Insulation & Sound Deadening

After I treated the majority of the rust areas I could see, it was time to build the floor and insulate. The van came with a ply floor that was stuck to the the main van floor but I had to remove as I wanted to raise the main walked floor a bit. Main reason for raising was so that I could add in 25mm insulation, some sound deadening and to run the electrical wires if need be. Turns out I’ve routed it down to one cable I need to run so not too much of an issue.

First off, the floor beams. I opted for four to the cover the majority of the floor. Further into the floor build I have added in a couple of wood batons that are flush with the edge of the plastic trim at the sliding doors. I’ve seen in mainly builds people opt for adhesive and drilling some screws through the floor. I opted for the adhesive only as I didn’t want to drill through the floor. A trip to Toolstation helped me pick up a couple of tubes of Puraflex40. I believe this is similar stuff to Tigerseal.  Simple enough stuff to use if you have a cage. If not picking one of those up is fairly easy and Toolstation will probably have.

Now onto the sound deadening. After a fair bit of research I went for a roll of Dodomat. I found pricing to be all over the place when I bought so Amazon was the place to buy at the time.

Usual areas to cover were the floor, doors and definitely the wheel arches. I say wheel arches however I ran out of the stuff before I did them so had to buy some more sheets. Along with the roll, I also bought a roller to help apply it to the surface and joining tape. Oh and remember and use gloves. I can tell you from experience that if you catch the edges of this stuff with your bare skin then it feels like an awful papercut.

Onto the insulation now. I made a trip to B&Q after reading what everyone used. Some people filled and insulated every cavity of the van and the others were doing some smaller patches. I guess it depends on your requirements but I certainly was not looking to fill every cavity of the van. Two types of insulation I bought was the fluffy roll made from recycled bottles. Pretty cheap at £17 a roll and I used one before I knew it. Off to B&Q again and I’ve got another roll. For the floor I wanted to buy the insulation boards. In an ideal world the thickness of the board would have been 38mm but I couldn’t get that. Went for 25mm instead so it’s not as effective as 38mm would be but it should help. This camper is not being built to be used all the time at the height of winter so it shouldn’t make too much of a difference.

Make sure when your cutting the boards to fill the space that it’s fits tight. If you’ve small gaps around the edges it won’t be as effective as you’d think. Fairly simple to install, measure and cut. I cut mine down with a hacksaw but I realised after all my cutting that my kitchen’s bread knife would do the trick also. I made use of the boards I used and had very little waste from the 2/3 boards I used. I still have 4 boards left as it was a pack of 7 I bought from B&Q. They didn’t have a large sheet so I had to go the multipack route.

That’s all for this post. I’ve got a couple more photos to add in of the insulation so instead of splitting them up, I’ve added a gallery below.