I have mine all in the cavities of the doors. No issues thus far - not a whole lot of moisture in there as far as I have seen.



The hardest part is getting it tight enough to the skin so that the window tracks clear on the front doors.

 

Thinsulate is fine in the slider and rear doors. Just keep it away from the latch mechanisms. Do not spray 3M 90 on the pieces beforehand. Install and arrange them first and then pull back the corners and spray adhesive behind on the fibers and skin surface. Then gently push back in place. There isn't a need to do that all over as the webs between the structure and skin will help keep the pieces in place.

All the best
Hein

nice look at our rear door speaker adapters with JBL GT7-6 installed.

 

Thinsulate is defiantly the way to go in doors -

 

Thanks for guidance! The Thinsulate should be arriving this week sometime! Regards

 

Thermal bridging? Is there any consensus on this?

I’m down to clown with a bunch of thinsulate in the rear door. But, with all that front facing metal, does the thinsulate actually do anything to insulate the van?

My understanding is that stuffing the thinsulate into the rear door will insulate INSIDE of the door, but the vast majority of heat transfer will be unaffected due to the metal conducting on both sides of the thinsulate


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My understanding is that stuffing the thinsulate into the rear door will insulate INSIDE of the door, but the vast majority of heat transfer will be unaffected due to the metal conducting on both sides of the thinsulate

I'm with you on this one, but opinions vary greatly. My own plan is to ignore the cavities, considering them as places for "good air flow" behind the walls I'll build inside the van. I'll lose some interior space this way, but I believe I'll have much more consistent insulation value all around in doing so.

 

Thermal Bridging! There was a video posted on Utube of a guy insulating a van over in Europe - he did some pretty extensive heat transfer calculations showing the merits of insulating. I don’t remember exactly about the doors, but with conduction, convection, and radiation as potential heat transfer mechanisms, I believe that there is some moderate benefit of insulating the cavities (at least to address / reduce the convection aspect of heat transfer). My van is equipped with the interior wall / door procection package and therefore have some plastic sheathing that cuts down on the covection aspect of the thermal bridging. Some Upfitters cover the walls and doors with supplemental layers that further reduces the effects of thermal bridging. Insulating inside the cavities would definitely reduce the surface area for convection, so in theory it would provide some marginal to moderate benefit - at least it would provide sound dampening. But like most post on this forum about insulating / heat loss / thermal bridging - its just one’s opinion.

 

Old thread, but I came up with a methodology that I used to pull Thinsulate (SM600L, in my case) into the small areas in my rear door and slider that I wanted to share without starting a new thread just for it given the umpteen insulation threads already. Hein has advocating using a string being sucked through the small structures with a vacuum / shop vac as a way to run a "fish" cord through the walls, which is a great suggestion. I have used that method with actual fishing line and a small bobber to great success, elsewhere. For my slider, it was easy without the vacuum trick. I first tried to use a larger Klein Tool fiberglass fish tape but found it easily hung up on structures in the door like the door handle mechanism. Thinking about it, I came upon the realization that lawn trimmer cord might be ideal as a fish as well as a pull. It worked great. It was just rigid enough and small enough to more easily pass through the tighter areas in the door, and was strong enough to withstand a good jerking. I was even able to fish a piece of insulation from the right side of the door cavity up and over the top of the door.

My method for attaching the Thinsulate to the lawn trimmer cord is pictured, below. I first cut a strip to length that was about 1/2" wider than the cavity width to get better space filling (5.5" for the slider window frame), then at one end I made a trifold, followed by piercing the trifold with the end of my shears (a skewer, knife tip, small screw driver, ice pick, etc. would also work) through all three layers, and back-inserted the tip of the trimmer line. I then doubled over the inserted line, twisted a few times and coated the twist with some vinyl electrical tape.

Where the vertical door frame interfaced with the horizontal top cavity, the trimmer line wanted to slide out a small gap in the structure toward the window side and became bound in the crack, so while I pulled the line with one hand, I used the other hand to push the line back through the gap with a plastic pry tool (could also use a butter knife, wider flat blade screwdriver, etc.) and guide it up and around the bend. When the Thinsulate made it to the access hole in the upper left corner, I pulled hard enough to get all of the electrical tape connection out of the hole to unwrap it.

The 60" long piece that I pulled went all the way across the top and about 2/3 down the right hand side. It was then easy to pull the other vertical pieces to complete the window frame.

BTW, to the discussion above, ignoring convection and radiation transfer inside a cavity (your doors, pillars, supports, etc) is missing the potential to reduce a lot of heat transfer. Surface area is key. The conductive bridging potential is greatest into the cavity as this is where there metal distance is smallest and where the surface area is greatest, whereas the cross-sectional area interfacing the van is small through the vertical steel structure (door frame/edge). In the interior regions of doors, it's easiest to use a mat type insulation rather than rigid. Any gaps left allow for more convection--think a blanket with air gaps on your body on a cold night. Of course the Thinsulate doesn't have the best R value, nor value in the market, but it does have some significant, unique attributes that make it so nice for situations such as this.