Engineer Builds GREATEST Ambulance Conversion EVER!

hello this is patrick with new jersey's outdoor adventures youtube channel back up here in brooklyn new york and today i met up with josh josh has an ambulance conversion i've been around rvs for 20 years and i've never seen a conversion as intricate as what josh has done here today i just spent the last hour walking through this thing and i was wowing the whole time and josh welcome to new jersey outdoor adventures hey what's up uh welcome to my truck i converted this ambulance over the last year it took five months i think and let's take a tour this is the side door there's also back doors i'll get you um welcome welcome in uh lay of the land here here's the uh shower and bathroom set up and then kitchen uh bed we'll fold out in the back we'll see that little bench and a workstation here before we get into all the details uh i built it because um i was able to like early pandemic nobody knew was going on early pandemic and i kind of like was panicking and i ended up making a hasty decision to like build an apocalypse vehicle and i ended up with this and like it's nice for going on climbing trips and traveling whatever uh it's pretty relatively recently finished so i haven't taken it on a lot of trips yet yeah here it is bathroom uh pass-through door to the front to the cab we drive and stuff up there nothing crazy going on up there all right i'll leave this open so i can stand over here uh shower shower and you can flip this little diverter here right and use this guy if you like um over here uh or down at the bottom this is the shower pan this is like a custom-made laser-cut plate um with like this is a just an amazon stainless steel shower cutter that i had someone weld into this plate for the shower pan and then here is our toilet this is a composting toilet um i haven't set it up yet to be honest i just haven't needed it there's like all these bathrooms everywhere um it's got this little these are like the locking drawer slides that you get and i like took off the little rubber handles on the so i put this bar across so you can slam it with your feet these little rubber springs uh if you notice uh these are what keep this door up from falling down that's what keeps tension on the top of the door so it doesn't fall above the door just a drawer with storage for bathroom stuff right and then this also slides down and that's my laundry machine for laundry it's a washer and dryer oh oh look at this wow this is how new this is um yeah here's my exhaust fan for the bathroom for those steam and such uh uh here's the door yep so um the bathroom and like everything in this build is all built with extruded aluminum um like 80 20 but not 80 20 like off-brand 80 20. um and that's just nice because it's light and modular and like sort of easy to build with but still a pain over here is my control center um this is just a tablet let me see if i can turn brightness up on here nope it's all the way up okay um so a lot of van builds will have like a control center of some kind with a bunch of switches and and readouts and monitors for your battery information if your diesel heater for your lights um and it ends up being like a big panel that takes up a lot of space um so i wanted to see if i can like integrate everything into one nice system and i've done that using home assistant which is a home automation platform open source home automation platform so like there's a lot of people working on it and it's got a lot of features and it over time it's ended up being like really easy to use so everything is coming through here um you've got your battery information can you see this at all on the camera okay you've got your battery readouts um this is just some information i'm choosing to display but like there's so much i could be displaying here an alarm system that'll like lock the doors and like send me a text message if the doors are open for some reason while they're locked um this is lighting so this is controlling all the ceiling lights here and there's also these kick lights along the side and the light under the counter here yep there's also like the floodlights on the side there's the emergency lights which are fun i have like a program written here if i'm sleeping in here and it's like completely blacked out then it's like kind of hard to wake up so i can set an alarm time and it'll like slowly turn on the lights to wake me up um and you can like write other automations like when the door is opened and it's dark in here then turn on the lights um or the outside cabinet doors when you open those doors it'll turn the lights on in those cabinets stuff like that there's like there's so much you can do another tab here is climate this is like temperatures control for the diesel heater there's a heated floor in here but it kind of doesn't work very well i don't know this is the exhaust fan for the bathroom and for the stove temperatures graphs data and then plumbing tank levels and temperatures and then all my valves are motorized so you can control them all from here and your water pumps uh tank heaters pipe heaters yeah and then uh here's a tab for my camera system which is down right now but you can see it here so i've got these hooks they're hooks nothing crazy i've got a trash can i found it in the garbage on the street you can find a lot of good stuff in the garbage in new york city here's this pantry that slides out i got this idea from somebody else on youtube who like put a pantry in a similar place in an ambulance build so it's just got junk walls and ceiling cedar um like the home depot stuff with like quarter inch cedar paneling on the walls it's backed by another quarter inch of baltic birch plywood for structure and so that is like one panel that you can unbolt and take off and access behind if you want to do that here this is a little door for the tank for the