STEALTH Step Van Camper TOUR - Bread Truck Converted into Mobile Tiny Home

foreign [Music] [Music] hello this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel today I'm hanging out with Kevin Kevin has a really cool Step Van that he converted to an awesome living space today he's going to give us a tour inside and out so join us hey Patrick my name is Kevin Cal from Yardley Pennsylvania thank you for having me on the channel I'd like to give you a tour of my 1998 Freightliner mt-45 step bear purchase this vehicle back in the beginning of 2022 but it's been a vision of my wife and myself for probably about three years now come on in foreign this build was really to to be stealthy and build it like a construction vehicle um so as you can see I have plenty of safety vests I have my orange jacket gloves flashlights so basically I could park this vehicle anywhere and kind of blend in as a construction vehicle and then as you come in you're gonna notice it's not a safety it's not a construction vehicle when you come in so come on in um first and foremost this is like our parlor it was built not only to uh to have some creature Comfort to home we inherited some cabinets from from some neighbors in my area as well as a break front which store some of our beach equipment and and our laundry equipment as well as our personal hygiene also installed a two-seat out of a New Jersey Transit bus and the reason for that was we wanted to have some seat belts so if my daughter's riding with us she could fasten their seat belt and ride comfortably this is bolted to the frame and bolted to the bulkhead as well as we do primarily watch um our iPads a little TV the television so we could set our iPads up on the counter kind of hang out right here just to go over some of the Creature Comforts of home when new when we purchased this vehicle this vehicle was purchased from Red company in central Pennsylvania so what you see here did not exist this was a stripped Step Van um it was built from scratch but one good thing about step fans is it's the awesome platform to build off of because everything is perfectly Square you're going to see that it's all tongue and groove ceiling above the ceiling is spray foam insulation my walls have two inch insulation with quarter inch birch plywood my floor has inch and a half foam insulation three quarter inch plywood with just some this is impressive carpet for privacy I have a curtain here that we can close as well as I have the bulkhead door foreign shuts it out from the elements at night time so like I said that whole stealthness with the construction vehicle perfect segue to that so as you come in one of the big things is we needed private facilities so Camco cartridge cassette toilet as well as I have a 32 by 32 shower that 32 by 32 shower is fed from a 30 gallon fresh water tank dumps into a 25 gallon gray water tank which is mounted onto frame rail this was built bought as a kit from a big box store except for the controls and shower head that was purchased from an RV dealer that's in the ceiling or just 14 by 14 fans I have one that uses exhaust for the bathroom as well as I have one above the bed that I can use is either exhaust or as an in as a intake all these walls were built with insulation in them all my Plumbing these Behind These Walls um so and I used all Pex fittings and PEX tubing on this wall I have the controls for my water pump my water heater and the LED lighting it's just a control for the water heater this is an outside thermostat I have the fugati um 12 volt propane water heater instantaneous water heater which is mounted underneath the cabinets as you can see underneath the cabinet I have my 30 gallon fresh water tank and I also have a catch can five gallon catch can for my sink I did not want the sink water to mix in with shower water because as long as we use biodegradable soap in the shower I could really dispose of that anywhere but with the sink I wanted to make sure that we dispose of it properly and that would go into my sanitary sewer I have inch and an inch and a half um Birch countertop 15 by 15 sink 1000 watt microwave it also houses my toaster oven Big's box stores purchase plenty of cabinet space for for our everyday living coffee pot 110 volt outlet for the microwave 110 fold outlet for coffee pots with the USB port uh two burner five thousand fifteen thousand um propane stove propane tank is a 20 gallon horizontal tank that's located outside also wanted to show you another neat feature these burners generate a lot of heat and in a small confined space so for just for for safety for safety and for also to keep neatness on the countertop I just purchased this off Amazon it's just a 25 splash guard but what it does is it keeps the heat off the back wall um and and keeps you away from any issues that you may have with heat transfer it may cause a fire in the wall so underneath the cabinet still room for storage part of my water tank tough to utilize the space that exists where the wheel well was so I mounted my fresh water tank on top of the wheel well my cat all my cabinet doors are magnetic this is actually my daughter's bed