3 Campervans, 2 Years on the road & 1 Game changing Accident - Vanduck Travels
Hi there, we are Anna, Zoltan and Floki.
We quit the 9-5 life over 2 years ago to follow our dream and travel as much as we can.
We built our first campervan with no experience at all, just spending hours on YouTube and Facebook groups to learn as much as we could.
Right from the beginning vanlife wasn’t easy to us. As soon as we left the UK to start travelling the engine in our first self build campervan (MWB Sprinter based build) died & nobody couldn’t solve the problem. After changing many parts, the problem still remained and we made the hard decision to sell the van. We stripped down the camper first to be able to reuse as much as we could on next build.
We didn’t want to give up and bought another van with an engine which no computer could stop.
It was a 1993 Mercedes Benz MB100D. One of the funniest Mercedes we’ve seen so far (but not
ugly). So far we have managed to visit most of the European countries but, in January 2020 we lost our beloved campervan in a road accident. Our tiny home on wheels had been completely destroyed. It wasn’t easy and again, we nearly gave up on everything but, with support of some amazing people we decided to give it one more go...
Lockdown build
So, here it is, our latest van conversion! Completed within one month during lockdown which we spent in Poland. Our base vehicle is a 1993 Mercedes Benz T1 310D with what they call a 'legendary engine' which can go forever. The van was in Poland for 20 years with only one owner from new and 79.000miles on the clock. Previously van was part of a German electric company and was only used to transport cables from one warehouse to another, right next to each other!
We must say we’ve learned a lot from our previous conversions, we have seen where we had
made mistakes previously, this conversion is totally different from other ones. We took from previous conversions the parts liked and decided not to repeat things which weren't working for us before. We have received so many positive comments already about our layout which so far, we haven’t seen in another van.
It includes:
- Half fixed bed where we can easily take a power nap and at night, extend it up to
190cm. To extend the bed we are using table and seat.
- Shower / toilet / kitchen top / seat – that’s the parts of the build which we are getting the most questions on. We are pretty proud of this bit as it’s working very well for us and we still have
plenty of space in the van. This part was also the greatest fun as we decided to use epoxy to create our shower room. The floor is about 3l of epoxy (clear and a little bit of blue colour) covering shells and which created the look of a small sea on the floor. To create the walls we used floor panels which we’ve also covered with thin layer of epoxy to make it waterproof. The kitchen top is a seat top sitting on 2 pieces of wood
- Planar Autoterm 2D 2kw diesel heater – £450
- Insulation – Armaflex 19mm mat x3 rolls – £140
- Gel deep cycle leisure battery 240ah – £400
- 310W monocrystal solar panel, Epever Tracer 40a controller, 1000W pure sine wave
inverter -£370
- 70l fiamma water tank, water pump aqua8, fiamma a20 - £170
- Cladding – stronger on celling and thin one to finish furnitures - £200
- Other wood - £250
- Roof vent / skylight – Dometic midi Heki, Fantastic Fan - £700
- 4 all season tyres - £300
- Camping washing machine - £90
- Vehicle service - £150
Other plans
As we are writing, we are currently in lockdown in Greece and have been here since August last year. We are planning to slowly move forward to discover other countries and return to some where we’ve already been but, only time will tell. After our accident we haven't really made any plans as we learnt that it can all change within a second. We will continue to share our vanlife adventures and the beautiful places we visit on our Facebook Page and Instagram account and hopefully soon there will be a (more organised) blog!
Thank you very much for reading.
Stay safe and enjoy life, you have only one!
Anna, Zoltan and Floki
Facebook page : www.facebook.com/vanthory
Instagram : www.instagram.com/vanduckmb