diesel heater like slides out if you if you finagle it this bar is original to the ambulance i put it back in here it's nice um all right kitchen here's the kitchen uh refrigerator uh isotherm 18 i think i don't know one of the drawer ones one of the like smaller ones induction cooktop uh yeah i think this is the only vertical oriented one you can get i haven't seen any other than this one so a lot of people use this one and you can also pull it out if you want if you want to cook outside get an extension cord that's my outside cooking setup power throughout 120 gfci and then usb power and this is a 12 volt power like a barrel connector for 12 volts just if you want to wire up some car appliances or something or i'm gonna build a like fan insert module that goes into that window for better exhaust and that can be powered off of this 12 volt moving along oh the exhaust right this is a exhaust for the stove so this uses the same exhaust fan as the bathroom so you can either close that vent off by twisting this in or you can also close this vent off with this knob you can see that going um to divert the flow wherever it works okay um and you can also kind of use the shower vents to like get a little bit of air circulation in here um but it's not quite enough so that's why i'm doing the fan moduling here and also this exhaust hood like kind of needs to extend over the stove so like capture all of the fumes coming up but it works okay um in the ceiling in addition to the lights there's also speakers a speaker system i've got like a chromecast audio that i can connect to for my phone and then subwoofer down here next to the toilet moving on kitchen sink a little cutting board i got this which um is actually i didn't think i would need it but it's real nice for like uh drying off uh dishes if you've just washed them it like keeps them off the ground so they can dry nicely that's the faucet and this is filtered water yep and then we got drawers um these are not populated yet because if they have too much weight in them then like if you if you crank the wheel too hard they'll fly open so i still need to like come up with some latch to keep them closed this one has a funny cutout for the for the trap on the sink and this one is in front of the sink so it's tiny cabinets here's some cabinets uh you can see my exhaust duct and all my kitchen junk mostly and other stuff yeah so this is all more um extruded aluminum um like this way of making cabinets and doing your build out in general is real nice because it ends up being super skeletal and light and open like there's a lot of space in here like you get the full volume of the cabinet and it's just like a frame and a couple panels of wood and it's it's nice it's relatively easy these doors are quarter inch baltic birch um plywood which i don't know if i would recommend using because there's like not a lot of meat for these screws to grab onto so it can be fragile or it can be delicate to put together um and you also need to find some really straight pieces so they're not funny there's an oven electric oven make pizza and stuff and whatever another cabinet short cabinet this is one of the outside compartments i didn't bother covering it up down here i just have a little cubby there's a there's a pillow in there this uh well let's open the door here so this is just that access for the temperature port of the temperature of the of the water port on the outside here yeah we'll get a better view of that when we circle around the outside um oh did i show you these drawers these are also drawers these are my window inserts that if these are closed they like just snug right in and you can get it completely dark in here and they also fit perfectly in here it's a joy wow okay these panels are just magneted on you can see um this is the led strip for the kick lights and then i've got tubes for that water port on the outside and they pop back on like that all right this is a like open cubby area for whatever i want to store i thought about building some sort of drawer module but it's actually nice just to have an open area to put junk whatever um so and the way this works is this whole cad counter section will if you crimp it real hard you can you can unlatch it and it all pops down i can show you this um right so you can see how where this latch system works it needs a little bit of lubrication but yeah so the idea with this is you drop the counter put a put a pad here let me get it here's my crash fat um this is for bouldering but conveniently it fits just perfectly right here and it's so good that i i just have to show you there it is tuck this in and you've got like a second couch for two more people so like when you open up the space you can fit like seven or eight people in here comfortably and you can like cram a little bit more in on the floor it's great right uh this is another cubby some rope some pillows shoes and then this is the bed system i've got this platform it just like unhooks from here folds out and then oh we need the counter we need the counter okay i thought we could leave that down but we can't leave it down okay okay that's it that's that you've got a platform and then right now i've just got this like japanese style futon with a tatami mat at home i was experimenting with alternative mattresses so i had this so this is just what i'm using in here um yeah that's the bed real simple uh maybe you want a little bit more thickness if you like prefer like a lot of gush in your mattress but i like this and that's it um more cabinets up here i've got some guitars in here cajon um there's a lot of like music stuff in here because uh i've actually had like a couple like little tiny open mics in here with friends from new york and it's real cozy and fun and nice and like fun to see how many people you can cram into this space and it's also like such a unique experience because