Beautiful Hand Converted Toyota 4x4 Van Conversion
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Alex Jackson has been building vehicles since he was 17 or so. He started with a 1987 Toyota 4Runner, followed by Toyota trucks of various ages ranging from 1988 to 2013. The two main things that he wanted for a vehicle to live in was diesel and 4x4. He drove with his truck on the trailer, dropped it off in Calgary, and then drove another like eight hours to pick up the van and drove it 12 hours back. He gave it a complete renovation over the course of a month and a half working eight hour days seven days a week.
The van is a 1998 Toyota Hiace. It is a four-wheel-drive diesel, imported from Japan. This is his best answer to the 4x4 diesel question mark for van living. I've got a little 2.8 liter naturally aspirated diesel engine that gets him roughly about 24 miles per gallon, but he doesn't ever go over 60 miles an hour, so roughly a hundred kilometers an hour. He’s learned through the years that having exterior lighting is really really paramount and super important, so he mounted a twenty inch light bar on the front bumper. He also put side mounted lights as well as on the back, so he can flick those on when he’s looking off to the sides and when he’s backing up in pitch dark.
Because the van is quite small and he didn't want to have a ton of stuff on the inside, he has this roof rack on top that he stores a lot of his tools, recovery gear, solar shower and solar panel. Since the vehicle is imported from Japan, it is a right-hand drive, meaning he sits to the right of the vehicle on top of the motor. One thing he did right away on the van is he put BF Goodrich all-terrain KO2 tires on. He has this ARB awning from a previous build, and it has been a lifesaver, especially in the desert. One good thing if you don't have a van big enough to have a shower inside is to build yourself a cheap solar shower out of PVC. That’s what he did, and it's absolutely fantastic, especially when you're dirt bagging the desert for like weeks on end and you're covered in sand and grit. For electricity, he can just take an extension cord and plug in for shore power.
He wanted to be able to cook outside and inside so he designed a kitchen station that retracts inside from the side door. He got some 400-pound sliders that locked and he had his kitchen built on those. He bought a Primus stove, because it's really really slim and worked well with his design. It's actually a two burner backpacking stove. Underneath he stores a bunch of food as well as his five pound propane canister which stays hooked up to his stove. He can turn it off to prevent leaks. He made a hatch so that when he’s on the inside of the van he can open it up to access his stove and cook inside.
He has a 50qt ARB refrigerator that runs on 12 volt. He has two AGM deep-cycle batteries underneath his refrigerator hooked up into a CTEK smart charger which takes power from his starting battery and power from his solar and just combines it. This way his batteries are always kept properly charged at 100%. He did all the wiring himself, which turned out to be surprisingly easy. He found that the key was making sure everything was fused properly. He has a 1000w pure sine inverter for 120 volt power as well as a Blue Sea fuse block that makes everything really really clean and easy to troubleshoot. He has a really basic water system which is just a jerrycan, but he had pretty much all the cabinetry finished before even considering water storage. This meant he had to modify one of the cabinets that he had already built to store his water. He put it right beside his kitchen to make it easy to fill up his pots and stuff like that.
He wanted to maximize the storage so he built cubbies pretty much anywhere he could. Pots, cups, extra comforter, his/hers cubby, everything has a designated place. By going with cubbies, it also allows his storage space to get good airflow while keeping items easily accessible instead of being hidden behind doors. There’s a little control panel near the bed with USB ports that allows him to check the voltage of his battery. The van also has a coffee corner with a little fold down desk, behind which they store everything they need to make coffee in the morning.
For the bed he came up with a design that folds out at night, and becomes a couch during the day. The design utilizes cables and pulleys to make the conversion process as painless as possible. Their clothing is accessible underneath the bed in two drawers that can slide out the back, or be accessed from under the hinged bed.
He is a heavy machinery operator on his father-in-law's farm in Alberta, Basically for five months, six months of the year he sits in a cab for 15 hours a day that can sometimes become 24 hour work days. It’s gruelling work, but it allows him to take big chunks of time off and travel. He loves taking pictures of his vehicles out in the middle of nowhere and he thinks he would like to display through his photography that there's a great big world out there that you can go and explore really easily if you spend a bit of money, get into a vehicle, and just hit the road. He thinks that people need to get out into the great big outdoors and experience it for themselves instead of watching it on the screen.
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