We Built Our Custom Van Conversion In 30 Days - DIY RAM Promaster Camper Van Tour

so we just completed our van build and I thought I'd bring you along for a tour we were able to get the majority of the van built and finished within 30 days just like the title suggests a lot of careful planning went into the build but a lot of changes were made along the way and most of the design ideas were just thought up in my head we got a lot of the materials locally from home improvement stores but certain things had to be ordered online as they were kind of specialized for this application be sure to subscribe to the channel because if you like what you see in this video I'm going to go into a lot more detail in future videos that cover the electrical system the plumbing the the build itself including how we insulated the van and some of the other fine details for the parts that we used that kind of make this uh unique to us we do not have any prior experience in building a van but we do have a lot of DIY experience with other projects that was able to translate pretty nicely into the van all right so let's go ahead and start with the inside and then I'll take you around the outside all right so right inside of the doorway here we have a lot of switches these switches here are for the exterior lighting so mounted a light here and there's actually a light under the van that comes on it's nice at night it casts a light on the ground this is just a 120 volt Outlet and then in here we have controls which I'll talk a little bit more in a minute this one turns on the cooktop and this is a timer for the 120 volt water heater if we look to our right we have our front seats they're both on swivels we went with the scopima brand swivel seats the reason we want them is there are a handful of options to pick from but they seem to be the best they are definitely not the cheapest uh but when it comes to holding the seats in the van you definitely don't want to go with the cheapest so we went with what we thought would be the best um and the most strongest and that was kind of the theme throughout the van is if you cut Corners to try to save a bunch of money you'll probably regret it regret it and end up having to do it again all right so over here we have a dinette area and we went ahead and raised the floor mainly because if you're sitting in this seat you don't want your legs dangling same thing with this seat so to make them the same height you can see there is storage underneath here and then because we didn't want to waste that space additionally there's storage under here we do have a seat belt installed that goes through the frame that was just so someone could actually sit here and be safe obviously you want to table down while you're driving this table is nice it's on these lift brackets which are kind of common in Van builds but they hold nice and sturdy countertop is the same Butcher Block that we used for our countertop in the kitchen here all right so in the kitchen you see we have just regular faucet here that swells out obviously it could be used Outdoors uh you have the sink which I really like this sink is not too expensive I got it on Amazon and went ahead and added a soap dispenser I drilled a hole through there just because that way you don't have to worry about the soap falling all over the place drains down into our gray water tank we have an induction cooktop this is a true induction brand it's actually really popular in the Class B RV World and Van builds it does run 110 volts again I did not want the cooktop to be just on all the time whenever the inverter is on that way you can't accidentally bump the power button and turn it on which is why I put a switch on that also we noticed really quick that coming in another van it was really easy to bump these switches which is why we added this cover right here to keep you from bumping it because you don't want to accidentally turn on your hot water heater because it draws a lot of power and this is an all-electric van so that's the next thing I'll talk about here's our power system we went with an Ames power 2000 watt pure sine wave inverter it is a transfer switch also what's really nice about it is you have our shore power coming in and it automatically switches to shore power when you're plugged in and then when you're not plugged in it uses your batteries here in a minute I'll give you a look under the van so you can see a little bit more what's going on down there we're using our energy battery monitor we have 300 amp hours of lithium iron phosphate battery or 100 percent it's got 12 volt uh USB ports and a outlet multiple places in the van also this is custom system that I made here for our water level in the tank you can just press that I'll show you the water level in the tank you can press this switch here to turn on the water pump pulls from our water tank which we'll see in a minute there's also a switch in the back I was able to kind of custom build a little Network which I'll talk more about in the video on the plumbing as far as that this was just a piece of solid butcher Butcher Block that I cut down and the only finish I put on it was a polyurethane finish there is no stain just the natural acacia wood looks really nice also we went with this high sense refrigerator it is just a regular old 120 volt refrigerator so a lot of people uh will use some sort of 12 volt compressor fridge you don't really save a lot of energy you just don't have to have an inverter with that but our inverter pretty much runs all the time and it can run in a power save mode where it doesn't really use any power until something is needed so like until the refrigerator goes to turn on all right so our drawers were pre-made did not make these just added catches and magnetic catches this was part of a vanity set that I bought because if you buy kitchen traditional kitchen cabinets they protrude