BUILD THREAD: Bear Cave (aka Couples Therapy)

USB-C cell phone holder.. a mash-up of ProclipUSA cup mount paired with RAM Quick-Grip. We both have Pixel Android phones, this combo is sturdy but took several attempts to align the cup hole mount. Wanted to avoid adding magnets to the back of our phones, as those get swapped out more often than our car mounts

Great start to the build thread! Bravo, @dorkmatt! 👏

Do some measurements on the bed. Just chatting yesterday with @Henchman about his mid-length on E-W vs N-S beds - discussing what we found in the Sprinter then re-evaluated in the Transit: the E-W doesn't save as much space as it seems unless going with a narrower mattress. The bed you mention / tag is 60" wide - same width as a queen - and it shows 80" to the edge of the flares - also queen length, but can't be an actual queen mattress because of the flares / walls - meaning a foam mattress versus a normal / real mattress. And with the 80" to the flares, you've gotta go with little to no insulation.

N-S placement /does/ take up a bit more space; but not as much as the 80-inch versus 60-inch seems. The trick is to measure with the rear doors closed from all-the-way against the doors / windows forward. Basically, there's more than 10" from the D-pillars to the doors. You end up with 8-10" lost in the N-S vs E-W, not the 20" it seems. But you get to run any queen mattress you prefer.

In our Sprinter, we ran the mattress all the way against the doors as described above. We ended up modifying the bed platform (which was very similar to what you linked but in aluminum) and shortening the length quite a bit. Maybe lost 6" or less from E-W. But ran a legit queen comfortable mattress.

In the Transit, we took up a couple more inches with the aluminum frame to accommodate the, "couch mode," setup. If I re-did it, we'd modify the frame to reduce length by another two inches and be down to about 7-8" difference.

Just something to consider if you want a comfortable bed.

We had Allied Body & Frame in Berkeley do the Flarespace install - $1600. Took 3 weeks to schedule, dropped off on a Monday, picked up the following Monday. It sounds like they're averaging several installs every month, they're one of the few local "official" Flarespace installers in the Bay Area. My guess is without our hiccup (see below), the install would have been probably just about a week.

We're super impressed with the color matching, though neither of have much experience with body work on past vehicles. The drivers side has an Arctic Turn window, the passenger side is blank.

One minor issue.. Flarespace forgot to send a wooden bracket - this is sandwiched in between the window and fiberglass flare. Without it, Allied was quite confused of the gap and attempted to use some door molding to "beef it up", but they tested this with water and it of course leaked... A quick email to Flarespace, they responded on a Friday afternoon within minutes, acknowledged the problem, and sent out a "wooden spacer" that arrived a week later. We were able to remove the window, along with attempted door trim, and then re-install with the wooden spacer. It seems fit great, but we haven't done a complete soak test.

It was a little weird that Allied didn't reach out to Flarespace directly to remedy the problem, as they seemed to know each other by first name - but instead effectively left it for us to resolve.

We had a brief scheduled hiatus for some medical procedures - yaya, mid-life crisis timing! Though I'd bet our pace will be slower than others on the forum, new skills, day jobs, and all that.

We're back at it and have a mostly finished Aluminess Driver Side Tire Rear Rack installed. This was a bit tricky, learning the process of placing clear vinyl wrap (that is provided) that protects the door from the brackets. We avoided bubbles mostly and were amazed at how well these stick, when the procedure is followed correctly.





We ended using both of the provided "spacers" or thicker washers, along with normal size washer on the opening side door bracket. For the weather stripping, we used sheet metal shears and will likely look at a Sika product to "rubberize" the exposed portion of the stripping. Note that the 2021 stripping has is not 100% rubber, but has some aluminum bits which must be removed (sorry, forgot to take a picture of this portion).





We're waiting for the Kiley Owen alternative tire bracket (found on the Facebook Ford Transit USA Owners group), instead of the weak Aluminess provided "U" tire bracket. It's unclear what pricing and availability will be, otherwise we may end up with a SendCutSend order ourselves Kiley is working on a 6 lug AWD version.

We finished up a Maxxfan install towards the middle/front of the van- the thinking being we'd like to exhaust food cooking smells and a portable shower steam in this area (more so then the back of the van). We mashed up a few different videos for building a large checklist of prep tasks, install steps, tools & materials required.