it's so intimate and you can like put a bunch of strangers in here and after an hour they're all like really good friends it is great um i've got some like cushions and pillows from ikea under here is more storage for climbing junk and tools and and whatnot [Applause] moving around to the workstation this is my garbage stool from the garbage but that's what i'm using for now you could like put a proper chair in here but um here's my monitor i've got this little latch this captivator that just keeps it steady while driving so this like opens up and grabs it uh and this arm gives you a lot of range of movement like you could watch it from bed if you wanted uh that's nice um so you're working here the magic trick to this desk is as follows this pulls out these arms swing away and then we just pop this in and you've got a little surface sorry to do work from and you can also use this table as uh as like you can open it up and have a bigger surface for guests or whatever and then the real trick is you can go from like the sitting height all the way up to a standing height so you can stand and work which i like to do i've designed this to be like it was it was kind of very hard annoying but after much wrestling with it i got it to go up to like the parameters of my body like all the way up to my standing height and down to my preferred sitting height which is like a lot lower than a lot of desks um and it was also hard because it's such a constrained design because this is the like back of the aluminum cabinet that is on the outside of the truck this is where all the plumbing is so there's like two and a half or three inches of space here to fit this whole mechanism so there's these linear rails here um ball screws and then the motors are like recessed up into the top of the desk yeah that was fun to make um and here is the this is like the controller that runs the desk and a voltage converter and stuff um yeah let me put this down um what can i say the floor is um just like a roll out vinyl sheep floor um i like was gonna do some vinyl planking but i just read too many horror stories about that stuff like popping up when when the temperatures change so i went with like a fake floor and it's fine it's pretty fine pop this back in here this is kind of hanging out right now because we're parked sideways but it tends to be fine so that's pretty much the inside um um but with an ambulance we've also got a ton on the outside with these outside compartments so let's see what i've done with that here's my crotch pad that i ejected we'll start with this one um so this is that pantry that slides out and can we push it there's the toilet there's that drawer laundry and then there's a little bit of extra space down underneath another storage compartment this is not dissimilar to how this cabinet is typically used in ambulances because there's it tends to be a pass-through cabinet here that you can access like from here and from the inside so that's that oh let's get this there's a tiny cabinet here just with some junk and extra engine coolant and diesel um haven't yeah i haven't like built out it yet over here this is that's the drain for the gray water and also like there's the diesel heater exhaust there so again i can drain this just by flipping a switch on that tablet or on my phone and it'll pull out another storage cabinet this is just like leftover material from the build but once i find a home for this i'm sure that you can like build out shelves in here and have a nice gear closet yeah as we're swinging around here's the back there's like outlets for outside here and a hose to bounce that's that this is where i keep the crash pad and then getting to water this is the plumbing cabinet um this is 55 gallons of fresh water 5 gallon water heater which runs on both electric and uh it has an engine coolant passed through it so you get free hot water from driving which is nice these are intake filters so you can filter the water before it even gets to the tank if you don't trust your water source for whatever reason or so you can like intake from a river or something there's an onboard intake pump in addition to a second pump just for the inside plumbing water pressure um so the way that would work either if you want to like hook up to shore water or if you want to pump from a river or something and you're parked and you don't want to leave these doors open then you open this hatch and you run a hose up and connect it to here or here i just have this for reasons and then this is like the whole block of all the all the valves for different setting different states and configurations for how you want the filter to go what pumps you want to bypass if you want to even bypass the fresh tank completely and just go straight off of shore water um and then oh yeah you've got a little plug here if you want to gravity fill straight into the tank you can do that too these filters are just for the uh drinking water the little little faucet by this thing the tiny one uh pressure tanks those are pressure tanks uh a uv filter for intake and this is an air compressor that came with the ambulance for if you want to use any air tools which i used a lot while i was building the inside like a nail gun and also just to have a blower is nice to clean stuff off and it's also for the air horn which is very loud and fun electrical is in this cabinet here's a shore power cover which came with the ambulance it's cool because it has a see this third pin in the middle it's so that so when you plug it in that pin gets depressed and when you start the engine it pushes out so it can eject the cable so you can be plugged in and start the engine and then just go without worrying about it's kind of cool yeah um this is the electrical cabinet there's a lot going on in here but it's two salvaged tesla model s battery modules um which in total i'm not using the full