it's a little bigger than a twin a little shorter than a twin but it works well for us it's a Tempur-Pedic mattress built down a frame bolted to the wall underneath that Tempur-Pedic Matrix I have a 12 volt chest style refrigerator freezer as well as I bought some um storage bins from targets that we hope we house are um pots and pans and our in our dishware with some just some child locks more cabinet space for clothing throughout here's our queen size bed queen size bed another big box purchase on sale built a frame for that um and that the reason why it is so high is because I wanted to have ample garage space which which I'll go into in a second for us to store our our everyday gear our bikes and our wetsuits and whatever else we want also we also travel not only with my daughter my wife we have three dogs that we travel with so the one thing we wanted to do was we wanted to make sure that we can safely secure the dogs if we go out as well as for a comfortable place for them to sleep when we do go out and they're not running around and they're not sleeping in a bed with us so if you look over here this is where it has my switches from my 12 volt lighting underneath in the garage I also have a light as well as USB port I have renergy 600 watts of solar on my roof as well as a 300 amp hour battery lithium ion amp hour battery located in the garage area 2000 watt inverter which one's my 110 volt appliances your microwave my outlets and then whatever else we need to run in a way in the summertime I have a portable air conditioner that the the inverter will run and I can go pretty much the whole night that 300 watt amp hour battery I currently have after the New Year's hopefully for as a nice Christmas present I'll receive another 300 amp hour battery give me 600 amp hours and we can go a little bit longer for heat we purchased a Chinese diesel heater there's a story behind this uh probably about three months ago I purchased a Chinese diesel heater from Amazon took it out of the box so excited great reviews everybody raved about these Chinese diesel heaters cut a hole in my floor around the exhaust outside run the intake outside wire the thing up and it doesn't work diagnose it realize that the fuel pump is bad order a new fuel pump very inexpensive to to get replacement parts or the new fuel pump fire the unit up fuel pump works Chinese diesel heater doesn't work one bad thing about some of the vendors that you use online for these diesel heaters there's little or no customer service so in this in my case there was little or no there was no customer service needless to say I provided some negative feedback and I threw the garbage I threw the diesel heater out in the garbage just chalk it up to experience my backup plan was I went with the little buddy heater that we we used a couple of times only drawback to a little buddy heater is it's not the co issue because I have my CO detectors in in in the vehicle it should they generate a lot of moisture it's a good good source of heat but I need something a little bit better so we also did as a backup was I bought a 1200 watt electric heater that I would store underneath the garage area that would Heat this space up pretty decent but huge electric draw so after numerous reviews I read about Chinese diesel heaters I'm going to try this circus one more time want to purchase thing another Chinese diesel heater but an all-inclusive which I'll show you and I and I said to myself before I even install this I'm going to run it on the ground make sure it works did that filled it up with diesel hooked it up to 12 volts thing ran like a top shut it off tried it again continue to spin like a top and I I installed it um that's 125 I've ever spent on heat it's underneath in the garage area which I'll show you right now so as you can see I have low bridge underneath I have my LED lighting in the ceiling as well as I have my all-inclusive diesel heater which actually works very well holds about three quarters of a gallon of diesel fuel which under high load are on high heat could probably go about eight hours fro so for what I use it for on low as well as I didn't talk about my electric blanket I could probably go I can go an entire night um with this set at about 60 65 degrees an electric blanket is comfortable in here um part of the garage houses on my electrical so you see my 2000 watt inverter 300 amp hour battery as well as all the solar panel wiring of a 10 amp um trickle charger that I could plug to shore power if I absolutely needed to recharge my my battery um I also have a backup generator that I had at my house already that really is just out here for storage but in the event that I absolutely needed I have a 2000 watt generator as well as I inherited a tool test so everything that I need is here this port right here is for uh exhaust port for my air conditioning that I use in the summertime as I said I'll remove this and then I have a portable air conditioner that just plugs into my inverter the exhaust fence right to the outside brings me fresh cold air on the inside so um also have some storage in here I have a there's my 1200 watt um