Despite fearing the worst, we cut the first whopping great hole in the van today, in this case, the hole for the 900×500 Seitz window thats going into the sliding door on the passenger side. Not before measuring and tweaking our plan once again, though!
In the end we opted for an actual cutout of 903×502 ; don’t ask why, we can’t remember but its a couple of mm more than Seitz’s cutout size. We couldn’t decide if theirs included the required 6mm gap for sealant or not, so just opted for something a little bigger. At the end of the day, the inner wooden frame is going to be the determining factor.
Following the advice from others who have done this sort of thing before, we covered the areas to be cut, both on the inside and outside, with masking tape, to try and protect the metal a bit and, as it turns out, catch quite a lot of the metal filings that we were about to produce.
We opted to cut from the inside out – not sure in hindsight if this was the right move, as quite a lot of the debris from cutting ended up inside the van. I don’t know if it would have done otherwise, as we couldn’t see the filings on the floor outside the van afterwards.
To start with, we cut several pilot holes using the smallest drill we had available and gradually opened them up to accommodate the hole cutter’s central drill. We had 4 of these holes, one in each corner, and one about midway along each edge to try and make it easier to get the jigsaw in place.
Pilot holes expanded using increasing drill sizes and then a hole cutter (22mm diameter) used to create the corner curves and access holes for jigsaw
Then it was just a case of several deep breaths (the damage has been done by now anyway) and slowly and steadily cutting along the lines, trying to keep to them as closely as possible. As the panel began to vibrate excessively during the cutting, we stuck loads of gaffer tape on them to try and reduce that, and allow us to see the line, rather than something resembling a guitar string thats just been plucked…!
Eventually we finished cutting and out popped the (rather sharp edged) panel – actually not as bad as we’d feared and quite a sense of achievement and relief! Several quick checks with a tape measure added to that sense of relief 🙂
Cris looking quite pleased with the outcome
We decided to dab a bit of rust treatment/prevention onto the edges and then prime them, as much as you can anyway being 1mm thick at best. That took a few hours to dry properly which gave us time to start adding the 25mm thick frame battens we’d cut beforehand. We had tried building a standalone frame but our woodworking knowledge, skills and equipment was way too primitive for such things, so opted to just cut and glue each side independently. The downside to that approach is that each one takes several hours to dry. The panel also had a distinct curvature which we wanted to ‘correct’ as the Seitz windows are designed to be mounted on flat panels. We couldn’t face the prospect of trying to sand/file/plane the frames to level off the curve etc, so decided to just pull in the curve using lots of clamps and Sikaflex glue.
Hopefully that should be enough to pull in the curvature of the panel
Once we’d glued our first batten, there was little more we could do as all our clamps were in use, so we continued with rust treatment here and there on the inside and started to remove the plywood floor. We didn’t make much progress on this though as most of the screws were rusted solid, so had to leave them soaking in good ol’ WD-40 overnight.
All in all, a productive, slightly scary, day, and as many have said before, cutting the hole in the van isn’t anywhere near as bad as you might think. Just measure several (hundred) times and cut maybe on the side of caution – you can always make the hole bigger, after all.
Around the World in a Campervan 