• Wander Libre's How to Install a MaxxFan - use of PPE, wooden frame design
• Levity Vans's How to Install a MaxxAir Fan 2019 - better metal shards collection method (box), DIYvan as cut template

The major lessons we learned:

• Countersinking the wooden frame holes was a mistake, migrating to t-nuts mostly worked - but a few "lost teeth" and just spun. These we replaced with washers and lock nuts, in fact we ended up using lock nuts for them all. It's surprising how many installs just use self-tapping sheetmetal screws, without any frame to cinch into.
• Bolts paired with butyl tape gave us a lot of control on sinking down vs. screws, hat tip to boating community.
• As well documented, self leveling lap seal is difficult to control but manageable with patience and a bit of luck. We'll probably cover it all with grey lap seal at some point.
• A single layer thin trash bag isn't thick enough to catch a molten hot roof bit, two of our initial holes burned right through the bag and fell onto the floor - but this did at least capture most of the metal bits.
• We used some scrap packing straps to "center" the Maxxfan white bracket + DIYvan mounting bracket over our blue wooden frame, this pre-drilling was mostly worth it. If we did this again, we're only pre-drill the brackets + actual metal roof, but not the wooden frame.

Guessing that @Hein's DIYvan bracket needs to be covered in lap seal fully to protect from the elements? We haven't gone lap seal crazy yet.

We got our Aluminess Rear Door Tire and BackPACK installed. The provided instructions were badly photocopied, printing out a fresh copy from their online available PDF's was much more legible. It seemed like some additional spacers (thicker washers) would have been useful, but we made it work in the end.

Our biggest recommendation would be to take photos of your doors ahead of time, otherwise you may be trying to over optimize the re-mounting. The BackPACK hit against the welded frame, we added some Neoprene Rubber Trim to damped the slam noise (I don't remember which exist size from the sample pack).

We'll probably try to glue this, thinking of using "3M Black Super Weatherstrip Adhesive, 03602", which describes itself as .. designed specifically to bond rubber gaskets and weatherstripping to metal surfaces.

Finished an initial Thunderbolt Lock install, starting on the rear doors. Instructions are piecing together their provided YouTube videos, no useful written instructions were included (pretty branding tho). In the great tradition of vendors rushing to adapt products to the adventure/vanlife space, they forgot to mention any rust protection after drilling several holes.

Our install includes the safety "Lock Inhibitor Relay", essentially meaning that the deadbolt won't trigger when 12V ignition sense is present (aka - the van is running). The wiring for this is a little complicated, also due to their current shipping relay setup uses different colored cables - than their online videos.

Our van configuration had a 12V cigarette outlet on the rear passenger side (aka Auxiliary PowerPoint). I used this as the ignition sense into the Thunderbolt relay. This is less than ideal, as this is still energized once the engine is off for some timeout period (around 30 minutes). I need to research a better ignition sense cable back here.. suggestions welcomed.

Their offered rivet tool broke after two rivets (they were nice enough to send a replacement within a week, even responding on a Sunday evening). One set of holes we accidentally drilled too big, the provided rivets were too small - we ended up using some 8-32 stainless steel bolts. While threading the cables on the passenger side, we included a spare DC cable for future efforts - say a reverse spot light.

The deadbolt is very effective and works as advertised. The workflow is a little odd.. say you unlock the van with Ford's remote, one-click just for the front doors. Start the van, the inhibitor will kick in and prevent the deadbolt from receiving any power. The problem here is the rear doors are now locked and not safe for emergency personal to open at an accident. The workaround appears to be always clicking the open remote twice, to open all doors - this way the deadbolt is already in the locked position when the inhibitor kicks in.

In our focus to complete all things external to the van, I started tackling the shore power connections. Our design goal here was to minimize too much bending over, sadly the resulting bracket just turned out to be too tall (where it will likely drag in the dirt at certain angles, being lower than the factory tow hitch).

The good news is my Fusion 360 skills are slowly improving, and it's amazing taking a lasercut MDF prototype and turning it into cut aluminum real world piece. Further lessons learned include, just get it powder coated - spray paint looks awful, even adding a paint roller texture made this worse. Credit to @natecostello for inspiration.

The next version will be black power coated with a 90° bend. The focus will be on all the external connections - 12 VDC out, Ethernet RJ45, 120 VAC out, and a rear backup light. We'll move the 120 VAC in to the under D pillar recessed square hole, likely with a small L5-30 "pigtail" to make the insertion and twisting a bit easier; instead of having to crawl around to find the correct orientation. Also adding some pilot light 8mm indicators for power in and power out state.