Van Conversion: Part 7 - Mounting the tanks

Time to free up some space from inside the house and put the fresh water tank, waste water tank, and calorifier under the chassis.

Prep

To hold the tanks under the chassis I'm used M8 hook bolts, aluminium square tube, washers, and nylock nuts.

One of six sets of mounting hardware

I cut 3 330mm lengths of aluminium square tube, and drilled 2 8mm holes through each end to accommodate the hook bolts.

Raised the side of the van

Redundant handbrake cable mount for European vans

The chassis comes with the handbrake cable mount/guide for both sides of the van, but it needs to go to make way for the fresh tank.

Mount removed

Useless hunk of metal

Filed and painted with Zinc 182

After experimenting with some spare alumunium angle on how the hook bolts will go in to the chassis rails, I opted to cut the hook portion shorter to allow the hook to enter the chassis rail higher up.

Quick work with the dremel

Protected with Zinc 182

Next comes drilling in to the chassis rail to take the hooks.

Obligitory rust prevention with Zinc 182

Fresh water tank

Got the hook bolts in and square tube all mounted up and...

The hook bolts were too long!

A quick trip to the local engineers' supplies shop, and another set of cutting and spraying later...

A successful test fit

All 3 sets of mountings in place

Waste water tank

Not a lot to show here, as the process was the same as the fresh, but here it is.

Raise the other side of the van

All mounted

There's a slight issue with the waste tank's positioning. On the top there's an access hatch which prevents the tank sitting further back because it conflicts with a chassis beam. As an option I could turn it up side down. This does have the advantage of being able to use the access hatch for cleaning without dropping the tank, but at the cost of losing one of the inlets (on the opposite pictured above). When it comes to plumbing things in I'll have a play around and see what works.

Calorifier

For those that don't know, a calorifier is a device which takes energy from another source, such as an engine coolant feed, and uses it to heat up water via a heat exchanger. The one I'm using here also has a 3kw immersion heater. In the first instance I won't be hooking up the heat exchanger, relying on the immersion heater, but when I do it won't be to the engine feed but will use a diesel hydronic heater.

The first problem I needed to overcome was that the exterior of the calorifier was its very fragile foam insulation. I need to protect it from getting pitted and worn from road chips and such. To do this I used one of the cut-outs from the van when installing the windows.