potential state of charge range i'm using like 70 of it to be safe and for like longevity of the batteries so i'm getting an effective like 5000 watt hours or something and there's four solar panels on the roof that's 1600 watt hours or 600 watts of solar on the roof on a day like today should be getting most of that here's the charge equipment the solar charge controller this charges off the alternator when the engine is running this is like the controller for the victron equipment and then a 5 000 watt inverter so you can run most of the stuff at once i've also like when i was working on this truck i also like this is the first thing i did so i could power my build while i was doing it and i was using tools off of it i was welding off of it let's start over here this is a selection of the electrical cabinet that was in the ambulance build before so there was like a lot more than that but i paired it down to just that which is the important stuff for like locking the doors and the emergency lights fun and important things like that and also like there's some connections that come through here that needed to be preserved so the electrical cabinet was on the other side of this wall so i had to like cut everything and move it out and put it back up here this is a little computer that's running home assistant which is controlling everything and then it's on a network here with this like philips hue bridge for controlling the lights and the wi-fi router and the cameras and the victron equipment is all on like a local area network [Music] and then that computer is running into an arduino over usb which handles the some inputs and outputs so that's how all of these relays connects to the to the pc and those relays are switching on the pumps these lights and the cabinets um heaters all the things that need to be switched blocks for the doors a lot of stuff this thing is like uh you like never use this but this is for like a contingency edge case where for example like you've parked the truck in a garage for a long time and it's not getting any sunlight and the system is like slowly depleting the battery over time and the thing with these tesla batteries it's just like raw lithium themselves so there's no battery protection going on in here so the thing about lithium cells if they get undercharged too much then like it'll destroy the battery it's done so like you don't want to keep draining so if it goes under some critical threshold then what'll happen is it'll say oh no and it'll switch this relay off it's like a bi-stable relay which means it doesn't need any active power to keep it on one way or the other you just give it power on one side and it's on and give it power on the other side and as well so it'll send a signal to this relay it'll cut it off and the battery is completely disconnected from everything and then the problem with that is when you disconnect the battery if the solar panels are connected to the battery um no if the solar panels are connected to the solar charge controller but the charge controller isn't connected to the battery it'll damage the charge controller so you also need to disconnect the solar panels so that's what this one does so what these two buttons do is they reset that connection for those two relays and then this one is for the battery heat it's also like a contingency thing where if the battery doesn't have enough power to heat itself or if it's too cold to safely discharge to heat itself then you can switch this and you can keep the battery off of the vehicle battery yeah and then over here these are the 120 breakers this is a amplifier for the speakers this is the camera system the 360 camera system and that's the cellular router and yeah i think that's it and like there's fuses and stuff here some fuses back here yeah that's that and then what do i say about this this is my truck it's a uh duramax engine six point something liters i don't know i don't remember um it's a big engine too big for any reasonable person to work on so i have like not worried about it at all it runs fine i've taken it to a mechanic and they say it's fine speaking of the truck itself is it like pretty good shape it's a 2005 chevy kodiak and it only had 81 000 miles on it when i got it um so i like paid a little bit extra for a nicer condition trucks but i think that's like worth doing when you're gonna like spend this much time and money investing into a conversion like this that's good that you mentioned that because you know building something to this level and this quality you want to start off with a chassis that's going to last a really long time yeah and you're on a good platform at the point where uh you put all this money into and the chassis is completely shot out yeah yeah so it's in pretty good shape so on the outside there's also these on ambulances they're called scene lights they're just flood lights on the outside for illuminating the scene and they used to be these like big halogen lamps that like pulled like 10 amps and they're crazy and i pulled those out and i pulled out the reflector and i i like squeezed in this these led flood lights and let me show you it's like kind of bright outside but let's see how much we can see them yeah um and these these are fun because you can change the temperature of them and you can make the color whatever you want and when it's dark outside these are like absurdly bright they will light up the entire neighborhood it's great and then the the emergency lights are also cool my favorite is this uh the light barn with the with the uh the stingers okay um oh yeah and then the lights on the inside also have right back can change color to be whatever which goes for the kick lights and the camera lights and everything josh thank you very much for taking the time today to give us more of your awesome creation i'm totally blown away i've been around these rv's for