Good morning team!

I've mentioned it before, but for anybody who doesn't religiously keep up with all the posts here, I'm headed across the country in early fall to start on my PhD work.

I don't fly anymore, so in lieu of taking a single day of travel to get from one side of the US to the other, I'll be spending a few days (weeks?) on the road in my van, which will ultimately be my home for the duration of my PhD.

Yeah, you read that right: I'm officially becoming a vanlifer.

To head off any potential criticism at the pass, I'm not a content creator (aside from blog posts and the occasional educational YouTube video on literature), so save for some musings here and some b-roll in the videos I put out once or twice a year, don't expect to be inundated by vanlife content or anything like that.

The van conversion has been my big project really for the last few weeks (I've owned the van and most of the materials for like eight months, but the transmission shit the bed within the first month, and the dealership ghosted me, so it was in the shop for quite a while), and it's been a really interesting, fun journey, though not without its problems.

While I enjoy waxing philosophic and talking books with the best of them, it has always been super important to me to have a very wide set of skills. I've always enjoyed the label "maker," and while you won't see me creating big robots or innovating some grand new way to pour cereal with some 3D printed part, I am pretty confident in most situations that I can throw something together with my tiny little woodshop that will, at the very least, get things going again.

The van, though, has really forced me to expand my knowledge base.

Take, for example, the roof rack.

Now, it should go without saying that I am for all intents and purposes a poor college student. This ultimately means that, while I've been planning and designing this van apartment thing, the first and foremost consideration has been to spend as little money as humanly possible.

I've been able to snag deals on my battery and solar panels and stuff, but roof racks for cargo vans are EXTRAORDINARILY expensive. We're talking in the neighborhood of $2000 for a roof rack.

Absolutely insane. There's no way I was going to spend a significant percentage of the price of my van on a roof rack, especially given that it only had to support a couple of solar panels.

So what to do?

I spent a decent amount of time wandering around Lowes and poking through the cut offs at my local metal shop just trying to find something that would work, and I ultimately settled on Unistrut. It's cheap (compared to extruded aluminum), it's super versatile (I swear I'm not sponsored), and while I'd only used my angle grinder for cutting river rock tiles and some heavy duty sanding, I had the tools on hand.

I spent like $140 on struts and hardware, then headed home to try and figure it out.

Among the hardware I purchased were stainless steel bolts, lock washers, and a not insignificant number of nylon lock nuts. I didn't have a great plan for how I'd put this thing together, so I just followed my heart when I bought all the bits and pieces.

Fast forward a day or so: I'd done all my measurements, cut the struts, riveted panels together, bolted everything in place, and mounted it all on top of the van. A hundred bucks of hardware replaced a two-thousand dollar roof rack, so problem solved, right?

I was feeling good, nursing the cuts and scrapes that I assume come with rookie metal fab. As I showered the day's worth of sweat and grime off, I was picturing driving down the road with my new solar setup, and I couldn't rid myself of the mental images of my massive sail of steel and aluminum tearing off and smashing into some poor shmuck's windshield on the highway.

Laying in bed, I poured over every site I could find detailing the specific hardware for automotive fixtures.

Nylon lock nuts and lock washers are both recommended for high vibration uses (like driving down the highway), and it turns out the Loctite I used was exactly the right type for my purposes.

I slept soundly, for the most part, and I've been thinking about that since.

First thing's first: this is by no means me patting myself on the back for being so smart and knowing all the things, but I definitely felt a real sense of accomplishment and satisfaction just for having the right instincts.

It's stupid niche knowledge that I rarely ever use, and it's something that I could have just looked up real quick, but there's something kinda cool about having that info tucked away in my brain. I couldn't tell you where it came from; it may have been some YouTube videos, or it could have been from when we made a soup can muffler for my dad's car when I was super young -- I have no clue, but it's up there for some reason.

So, why does this matter? Why is it worth writing about?

I'm often the oldest dude in my classes, but I'm still a relatively young guy. My parents had a computer in the house growing up, but I didn't really become a legit netizen until my mid- to late-teens. Most of the time, when I wanted to know something, I had to look it up in an actual book. I still have dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri? who knows) from my childhood, and I get a little giddy when I see those World Books in used bookstores. I have a McMaster Carr catalogue buried in a desk drawer somewhere, and I treasure both my pocket and my full size Desk Refs.

