Vannin' Home Forums General Discussion General Discussion What Did You do To your Van Today?

I have my new restoration project to work on. A Martin RV sunroof with mirrored glass. It needed a new operator.

I picked up two dual operators when I was in Carson City. That was the whole point of the trip. The correct operators are out of production and the ones currently available would take a lot of doing to get them to work.



The original one has a bent arm that is outside of my skill level to repair. The two I pulled are bent but nothing that a large hammer didn't fix. I got them straight again, assembled, greased, and installed.

Now I just have to clean up the old frame, paint it with some VHT aluminum colored paint, clean the lower frame, paint, and install some universal glue in weather stripping. I dunno if I wanna keep it or sell it yet. When I'm done it will be light years ahead of how it was when I got it.

Nice score Charlie.

Great score!

Yesterday I put up the blue interior ceiling light I made, which will be slightly recessed into the ceiling finish panels once they go up. It measures 5" x 74" and has a removable textured acrylic lens cover just in case I ever need to get inside it to replace lights or whatever.













It's hooked to my dome light circuit so it comes on when the doors are opened and the headlight knob is turned to the left, and I also wired in this dimmer so I can control the brightness.

Decided to convert the cluster to purple LED lights. Didn't realize the 194s in the cluster don't just slide out of the plastic base, you more or less have to break them to get them out. I found if I bent the tabs on the LED bulbs around to the side I could get them to work with the contacts in the base. Some genius double-sided taped down the dash face, too, I had to cut through some of that to remove it. No idea why, they don't rattle even if you don't have all the screws in.

But it looks cool now. And the heater control bulb was out entirely, so now you can actually see that.

I also painted the grille, I had painted the headlight doors white to match the body and did a quick, rough job on the grille, painted the upper of the bars black and the lower and frame white. Eventually I think I'm going to do something similar to one in the Readers Rides section and cut out the plastic grid and upper bar, smooth it and put some mesh in it. I found big sheets of grille mesh on eBay for around $30, that's not too crazy.

We wired up the ignition on the Econoline so I could at least drive it when I want (although with nothing else hooked up - lights - I will have to do it on the sly). The spark we have been getting has been on the weak side, which shouldn't be the case with our new 'high performance' coil, so for giggles we put the previous Accel SuperStock coil back in and it was stronger, but not light years better. Dunno why we aren't getting a brighter/stronger spark.

While on the test drive today, it seems my hacky turn signal cam fix last week didn't take, turns out the adapter for the Grant wheel I had on it will never work with the inner reset ring doohickey mechanism.....should've just bought a whole new switch. Going to do that and then put on an OEM steering wheel at the same time. Will sell the Grant one here once it's off.

The good news - she's running a little bit better and minus a few extra tweaks we'll probably be done with the engine. Still need to flush the radiator and trans fluid.

Oh and the rest of the wiring (still).

You got a good ground?

Good question.

Wired up some usb & 12v charging ports on the back of my driver side rear bench. ⚡️