Cramping In Style

Progress and New Projects

After spending all day Monday struggling to pay attention in class and at work, zoning out for much of the day thinking of everything I needed to do on the van, I came home Tuesday ready to get down to business. I stopped at the DMV on the way home to transfer the title and renew the tabs, but apparently you need to have the insurance set up before you can transfer the title (makes sense, I guess.), so that didn’t happen. Once Taylor gets it set up with Progressive (only liability, of course) I’ll head back up there and make it officially ours. As soon as I took the dogs out, I headed down the street to where we had parked the van…and found quite a surprise when I popped open the back to chuck in some tools.

• 

• 

I won’t pretend I knew what had happened right away, but I know that it looked pretty unfortunate. I could see part of the leaf spring (the rear suspension) attached to whatever had been catapulted THROUGH the floor of the van, so I boogied on upstairs to do some research aggressive googling. Apparently, all that had happened was that the piece that attaches the leaf spring to the frame had snapped, probably when I recklessly drove our twenty year old van over a snowbank to get it in the driveway. Oops.

Thankfully, we live in the era of next day delivery, so two new shackles and all the necessary fixin’s are set to arrive on Thursday (I’m going to replace the same piece on the driver’s side while I’m at it, just to be safe. They were about thirty bucks each and it’ll be a simple install (hopefully). We’ll come back to this later!

On to the rest of the van! I eased it around the corner and up into the driveway, jacked up that back end so the weight of the van wasn’t on the floor of the cargo area, and got to work grinding out the last few bolts in the floor. I’d ground out the bolts holding in the shelving over the weekend, but there was still this one tiny piece keeping us from moving forward on removing the floor.

• 

• 

Five minutes of grinding later, that little troublemaker was gone. I ripped off the last wall panel, joyously peeled off the mat, and ground down a few bits that were poking up. Take a look!

The rust was really bad towards the back of the cargo area, but pretty much nonexistent between the wheel wells and the cab, which surprised the both of us (pleasantly!). I slapped on a cup brush I bought at Menard’s (very soon after learning what, in fact, a cup brush was) and got to work on the rust. It came off pretty easily, but there’s a bunch, so it’s definitely going to take a little while.

So at this point, we’ve got a completely empty van with about a third of the floor somewhere on a mildly-viciously rusty spectrum. Lots of tedious grinding ahead, but once we knock that out, we’re all set to start ADDING things instead of taking them out. Stay tuned!

P.S. – Taylor just got the Instagram up, so if you’re not interested in the nitty-gritty details I’m putting up here, go check that out for photos and quick-bite captions! @crampinginstyle on instagram.