Don't confuse this as some kind of derision against the internet or anything like that; I'm a huge internet goober now, and I frankly struggle to consider what it'd look like if I didn't have the world at my fingertips.

That said, while I struggle to picture how I'd go about my day without my phone or computer or tech or whatever, days spent making stuff help illuminate what that'd look like:

[If my dogs didn't wake me up in the morning, I'd still be up and moving at a reasonable time (thank you The Air Force for building a halfway decent internal clock in my brain). I make a pot of coffee every morning, but I'm confident I could do it over an open fire if I had to (because God knows I'm not skipping my coffee). I know I've got to make some headway on this van, so I take stock of what I have in the garage, then hop in the car for the hundred-and-first trip to Lowes for this project -- no GPS necessary (this is, after all, the hundred-and-first trip; I'd be ashamed of myself if I didn't know how to get there by now). I don't know what I need, but the employees are nice (even though I'll do everything in my power to avoid even making eye contact with them), and I've got half a brain at least, so I'm pretty sure I can find stuff that works. Truck back home, and start cutting stuff. My headphones are all dead (oh how I miss the days of my iPod and wired headphones (though that's the subject of another post)), so I throw in ear plugs and quietly work until it gets dark. Hopefully I've finished the project for the day, but any headway is nice. I head inside, take a shower, and collapse in bed, wiped out from a decent day's work.]

There's an interesting conversation to be had, I think, about the fact that I can lay out the entire last paragraph of things in a way that sounds triumphant when, in reality, that's just how we did things like fifteen years ago. There's also an interesting conversation to be had about the fact that I felt the need to caveat it with "I'm pro-technology! I'm pro-working smarter not harder! I'm pro-using all the tools at your disposal!"

I often find myself pondering why, on days when I'm all but unplugged, I feel a profound sense of satisfaction by the time I go to bed. I can call upon knowledge buried in the back of my brain, use maths that I hated as a kid, I can put something together that didn't exist twelve hours prior.

And, to highlight one more little thing in this impossibly long post, I can fail, and everything will be okay.

Yesterday, my big project for the van was my sleeping solution. I'm going a little off the beaten path for my van, mostly because it's going to be something of a scholarly haven for me (unlike other folks building their vans, where things like bicycle storage and massive battery banks take up huge swathes of space), so I've been dwelling on a way to convert my sleeping space from a bed to a table. I had a bunch of ideas, but after seeing this strange convertable table at Ikea, I opted to put together a shelf on wheels which on one side has a platform which folds down into the bed, and the other has a booth table top (it makes sense in my brain, and I was able to mock up a version in CAD which I was happy with). My laptop was dead yesterday morning, and I really didn't care to fish out the charger and figure all that out, so I just went into the garage and started taking measurements in the van and cutting plywood.

It went fairly smoothly, all things considered. I found some old casters, cut out all the wood, made supports, and glued and nailed together the main frame for the structure. By the end of the day, I had what was essentially a bookshelf on wheels.

The problem is, it just barely fit inside the van -- I'm only able to maneuver it inside the space because it's not complete, so the top half of the structure flexes under the ceiling. Turns out I didn't take into account the height of the casters in my design.

Now I have a shelf which I can just barely wedge into my van, and which took a full day to put together.

And it's glued and nailed, which means I can't just take it apart and fix it, I'll have to be a little destructive to get the thing fitting properly.

Don't get me wrong, I was pretty pissed. I started to beat myself up, but then it occurred to me that it really wasn't that big of a big deal. In total, I lost about two square feet of cheap, crappy plywood (of which I have plenty), and maybe thirty minutes of work? It was easy to gut-check the fact that this error had cost me the entire day of work, but in reality, it really hadn't.

I'd fucked up, but I'm confident I can fix it, and I know to pay attention a little closer next time.

After all is said and done, I think those are some of the best parts about making stuff. The maker in all of us logs away little details about materials; it notes the weird, creative assembly options for furniture and other cool stuff. It evaluates our skill sets and lets us believe we can do something, and when we mess up, it stores away the lessons learned and updates that internalized skill set (often times noting that we're more capable than we thought we were when we woke up this morning rather than less). The more we do, the more we stretch our skillsets, the less complicated the world feels. We feel more able, and things feel less out of reach.

I think that's pretty neat.

Until next time.

  • Austyn