a long time and diy camper builds and some of the things that you have done in here some of the products used i've never seen before so this is all new to me and i'm sure to my viewers can you walk us through a little bit about like time frame how long this took to take some of the special tools you might have needed to buy and also budget sure so time frame i spent like a month or more just doing like research and design before i even bought the truck um including like uh like catting out different ambulance box designs like trying to figure out which to buy and what the interior layouts would be like and how i would because the design of this is like really constrained by how the cabinets are because they push into the inside space so you need to build around the wheel wells it needs to build around these cabinets on the back and on the front and so i spent a lot of time designing just like figuring out how i wanted to lay it out and do the design and then after that it was like five or six months of building full-time um budget i spent the truck was listed for twenty thousand dollars i paid eighteen thousand five hundred and then in total including the truck i spent seventy or seventy five thousand dollars on everything um [Applause] [Music] special tools and processes um something i did a lot was like sheet metal fabrication where you can just design a part and then order to get laser cut and often this like isn't as expensive as you think especially if you like need a lot and you can buy in large volumes um and you can also get these parts cnc folded um so that's how i got the shower pan together that's how like all these all these brackets are that are holding these panels in between the the extruded aluminum rails and like holding the walls together and that's how these brackets that are holding the motor assemblies for the desks are and i think there's other stuff like brackets on the roof like brackets everywhere it's really nice to be able to laser cut stuff and just order it and it saves time because you don't have to fabricate stuff yourself so i did that a lot um other tools i don't know just like a lot of stuff doing some all the hand tools power tools i did a bit of welding on the inside of the box i had to reinforce the ceiling a little bit which was interesting like the way the ceiling was designed it allowed it to bow down in the middle a little bit so i added some support braces and also welding and rails for these rails which which go along the whole length of the of the truck and that's what everything is mounted to these rails just these bolt to the frame of the box and all the build out is just bolted to these rails there's two on the ceiling uh two on the walls high and two on the walls low and that's what everything is melted in with and then it was also you have cad experience you could program certain things um that's not stuff that i'm capable of doing um but like it is something anyone it just it's just the amount of like time you're willing to invest in figuring this stuff out i haven't not actually set up a home assistant system before and it did take a lot of hours of like figuring out how this thing goes together especially because it's pretty unconventional to put a home assistant system on wheels like most people don't do that it doesn't actually make a difference but it's like slightly different in use case yeah and it helps to like know some electronic stuff and wiring in order to set up some of the inputs and outputs on the home assistant system but um so you got five months for your labor yeah another couple months of research so you have 70 000 plus in cash like uh in a project and then you have your time too and that's yeah usually not accounted for when time is building stuff easily worth significantly more than the materials for sure it's just so much work it's so much work that like i didn't people always say in these in these videos people always say like this is gonna take longer than you think it is this is gonna be more work than you think it is and that's true but like time six like i would not have done this if i could have anticipated accurately how much work this would be it's just so much i would have just like stayed home or bought something or like bought a van and built something real simple i'm amazed because all the challenges you had to overcome in the process of building this that caused the delays there must have been so much new things that you learned yeah and i'm sure you're going to use some of that stuff and future builds maybe yeah yeah i mean yeah all the experience you have making stuff is is cumulative so like you learn something on everything and this project is a culmination of all the stuff i built before this and everything i built after this will build on this so yeah i'm sure a lot of the viewers are going to really dig and love this build and they're probably going to want to follow along to see what other projects you're doing or enhancements that you do to this one can you tell us a little bit about how they could follow along yeah so if you want to see what i'm working on sometimes i post stuff on instagram i've got a youtube channel i put projects on sometimes you want to just put links to those or cool instagram and youtube i've got a website i don't update it very often but that exists that's it all right you'll send me those links i'll put them in the description this is patrick new jersey's outdoor adventures youtube channel thanks for joining us thank you patrick

Channel: New Jersey Outdoor Adventures

Views: 685,006

Keywords: vanlife, van life, camper build, camper van, van build, van buildout, campervan, rv, camper, camping, Bugout, Home assistant, Home assistant rv, Campulance, Ambulance conversion, DIY camper, Apocalypse vehicle

Id: hLc1x2JzED4

Length: 38min 1sec (2281 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022