Sorry for the lack of posts recently, there’s not been much happening guitar wise; my current builds are unchanged since I started the new job.

That’s not to say I haven’t been making sawdust in the garage - the last week I’ve been out there full time, fitting out the locksmith van which I will ultimately be turned loose in. In light of my less than comprehensive driving experience (read: 6 months driving in the 3 years since I passed my test) my bosses decided it would be unwise to release me on an unsuspecting world in a Transit, so I was set the challenge of shoehorning a transit-sized amount of stock and tools into the rather less than transit sized Vauxhall combo.

Quite apart from the size, the shape is enough to make for some serious headscratching - nothing in the van is geometric or straight, and there’s no reference for square or plumb (moving from one side of the van to the other changes what’s upright - great!) - I got pretty good at scribing and fitting to curved surfaces by the time I’d got all those shelves in! I also got to break out a few tools I’ve not used much before, not least the air nailer, which allowed me to channel my inner Norm Abraham and thunk nails into everything in arms reach.

It all looks nice and square there - but if you look at the first couple of uprights in place you can see how curvy the interior is - every component had to be trimmed to height or length, tried in place and scribed to fit before being cutout on the bandsaw.

Aerodynamics be buggered - if you ask me, this is how a van should look.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 20th, 2006 at 12:54 am and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.