heater that I use time to time as well as I just carry some equipment that I might need motor oil or power steering fluid or whatnot so if you look at the back wall you can see some of the spray foam spray foam insulation that I had used on the ceiling and also cascaded down the back wall as well because I had some left over and it's about an inch inch and a half thick on both walls as well as on the ceiling this insulation is just foam insulation that I used on either the floors of the walls and really I doubled it up so it's three quarter so I doubled the three-quarter up for the floor so the floor exists of uh inch and a half insulation on the floor with three quarter inch plywood and then in my walls like I said I used two inch and then two inch foam insulation as well as [Applause] um the quarter inch perch plywood which is painted over this old barn wood was another find that was on closed out in the Big Box store that I just took a roller and painted over a couple sections to make it look a little interesting but it was cheap fast that's on top of the quarter inch plywood that's there I probably added about in total about an additional two thousand pounds but one nice thing about the Step Van is the step band is rated for sixteen thousand pounds empty it's about ten thousand pounds so I had the room to uh to really build off of that so and then lastly I have it my fan in the back that I use for air circulation and then my second source of egress so now let's take a walk on the outside and I'll show you some of the some of the things that improvements that we've made to make it stealthy and look like a construction vehicle so if we come to the front of the vehicle installed all new tires um like I said I wanted it to look like a construction vehicle so I added the cones the cone rack to the front on a new on a new on a new bumper um this was a bread truck so I kept the name of the original owner which was taranini's bread in Mechanicsburg Pennsylvania I kept their name on the front that's just the left the remains of the glue everything on the truck was painted over with Rust-Oleum paint and you can't notice it but it was painted with either a roller or paint brush the exact same color changed out the headlights the LED headlights because anybody that knows the old style headlights you're lucky you could see five feet in front of you so new headlights I could look down the road quite a ways new front tires new rear tires um added some emblems this is a battery charger this is the shore power for battery charger with truck batteries I was very specific in the engine and the transmission that I wanted in this vehicle and I looked for probably about a good year until I found what I wanted I wanted the 5.9 Cummins Engine with the Allison Transmission and some sometimes you could find them and sometimes you can't they're one the nice thing about them is you can go a half million miles plus um on the engine before it needs a rebuild but the long and short of it was this is what I wanted I didn't want anything else I didn't want to settle so I wanted to make sure I got it right the jump seats I installed so my wife can sit here right so I replaced this was this was a new installation as well as a replacement seat in the front um Grace Industries which really I wanted to show where we were from I wanted to show that we were from Yardley Pennsylvania what was I going to name the truck one of the three dogs got her name drawn out of the hat and it was Grace so we just said it's Grace Industries it gives to that whole stealth appearance when we're out on the road somebody looked at the truck they're like oh it's just a construction vehicle so as we come down the frugatti water heater this continuous water heater it was installed it cut that in myself and installed it propane water heater here's my fresh water fill with a lockable cap as I had mentioned before installed a 20 gallon horizontal propane tank I wanted to be above board I wanted safety safety in mind I did not want propane tanks mounted on the inside of the vehicle not that there's anything wrong with that but I wanted to make sure that we were doing the right thing with the installation as you come around the back install the trailer hitch for our bike racks as well as a backup camera so I could see what I'm doing when I'm backing up um the vice was something I had laying around the house but adds to stealthiness allows people not to scratch their head what this vehicle is here's the air condition vent that I talked about comes with a six inch exhaust Port that that exhaust from the air conditioned vents to the outside um and then let me show you the inside here's my garage build toolbox and power battery my generator on the Dual gate as well as I have a Coleman portable stove and portable Grille fits on the underside on the top you can't really see it from here we'll walk around the side of it I inherited a 40-foot extension ladder what I did was I separated the two flies when it came time to mount the solar panels I was kind of a little bit at wit's end because I wanted to make them look seamless I installed the roof rack