way too far into the van so I was able to find this bathroom vanity that I liked that had drawers is a 36 inch vanity I was able to kind of adapt it to work really nicely in here same thing we kind of cut Corners just a little bit when it came to the overhead counters I didn't really want to make them so we bought some 12 by 12 by 36 cabinets from Home Depot and they actually worked really nice see if we were able to cut them down fit them and bolt them to the frame of the van very solid another thing I went with kind of last minute was I decided to add a microwave uh it was nice because we went through all this trouble to finish the area which is kind of hard to finish through here and then ended up covering it all with the microwave but it's nice it fits in there really good nice small microwave actually we're able to buy this at Walmart for really inexpensive is under fifty dollars just due to the size but it fits perfectly in there so you do have a smart TV installed it's on a swivel mount it can come out you can watch it from the front you can watch it from the bed the main thing is at night you can swivel over here so there's more leg room so this is a full size mattress six inch Memory Foam we did have to cut a little bit off each side unlike some other van builds we chose to not do the bump outs uh on the sides and there's no reason to I'm about five foot 11 inches and I fit nicely on here um I do touch both sides when I stretch out but normally you know you sleep with your legs bent a little bit just depending on how you sleep it may or may not be necessary to do the bump outs so it's worked good for us two of us fit in this full-size bed nicely and this is a 159 inch non-extended wheelbase so 159 non-extended if you had an extended you could widen the bed a little bit just depending on what you wanted to do with the space so down below we do have passthrough to the basement right here we built this little storage area here it could be used as a closet or whatever else just kind of with the space the whole point was to retain access to the plumbing that is in the shower so here's our shower a lot of people are interested in how to put a shower in a ProMaster kind of just went with the FRP walls which are glued on kind of a traditional RV style faucet really like the shower head it has three settings so it has a like a low extremely just like a drip run and then a medium and then a full on what's nice about that is everyone knows you kind of take a military shower when you're in a van like this to consider of water and there's usually a spike of hot water that comes back if you shut it off completely on the shower head so the fact that it let it run but at a very low rate makes it so you don't have that real quick influx of water so we chose to go with a Thetford cassette toilet works very nicely plan is to just try to keep it number ones and not number two's but if it's an emergency it's there you just have to take it out if you want to take a shower not a big deal you could also put it under here and have it slide out multiple options for that uh just like a lot of Van builds and RV builds we went with Nautilus shower door and they really have the market when it comes to a shower door in a van for a lot of reasons but a little bit pricey but it as you can see it fits very nicely still lets light come through all right so for heating cooling lighting so lighting we have LED lights in the ceiling they are on a dimmer so you can turn them down which will not look great on camera same thing up here we have a lighting LED lights that you can change the colors on a switch here that's just for accent lighting at night and then these under cabinet lights the kitchen area here we do have a max air roof fan in the back and we actually went with the non-deluxe one because they have a lot of problems with uh battery voltage when using lithium batteries so try to keep it simple just a multi-speed fan and you have to crank it open by turning the knob right there which is obviously very easy to do when you're in bed do have a little reading light here that's white or black and it has USB charger this is the remote for our air conditioner which is mounted on the ceiling right here we went with the rec Pro made by Hutton which is out of Australia AC the jury's still out on it it is a good unit it's 9 500 BTUs it's pretty much the perfect size for the van I'm not completely sold on the way it works with the remote I would almost rather had a traditional wall thermostat to wire it to which is not an option but it is super quiet which is very important in a space this small and it is energy efficient is also very important I can run it completely off the batteries for a certain amount of time all right so as far as heating goes we just have a little electric space heater we do not plan on full timing the van right now so we will not be in cold climates with it so the electric space heater is just in case we get a cool evening where you need to warm up a little bit we also could run the van and just use the engine heater a lot of people do use diesel heaters if I was going to put some kind of gas powered heater in the van it would run off of gasoline the promasters have an access panel right here to the gas tank and it's very easy to put a gasoline heater I could even put it in the space in here so that may be something that's coming in the future all right so we've got storage here here the whole basement lots of cabinet storage up here kind of let this area clear and we went ahead and installed a this is kind of just a normal camper travel trailer window that we put in and it's nice because it opens and you have a screen we did also add the windows on the back those are just a regular ProMaster aftermarket uh Windows they do not open um so we had to cut that hole then on the side we chose to leave the door with no window just to have more