I spent all weekend working on the Doom Truck with AJ. We are upgrading the shop box, making it a bit nicer to camp in, which mostly means cleaning up all the interior surfaces and building in a permanent bed frame with storage underneath. We’re not going to go full RV style with cabinets and fold-outs everywhere, because we like the open feeling it currently has, and we want it to continue being versatile.

First of all we have to stop all the water coming in, which caused a bunch of problems over the winter. One of the window frames leaks – but there are also lots of holes drilled through the walls and floor where previous owners had bolted down various workbenches and storage containers. Our plan was to weld plugs into all these holes, then grind ’em flat. We can always weld tie-down tabs onto the sheet metal if we want to.

Well… it was a long complicated process, and I started to bore myself trying to recount the details, so I’ll just say that it took half a dozen trips to various hardware stores and over $1000 spent on tools and supplies before nonstop labor finally got us to the point that we could start welding around 4 PM on Sunday. Oh, my.

We did end up making a fair bit of progress once we got going: all the floor holes are filled and ground down, so the wheels won’t kick water up into the box anymore, which means we can put down that nice cork flooring without having it rot from underneath… And I patched up the assortment of bolt holes down one side of the truck with big round rivety-looking carriage bolt heads, welded in place. The welds look terrible and it’s going to need a bunch of cleanup, but at least there’s no more daylight leaking in.

I didn’t get to the bolt holes on the other side of the truck; AJ thinks she will try to tackle those during the week. There are also a couple of big square access panels for equipment long since removed, with extremely janky covers… we’re going to weld the covers on, stuff some insulation in the gap, and weld them shut on the inside as well. Finally, we need to cut away and rebuild the threshold, which has leaked enough water in that the wood is a little rotten…

But hey, this is not a bad set of problems to have. The truck works great; we don’t have any mechanical problems to fix right now. It took a long time to get our metalwork process going but now things are moving quickly. And wow is it going to be nice to park our giant clanky apocalypse-proof monster truck at every festival and camping trip we go on this summer, then throw open the doors and have a clean, stylish, convenient, and actually pretty damn swanky home-away-from-home inside. I’m looking forward to it.

Also looking forward to installing a muffler, now that I can weld stuff in my back yard, because *damn* does that thing need one.

Oh yeah! I just discovered the wonder that is turbodiesel propane injection. It’s like nitrous for a gas engine, giving a significant horsepower boost, which will be super useful when climbing up hills – but not only that, it actually improves fuel efficiency, cleans up the exhaust, *and* puts no additional stress on the engine, since it actually *lowers* burn temperature slightly. Way simpler and cheaper than any of the other power-boosting improvements we’d been considering, and we’re already planning to have a propane tank on board to power the stove, heaters, etc. Super cool, it should mean it’s no longer a hassle trying to convoy out to an event with other vehicles.