Looking back

After 40 years of looking over my shoulder when backing up the car it's not easy to do the same thing with this big two meters wide Van and not having any windows in the back door.
Not willing do drive over playing kids or backing up into some trees or parked cars we came to the conclusion to look for options on how to change this.

We didn't (at this point) want to put windows in the back doors because we would probably always have them covered up. You still wouldn't see a small kid because back door windows are to high in the van to see a small kid playing near the van.

We decided for a brake light back up camera with monitor on the front window on the spot of the back up mirror.

We found this on Ebay for only 69 GBP + 7 GBP shipping to Sweden.

It arrived two day's ago and I installed it yesterday. Should be a simple straight forward job. 

Simply unscrew the old one. Also take out the small distance bolds because the are included with the new set. Screw in the new brake light with camera. You can adjust the camera's angle by just pushing on the top or on the bottom of the lens.

The system needs a signal from the backup lights to turn on automaticlly when you put the car in reverse. I checked at the back what color the cable was and searched for the same cable at the front near the fuse box. There I taped into the cable and connected the reverse cable feed for the monitor. Also installed the 10 meter long video cable that was included, the red power cable and the black zero/ground cable. For the power cable I tapped into a ticker red power cable under the driver seat that didn't have power on it anymore when I took out the key from the ignition.

It's a good idea to check if everything works before putting in all the cables to the front of the car. I was glad I did because...... when I was done with installation the system reported "No camera signal".

Took some time finding the problem but I had taken out some screws for installing the cable running up to the monitor. When I screwed one of them back I damaged the video wire. Easy fix but I was very happy that I tested the system before installing it. Now I new it was something I had done/damaged during installation. This narrowed the search a lot on finding the problem. 


The van doesn’t have a backup mirror inside so I temporarily used a GoPro attachment for the monitor. We will buy a cheap universal mirror with a window suction attachment to final solution.

All the lining is back in place and we have a backup camera/monitor installed! 

Making her look good.

Let's start by getting rid of the rust and making her shine!

To get her back to the way she looked leaving the factory we need address the rust on the inside under the floor, take care of some rust on the outside (back door hinges, behind the sliding rail from de cargo door, rims and some other small spots), polish the paintwork and blacken the trim.

Rust inside:

As long as there is nothing installed you can still get to everything without having to break down stuff. So let’s take out the walls and subfloor and start with a blank canvas.

Taking out the subfloor seemed easy enough. Just unscrew some bolds and out she goes…. until… one of the bolds snaps right off. Okay… so just drill it out and make some new thread, try a new bold and let’s move on.

The white floor looks not to bad at all. Only a few spots of rust. I grind the rusty spots back to the bare metal and use rust preventing primer as a first layer. After that I use white hammerite paint to cover and seal it.

And there it is, the white canvas!

Rust outside:

There was a very small (2mm) red spot just above the sliding door rail. Because I could unbolt it from the inside I decided to have a look if I could fix this spot real fast.

Well….. you know that the biggest part of the iceberg is under water…. same goes for a 2mm spot of rust just above a rail from a sliding door.

That little spot was all we saw.

This girl makes nothing go fast! I sanded every spot of rust and surrounding areas back to bare metal, primed it and used the original color paint to spray paint it again. On all the surface areas that came in direct contact with the rail I applied some white sealant. I also used some sealant around the bolds before screwing the rails back to the van.

Looks like new again.

The hinges on the backdoors had a little rust on them also. So when I was working on the rails I took care of the hinges at the same time.

Nice and white again!

Last bit of rust (as far as I know now…) were the rims. For now we want the van to look as close to original as possible so they had to be repainted also.

Took a lot of strength to get them off and I even had to buy a bigger tool to unbolt them but I won! 

Next step was cleaning, priming with wheel primer and painting with wheel paint in the original silver color.

Light grey trim?:

The trim on the side had turned to light grey and was a lot lighter than the bumpers on the van. I still had some special “bumper black” from the time I owned a Land Rover Discovery. The wheel arch trims on that car also turned grey when she came to age. 

Working with this stuff is super simple. Just degrease the plastic using something like ammonia and roll it on. It dries very vast and tadaaaa…

Just don’t get it on white paint!

Paint restoration:

Don’t really know what they have done with the van but it seemed like the van was faded all over the place and on some areas not at all. I had some commandant4 cleaner left over but that wasn’t enough to take care of the job and it's not unavailable here in Sweden. And I wasn’t happy with the result. So I bought a new pad for the eccentric grinder, a new bottle of polish and got on with it. Sealed everything with Turtle Wax (I love this stuff!).

Now I like the result. She looks like new!

Meet our Peugeot Boxer Van (soon to be Boxer Camper Van)

Why a Peugeot Boxer as a basis for our Camper Van

Peugeot Boxer?

Why did we go for the Peugeot Boxer as a basis to build our camper? Well, I looked at a lot of home (or semi-professional) build campers and what you can and can't do within the space you get.

I talked to my wife Rommy about it and we agreed that the Van (we already call her Mupke but more about that later) needed to be short and narrow enough to fit in a normal Swedish parking space. She needs to be wide enough so we could sleep from side to side. Service and parts need to be widely available. And the last demand was that she needs to be less than 6 meters long (19.68 ft) so we still would be able to get on the ferries and toll bridges at the cheapest price for a normal car. We love the Sprinters and Crafters but they are too narrow to sleep from side to side. Same goes for a lot of the other Vans from Ford, Nissan, and Opel etc.

In the end we ended up with a choice between Fiat Ducato, Citroën Jumper, Peugeot Boxer or Ram ProMaster. Looks like a lot of choices doesn’t it? Well they are actually all the same with only minor differences.

The size to look for was the so called L3H2 version.

Length L3 means that the overall length will be 5,998 meter. 

Height H2 means inside the height will be 1,932 meter.

And these vans will all be 2,050 meter wide.

This means she is under 6 meters, we can stand upright in her (even with the isolation taking up some space on the floor and ceiling) and we can sleep from side to side in her.

And this is her!

After we looked at several cars we decided to buy a 2013 (November 2012 registered) model Peugeot Boxer 3.0 HDI with 149.000 km on the clock. Took us a whole day to drive down to Borås and pick her up at Hedin Bil but she looked nice and with 12 month guarantee the risk wasn’t so big.

She needs some work on the outside with a small dent, trim that should be black and paintwork that's in desperate need of a good polish. But for the rest... not bad at all. 

On the technical side she needs service, the AC doesn't work (guarantee) the airflow selector works on 4 or not at all (guarantee) and the spare tire is stuck in it's bracket.

Time to get to work!!