A lot of people could care less about vans. Particularly about the intricate details of building one into a stealth camper. So folks, this ones for you. I’m gonna tell a story from my past. Any electricians in the crowd, why don’t y’all stop back next week and skip reading this one.
This was about thirty years ago. I was younger then. Bullet proof and even more confident than what I struggle with now. I was moving my small business from it’s second location to its much bigger third location. …But of course doing it on a shoestring budget. Myself along with a couple of partners were doing a lot of the work ourselves. In the past few years from a prior landlord I had learned a whole lot about starting a small business on the down low. I guess I was living the stealth life back then too. At that time, it was the building inspector I was hiding out from. I signed a lease on about six thousand square feet of ground floor office space with a full basement. I could afford it because the place was in rough shape and I was able to negotiate eight months rent free to rehab it. “Free? Yeah, I have that much money, where do I sign?”
But the *only* thing that made this cash flow at all was to do most of the work ourselves. Doing work yourself is something big cities don’t like at all in commercial buildings. Serious penalties. But the building inspectors office is also short staffed and overworked. You play the odds and cover the front windows with three layers of black plastic. Do all the work on the inside. Keep traffic low. Unload all construction materials quickly and after dark if possible. Don’t get an onsite dumpster, we got one at our old location and hauled the construction garbage over there. Don’t get a building permit for anything. Absolutely no “COMING SOON!” sign out front. Whaa-laa you open a new business in about three months.
We actually did have a walk in building inspector at about the sixth month. It was at a desperate phase of the project. We had moved in at about month two, but didn’t have the whole place ready. The main section of the space was not finished yet but it was rented to a client in about a week so it *had* to get done. I was bogged down in laying the clay tile the floor in the new bathrooms. We had built a kitchen in the center of one room and I still needed to hook up the gas. We had hired two drywall tapers. —They were working on their own. We also hired an old retired carpenter back in about month three. The day he arrived we told him he had been promoted to foreman. We were his crew, we told him what we wanted to build and the four of us went to work. We were making a nice place, lots of wide woodwork and salvaged architectural antiques. It took time.
The day the inspector showed up I was gone, picking up black iron pipe to run the gas to the kitchen. The drywall tapers had been working in the front and recognized him when he pulled up. They grabbed the carpenter and hustled out the back door before the front door ever opened. My business partner, who was perhaps the only man far sneakier than me, was wearing a tool belt and had a hammer and chisel in his hands. The very definition of being caught red handed. But, he showed the inspector a section of the maple flooring where he was cutting in a patch. The inspector asked if any other construction was going on and my partner looked him straight in the eye and said, “No, just a lot of cleaning and a little paint.”
But all of the stuff I did on this place, wiring outlets & lights, running gas pipe, plumbing, sewers, pales in comparison to one job. Because you see…
The tricky thing was the electrical panel. We didn’t need to do all that much, mostly just some basic wiring of lights and outlets. Really much less of that than in a typical business. I felt ok doing all that stuff. When I was in high school I considered being an electrician when I grew up. …That was before I decided to be a photographer and way before I ended up being a computer geek. My dad hired any electrical work done on the farm. To get out of chores and things I was supposed to be doing, I hung out a lot with the electrician and asked questions. The summer between tenth and eleventh grades, while other kids were going on vacations with their parents, I was taking a vacation from pulling weeds in a bean field by taking a week long college course on being an apprentice electrician. I don’t think they were expecting *me* to show up. I am willing to bet they added an age requirement to the application form the following year. But once they determined I was the student who came a distance (driven there by my mother) and was paid in full, they sort of shrugged their shoulders and told me to take a seat. I learned a lot in that class.
My point is, I knew enough to not end up electrocuted and keep the place from burning to the ground. I think all the work I did might have even passed code, had it not been totally illegal for me to be doing it. But there was one big issue. Here’s where it gets a bit technical for a second. The building had 300 amps of 208 three phase. About six times the amount of electricity coming into your house. But, it only had one service disconnect that went to a small sub panel and two large fuses. “Upstairs” and “Downstairs”. You couldn’t run a business like mine on two circuits. But, I also couldn’t call the power company and say to them, “Hey, could you guys come shut off the power at the pole for about an hour? Why? Oh, no special reason….” No, that would be a very big red flag that something was going on at Ten South 13th Street. Permits would be asked for. Inspectors might be called. No, we couldn’t turn off the power. We were going to have to do it live.
I bought a new service panel and one afternoon, by flashlight, I installed it. A shiny new Square D breaker panel with room for about 40 breakers. It was great. But a scary, scary job. The major problem was the wire from the new panel to the disconnect was thick. About as big around as my thumb to carry all the current. Not all that much thicker than I just worked with here on the van project, wiring the twelve volt from the inverter to the batteries. But really different because in the van I could use welding cable which is flexible to the point of floppy. House wire on the other hand, like I was hooking up this breaker box with, is not flexible at all. I could really just barely bend it with to hands. A couple of times there were two of us pulling on the wire to bend it to fit somewhere. Imagine this… A shallow electrical closet on a hot day. Three people are packed in there representing 75% of the voting shares of my small corporation. The treasurer is holding a flashlight and a broom. He says he will use the broom to push anyone being electrocuted off the wire. …I am glad we didn’t have to find out if that worked or not. I threaded that thick wire through and into the box with live wires in it. Bent it around and tightened the lugs to lock it into place. There were no missteps and it all went sweaty but smooth.
There is a frame shop there now, and over the years, they have made some changes. They removed the curved glass block wall and my beautiful little conference room that was behind it. For that sin, they might never discover the secret panel in the bookcase of my office. Certainly not from me. But where I really wanted to look, that day I was there, was in their electrical closet. I know that panel is still there.
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