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UPDATED - Making Your Own Camper Furniture
In this article I am going to share with you how I made my own campervan furniture for my VW T5 camper conversion. This article looks specifically at how to do this for a VW T5 self-build van conversion, but the principles herein can be used for any sort of van.
It's really easy to change your gear stick knob and gaiter in a VW T5 camper van or panel van and we will take a closer look at this in this very quick article.
Basically all you need to do is flip off the current cap (where the gear pattern is) to reveal a torx head screw. Once you have unscrewed this with the correct size torx bit, the gear knob just pulls off easily:
This week I bought a new drive-away campervan awning from Olpro to go with my VW T5 camper conversion. Olpro sell a variety of different awnings from large to small, many of which are available as both an air-beam or conventional pole design. I bought the Olpro Cubo Breeze direct from Olpro's website which is the air-beam version of their Cubo model.
In this video, I show you some different options for fitting USB sockets to your VW T5 camper van.
Basically, you can hook into the rear of your stereo to pick up power and I utilised this to fit a USB point inside my glove box that I will use to charge my power bank and/or power a dash cam. I also show you how to use a similar method to fit a USB point to one of the dash blanks near the heating controls in your T5.
The parts I used can be bought here:
Carista is an app that allows you to customise certain aspects of your VW T5 van's onboard software. If you buy the Carista dongle (which connects to your van's diagnostic OBDII port and onwards to your smartphone via bluetooth) it gives you access to features that would normally only be available to VW dealers.
You can customise things such as one-touch electric windows, coming home lights, central locking and around 100 other things. It can also diagnose engine management problems and reset the service light.
In this video, I fit some Team Heko wind deflectors to my VW T5.1 camper conversion.
To buy these wind deflectors for your van, click this link https://amzn.to/2Pc4Smj
Recently, I upgraded the daytime running lights and the sidelights in my van to LED aftermarket replacements. I have a VW T5.1 and the stock bulbs not only give quite poor illumination but they are also an 'orange-yellow' filament old-fashioned light. The new bulbs give a nice modern white light.
Check out these photos of the story of my VW T5 camper conversion so far! The van conversion is by no means complete yet and I'll be adding more stuff during the first quarter of 2020. Within this post, I have also included a van tour video. In the video, there is a cinematic intro which shows you everything within the first few minutes. Thereafter, I don my GoPro head mount to show you everything in detail.
VW T5 Conversion Van Tour - the full tour video can be found here - https://youtu.be/KUUst8b-SoM
Replacing the standard fit festoon bulbs in your VW T5 camper conversion is an easy way to add some extra style to your camper. You need 42mm LEDs and I went for 'cool blue' because they also contain a good white level. As I already have deep blue spots on the bulkhead and bright white spots on the roof, I now have a very versatile choice of lighting in the van that can all be switched on or off independently according to the needs of the situation.
In this article we are going to have a quick look at my van electrics and how I fitted my split charge relay.