know it's just nice to be able to have two people in here and do that it's another thing too is that this comes out and I need to get a little different Mount because I can have one that comes down a little bit but makes a great secondary monitor when you're working oh wow that is super clever yeah and a great little TV too if you're over here and yeah that back here this is where I keep all of my clothes that I use on a regular basis so these simply just come up here and it's just cubby storage for clothes and that's um that's worked pretty great for me and then what is your bed system what do you use for a bed it is just a straight up platform bed super simple don't it's doesn't change fold up do anything fancy um cheaper to build it that way and you get more storage yeah um but the bed's a full-size bed and I'm six three and ambulance is eight feet wide and sit right here underneath my fan um yeah it's been great for me and the dog and it fits us both pretty comfortably we wake up every morning to his face on the pillow next to me that's excellent and you guys have a little view out your window because I saw him poking out earlier so he can just look at the world going by yeah he usually um when we're down at the beach and stuff I open up these back doors and he loves being able to look out this way usually back onto the sand and he loves that James thanks so much for the really cool tour of your beautiful rig I'm so impressed with just just everything about it it's beautiful in there in outside severe utilitarian inside is gorgeous so thanks for the tour yeah that was the goal with it thanks for um getting me on the channel so if someone wants to find out more about you traveling on the road how can we get a hold of you the best place to find me and follow along for the travels would be my Instagram which should be I think somewhere along the screen at some point if you got something out of this video please go ahead and subscribe to the channel share it with friends give us a big thumbs up and until next time we'll see you guys down the road so long James thanks so much for that really cool View uh thanks for watching guys have a good one foreign

Channel: CheapRVliving

Views: 240,888

Keywords: car, van, RV, Full-time, nomad, camper, camp, boondock, travel, caravan, tiny, house, RTR, Bob Wells, Nomadland, CheapRVLiving, Cheap RV Living, vanlife, van life, how to live in a van, van dwelling, van tour, van conversion, living in a van, camper van, van build, diy van build, sprinter van, van living, #vanlife, van dweller, campervan, vandwelling, diy camper van, RV Life, Living in an RV, Class B, Class C, Truck Living, Living in a car, boondocking, Living in a RV

Id: dVfnmiMtuaw

Length: 16min 25sec (985 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023