more privacy and not have that large area where hot and cold could get in above here there's different ways to finish this off we just chose to go kind of a simple good looking method we use this to store like the window covers for the front windows so that's the most important thing we've found in keeping the van temperature regular especially when it's warm is to put the insulated covers on the windshield and side windows we also have a cover for the roof fan and the back windows as well to make it completely private and then the window over here obviously has curtains that close all right so the van itself is a 2014 Ram ProMaster and we went with the RAM for multiple reasons the main reason being it's very simple and seems to have a lot less issues than the Sprinter and the Ford Transit and another reason I picked the ram over the Sprinter is just because there's a lot more room side to side most sprinters you have to run the bed long ways and I just thought it worked out good to do this also it kind of came down to availability uh it was really hard to get a hold of one of these Vans especially for any kind of a reasonable price the high roof 159 wheelbase ones are definitely on a premium and they know that people use them for a lot of different things so you're not only competing against people who want them for work vans but also people who want them to do conversions like this and obviously Amazon uses Ram promasters for their vans so they kind of have the market on them right now so it is hard to find a new one I would have liked to have bought a new one but couldn't so we found this 2014 with under 100 000 miles and the sad thing is the prices on them are relatively close to what you'd pay for them new especially back in 2014 obviously the prices have risen over the years so when you're looking for uh what you're going to start with the van itself just do your research and understand the pros and cons for each because there are pros and cons to each all right so when we started the build we started basically by taking care of the floor so this started out life as like a catering work van and the floors needed some attention there was some surface rust on the inside of the floors that I had to basically just sand off then treat it and it was just surface rust on the inside of the bottom of the van is very clean the ram promasters are known for not rusting they do a really good job of galvanizing the metal and painting it from the factory uh then we then insulated the floor which with one inch foam and put down a subfloor structure with three quarter inch plywood and then over the plywood we put a self-stick vinyl floor that we used extra adhesive on from past experience using this type of flooring found that if you just use the self stick when it gets really hot or really cold it will it will pull apart but if you add extra adhesive at the time that you're installing it that will not happen and then it ends up being almost like a solid sheet of linoleum all right so the back of the van open it up so here's the expensive part of the van the basement area as you can see there's a lot of storage under here because of some of the decisions that we made along the way for instance we use this ProMaster specific water tank which actually is molded to fit around the rear wheel uh it holds almost 30 gallons of water I did do a custom um water level sensor which I kind of showed you a minute ago and I'll go more into detail on how I did that in another video uh we do have a 12 volt RV water pump sureflow pump the whole van is plumbed with expandable PEX a pipe we do have an outdoor shower back here this is a remote pump turn on switch and this is our gravity fill for our freshwater tank here so you can just take a hose and fill that up the shower is nice because it's just a quick connect plug-in and then you have all your different settings you can actually even wash the van itself with this it it pulls out pretty far it's kind of like one of my favorite features about back here in this box here this is where our batteries are all right so we have three 100 amp hour batteries and the reason I went for three 100 amp hours instead of like a 200 amp single battery is because the combined output is more when you use separate batteries these batteries are made by a company called chins I have used battleborn batteries in the past and except for a low temperature cut off there really is nothing uh greater so far in my experience with the battleborns than these and I was able to pay about a third of the price for these but but had I just had a blank check I probably would have went with three battleborn batteries we have our fused uh line here that goes into a master cutoff switch our distribution bus bars I'll talk about all of this more in another video but I will say that we have three different ways to charge the batteries in the van the first way is through solar power so on the roof we have two 200 watt solar panels for a combined total of 400 watts in ideal conditions they come into our victron 130 mppt charge controller which charges the batteries and that is our primary method of charging the batteries is through solar and I have not had a single day where the batteries have not been to 100 percent within a few hours of sunrise next to that we have a DC to DC charger which uses the Vans alternator to charge the battery at 30 amps so it it will output the same amount of power as our solar charger would under ideal conditions so while driving down the road you can top off your batteries or if you have a day where you don't have Sun you can run the engine for a while and accomplish the same goal the third way that we charge our batteries is through Shore power so you can see the short power comes in here it goes into the inverter like I said our inverter is a transfer switch and charger and it can charge it up to around 80 amps