Scandinavian road trip
Sat 26th July 2014   
After some hectic week-ends spent converting the car to a mini camper-van, we were finally ready for our road trip around Norway and Sweden.

  Beds and Storage
Sun 6th July 2014   
Time to address the important topic of the storage and sleeping solutions.

The concept

One of the interesting things about the Valp, is that it's a perfect small utility vehicle: It's about the same size as normal car, but you can fit an impressive amount of thing inside.

Losing this just for the sake of a camper conversion used a couple of weeks each year does not sound very optimal.

  Audio system
Mon 23rd June 2014   
A decent audio system is part of the comfort of modern vehicle.

Components selection

Obviously, since we had nothing at all, we had to select and buy all the necessary parts:

  Fridge installation
Tue 10th June 2014   
Camping without fresh beverage or food is not nice.

Chosing the fridge

After having checked the various type of solutions available (portable cooler plugged on the cigarette lighter, absorption coolers than runs on multiple power sources, special fridges running on 12v, etc...) we finally decided that the best for us was to actually go for a good old standard 220 volt fridge, just smaller - so it would fit in our installation.

  Renewable energy
Mon 2nd June 2014   
So, we decided to try the solar energy to power our vintage camper van.

As for the general design of the camper, I dived back in the swampy fields of humankind's collective knowledge to extract information about hooking up solar panels.

I have to admit that I was not impressed.

I would have thought that this was a mostly solved problems, but it appears that the field is a giant mess of conflicting informations about do's and don'ts, so in the end I had to take a leap of faith and take sides.


  Camper conversion
Thu 15th May 2014   
Before starting any significant project, it's generally a good idea to evaluate the state of the art, and then only proceed:

There's probably some glory in spending time solving an already solved problem, but it's definitely not time effective.

  Engine top replacement
Fri 2nd May 2014   
Despite all our previous attempts the engine was not working particularly well, so I decided to do something I should have done a long time ago: Check the compressions.