that I just bought from a big box store and made it with Unistrut and and flat stock metal but they were spread out about 48 inches apart so in order for me to install the 42 inch long solar panels I utilized the extension ladder so I bolted the extension ladders to the unit strut and then bolted the solar panels to the extension ladders and then if you look from the side it still gives a stealthiness of a construction vehicle the solar panels blend right in and here's my 6 300 watts of solar on each side another hookup for Shore power here's my exhaust from my famous Chinese diesel heater and then here's my diesel fuel tank 40 40 gallon diesel fuel tank that's just for the engine I don't use that for the diesel here so any any hole or any external installation that I did I used to use butaline tape to close those gaps or I use lap seamer so I have the two fans in the ceiling as well as the skylights in the ceiling and I also have the wire entry port in the ceiling I used lap sealant to close those gaps so the water would be impenetrable and it's a real it's really good sealant as well as when I did install the roof racks I used the butaline tape butaline tape stops the water from penetrating into the openings that we had made Patrick thank you for having me on the channel today was very excited to show your viewers my creation and my step band this is the first step van that I've had on the channel so as you know I was super excited to meet with you today so just to review some of the specs here this is a 26 foot long van and the backspace is approximately 19 18 19 feet correct so it's quite a decent sized living space and you're able to incorporate a toilet a shower two beds a full kitchen and a living room space in the front of that I really like your approach to this thanks can you tell us a little bit about budget what did you start off with and what did you end with sure um so like Patrick said it's about 26 feet I have just under 200 square feet of living space um set a budget of approximately 10 000 when I was going to do this build and that was pre-covered we had this number in our heads we knew what we wanted to pay for a truck I didn't want to pay any more than 10 000 for a truck and I didn't want to pay any more than ten thousand to build it out and then with everything after covid just exploded with prices so my budget went from 10 to 15. um with that said um I'm somewhere in between those two there's some things that I absolutely wanted to install new and there was some things that I could have gotten from the second hand shop and I did so that was really keeping me in line with my budget uh is there any tips that you would share with our viewers if they were to take on a project like this like registration Insurance anything they need to know about question your insurance before you you make your purchase because most insurance companies will not ensure a truck even though it's not a commercial vehicle they'll ensure an RV they'll ensure you know a pickup truck or a van but when it comes to Step Van you gotta have to kind of look around and there's some companies out there that you hear about every day on the radio that'll cover those those Insurance costs um registration wise it's registered as a as a truck it's not a commercial vehicle um I didn't need commercial plates I don't have RV plates I could convert it to an RV and get RV plates and get insurance from the same insurance company had my uh car insurance with but that said um this was relatively easy and simple to get that it's not like buying a school bus and having to go convert it to an RV and registering a different that's a good tip though that you shared with our viewers one other thing we're probably going to get a lot of questions is do you need a CDL no you do not need a CDR because this is under the 19 000 pound threshold it has hydraulic brakes um you do not need a CDL to drive this vehicle and it's actually very easy to drive it's kind of like driving a vehicle with barn doors wide open it's kind of sways on the highway but it's really not once you get used to driving the vehicle it's not it's it's actually it's a pleasure to drive it and the tip that you gave me earlier off camera was getting the tire pressure right correct really improves the ride just because it's a truck you know an inflate the tire pressure to its maximum you follow the specifications of the vehicle so once you get that down it's actually pretty comfortable to drive on a windy day like today it's okay but you know what you make the best of it Kevin thanks again for taking the time today to give us a tour of your awesome creation well this is Patrick with New Jersey's Outdoor Adventures YouTube channel thanks for joining us thanks

Channel: New Jersey Outdoor Adventures

Views: 583,538

Keywords: vanlife, van life, camper build, camper van, van build, sprinter conversion, van buildout, campervan, rv, camper, camping, glamping, step van, tiny home, tiny house, utility trailer, cargo trailer, skoolie, school bus, box truck

Id: i1QI-ZTa1_g

Length: 22min 45sec (1365 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 11 2023