Roof framing done

All the walls of the van are now insulated and all cables are in place. This week we’ve prepared the roof by mounting wooden beams onto the structural beams in the van. These will easily hold the load of me, so several of them will make for a solid roof build. We used three layers of 11mm pine so that we could bend the wood to follow the slight curve of the roof.

The roof will be covered with a thick, dark blue felt fabric that is then held in place with thin strips of wood. To make sure we can make the rood look good, To get nice and evenly rounded sides, we drew a template on cardboard that I then translated into CAD. I then milled 19 of these using the Bitraf CNC.

These were then fastened to the wooden beams we had already mounted to the roof.

We found that since the car isn’t a perfectly straight surface (due to stuff sticking out inside the van), we had to add some thin strips of wood along the curves to ensure that they all line up fairly well.

The end result isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that it won’t annoy us in the future (we hope!).

This will make a lot more sense when we later add thin strips of wood along this curve. I’ve done a small simluation in CAD, to get an impression of how it will eventually look. Imagine a dark fabric in between the ribs and the curve and you’ll get the idea.