Title and Plates

There are times where I just say this whole thing just isn't worth it.   Working in another city.  Living away from the people I love.  Tonight is one of those nights.  Where the desperate loneliness sets in.  Walking around a virtually abandoned metro downtown in the damp fog.  Where I look at what I am trading, my life,  for what I gain, a few shekels.  It isn't worth it.  And this van project… Where I am building myself a place to live and making it more comfortable to live away from where I belong …just makes it accessory to this wrongness.

I basically wrote that paragraph and when I was done, didn’t write another word for a week.   Yeah, ok.  So here we go.  Back on track again.

Loading up for its first trip to the city...

The temperature here is what we locals call “warm”.   To translate for you outsiders, that means thirty four degrees, damp and foggy.  But here it means the January thaw is on.  The snow is melting.  Rumors for the weekend are low 40’s, meaning I will see a motorcycle or two.  Just watching them dodge the ice patches and huge potholes gives me the shivers.

Walking around in my big city tonight, still nursing the sore foot a little bit.  It's just part of the price of living in this climate that slips happen.  Last night I took another small tumble.  You can sometimes go from a block of clear dry sidewalk to a hidden icy patch.  As it was, I came down forward so my hands took the impact.  Lucky really.  They handle it better than elbows do.

It's funny how quick it changes.  Last week heat, and trying to stay warm, was about all I could think about.   It was seriously cold and I was looking into ways to keep a van warm.  Just because I live up here in the land of snow and ice, doesn’t mean I want to sleep in below zero temperatures.   I am very fond of my creature comforts, and being warm is very comfortable.   One night last week it was nineteen below zero (and that is Fahrenheit my German friends, Fahrenheit.) so my van needs to keep the cold at bay.

On the roof, I am going to have one, maybe two solar panels.   Those will be used to charge batteries, four to six of them.   But you can't heat with electricity.   Not off batteries anyway.   I will be able to heat a bowl of soup in my microwave running off my batteries, but heating the whole van would take way more electricity than what they can store.   The heat source will be a small RV furnace which uses propane gas to make the heat.   Then it has a fan, running off the electricity in the batteries, to blow the heat into the van.   Just like the forced air furnace many of you have in your homes, on a way smaller scale.

So for the furnace I need propane gas.  In a real RV they usually put one large tank under the body of the vehicle.  It is a refillable tank that stays in place.  When it runs low, you drive the RV to the place that refills them.   I could do the same.  There is a manufacturer who produces a long slim tank that can mount under the left side of the van, sort of beside the regular gas tank.   The down side of this idea for me were twofold.   I would lose a degree of stealthy-ness because the tank bottom and filling valve either have to be visible under the carriage, or via an access door (potential rusting spot) I would have to have built in the side.   The other thing though, is places to get propane tanks filled are fewer and harder to find.   I wanted ease.

Enter the standard 20 pound propane tank.  These are the same ones you use on your gas barbecue grills.   Most convenience stores have a propane tank exchange so I would have a ready source of heating fuel always close by.   This just seemed to me like a better route to go.   Early into the design I felt like I needed to incorporate those tanks rather than some other.

Lets talk about design for a bit, shall we?  The very first part of putting together a project like this is gathering specifications.  The next, to determine physical size of some of the components you feel you need.  …And figuring out the difference between “want” and “need”, I might add.   What I did was to start looking at the sizes of objects.   Doing research online I got the dimensions of the tanks and then started to design my project around this fixed size.

Twenty pound propane tanks can be up to nineteen inches tall, they would take an inch of clearance so I could lift them and tip them out.  I started working with twenty inches of space needed.   These tanks would control the height of the bed and amount of storage available in the back.  Design continued.

Can you play a game of "spot the housing"?

When we last talked, my wife, consummate bargain hunter that she is, had found me *the vehicle* on Craigslist.   A 2008 Chevy Express, half ton white cargo van for $6000.  I financed the purchase through a local credit bureau and before I knew it, I had a cargo van sitting in my driveway.

The next thing was I needed was to get the license plates and registration in order.   As I have mentioned, I work in one state, my job is in the neighboring state.   So the van is almost exclusively going to drive and sit in a state I don’t actually live.   I was thinking out of state plates would be less stealthy, make it stick out more.   I was curious if it would be possible to register it in my work state rather than my state of registry and for that it took a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Nothing ever goes quick at the DMV.   The nice lady at the front desk didn’t have the answer to my question but she was pretty sure I should fill out a vehicle title transfer form.   I said to her, “Uh, I don’t have any of the vehicle information with me.”   She said, “I can’t give you a number unless you fill out a form”   …Ahhh, who doesn’t love the smell of a good bureaucracy early in the morning?   So I got my form, filled out five (three of which were my name) of the twenty boxes they wanted, and waited for my number to be called.

I have found over the years it sometimes helps to simplify a story.  My wife refers to this as lying, but I think it aids not getting bogged down in details.  Talking to the other nice DMV lady at the counter once my number was called, I told her that I would be moving to the area but was saving up money to rent an apartment.  I told her until such time my mailing address was going to be this van and asked her what to do.  She really didn't bat an eye. …of course making me wonder what kind of stories do.   She said this is really no problem as long as I could find a friend who would be willing to receive mail for me.  As simple as that, my title and license plate problems were cured.