and then we have a power distribution center over there for 120 volt system and we have our 12 volt distribution fuse block here as far as the water heater goes we did go with a Bosch 4 gallon 120 volt water heater just to keep everything all electric the only difficult thing about going with this very popular water heater in a van conversion is if you need to drain it which you need to do in between uses if you use the van on a non-daily basis just every now and then to go camping you have to drain it I put quick connects on the fittings up there that way I can pop them off and the whole thing just pulls up off the wall and you can actually turn it over and drain it out here it would be nice if there was a unit electric like this that had a drain that you could just open in the bottom and drain through the bottom of the van so over here on the left side of the van we have our shore power Inlet this is a furion 30 amp 125 volt twist lock connection which I started out by going with a smaller regular extension cord style connection and realize that it just was not enough power to be able to power everything so when I'm on when I have the availability to plug into Shore power or use a generator I want to be able to run every electronic Appliance that's in the van including the hot water heater the air conditioner the stove the microwave all at the same time and 20 amps or 15 amps from a regular extension cord just was not enough so I made this upgrade halfway through the build and kind of Switched stuff out it went to bigger 10 gauge wiring to make it more like a traditional RV over here we do have a city water inlet so again if you're at the campground and you have the luxury of having an actual water connection you don't have to use the water tank inside you can just hook directly to here and then that bypasses the whole water pump system and pressurizes the plumbing lines in the van all right so the exterior of the van is pretty much just plain Jane work van which is honestly the look I was going for obviously we have our solar panels on the roof we have our AC on the roof but everything's very low profile you can obviously if you had the train die you'll kind of know what you're looking at just because there's a window right here and the plugs but I'm not trying to do the stealth thing that seems to be popular it's obvious what this is we did add some eye board running boards along both sides mainly this side there's a larger one it's a nice step when getting in and out we also made a screen magnetic screen opening that we put right here you can buy them aftermarket they're very expensive some places where we had the ability to make stuff easily we kind of that's where we kind of cut some cost so we made our nice screen door it has an opening right here that opens and closes and sticks together magnetically that way if you are parked and it's nice out you can have the store wide open have all that fresh air coming in and not worry about bugs coming in so last thing I'll talk about on the outside here is the van life Outfitters gray water tank which the nice things you can't really see it all you can see is the little three inch standard RV Outlet here this is just a gray water tank only holds about 27 gallons you can custom kind of make your own solution for a gray water tank but that right there was worth every penny of the 500 we paid for it in my opinion the only thing that I would have liked better is if the outlet was on the driver's side just because that is standard at an RV park is to have your utilities come out the driver's side but the exhaust really gets in the way and where it goes on the driver's side and it makes that not really possible so you just basically have to turn the van around to empty it or just run a hose underneath which is not that big of a deal all right so like I said there will be separate videos where I talk about the complete solar installation there'll be a video for the specifics on the electric uh and how I did it in the van showing you how I and where I ran the wiring there'll be another video on the plumbing system and I'll also have links to most of the products that I used in the van in the description so if you see something you like maybe you got an idea there should be a link in the description to the product I used if there's not be sure to leave a comment let me know I'll try to help you out the best I can final thing I'll say about the build I'm proud of what we were able to accomplish especially in a month we worked every day on it in some way to get it done it was actually very tedious work doing all the shiplap and the framing and the flooring everything about it every cut for the shower is on an angle it's not like building a cabin or a house where you're going to have level straight cuts for everything everything in a van has some sort of curve to it that makes it a much more difficult situation but I am pleased with how it came out hopefully you got some ideas from our build I know we did get a lot of ideas from other people's builds and that's the whole point of sharing this information so again be sure to like the video If it helped you out if you have any questions or comments leave them below sure to subscribe for more and until next time we'll see you later [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Jack of All Master of None

Views: 201,167

Keywords: DIY, custom, van, build, conversion, camper, RV, motorhome, Ram, Promaster, Sprinter, Mercedes, Ford, Transit, how to, start to finish, Solar, Off, Grid, No, quick, easy, cheap, cassette, toilet, shower, gray, grey, water, 159, extended, 136, Recpro, AC, A/C, 9500, campervan, luxury, self-build, self, modern, stunning, pro, professional, stealth, green, energy, efficient, Class B, best, tour, kitchen, microwave

Id: kPdE5U2MnvI

Length: 29min 18sec (1758 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022