Escapees May June 2015 Demo

bar. I was easy to convince—I didn’t want anything coming adrift back there. The drawbar is rather heavy and, therefore, awkward to hook up. This van needs a driveline disconnect to be towable. No one in the greater Portland, Oregon, area would touch this installation with a 10-foot pole. I finally found Southwest Driveline Service in Mesa, Arizona. They had done several Sprinters over the last few years. Of course, I had to get the Sprinter to Mesa, so we chose to drive both vehicles in tandem. We could have disconnected the drive line, tied it up and towed the van. cabinets was the fun part. I actually inventoried everything that was going into the van. I weighed each tool and storage bin. I divided the space into quadrants and whenever I settled on a location for a tool or bin, I listed it with its weight on a chart. I was able to pretty well balance left and right sides and fore and aft distribution. Each item had to be locked in an enclosed shelf or drawer so as to be able to withstand the magnitude 6.9 earthquake we create as we go down the road. Continued ››› Building Benches Building the shop benches and

When my wife, Judy, and I started planning for retirement in 2004, an impasse developed right away. Judy wanted to sell the house and go on the road full- time. I was anticipating the wonderful freedom of working full-time in my garage, building things like bicycles and grandfather clocks. I had accumulated some really nice tools and the skills to use them. We developed a compromise plan. We would sell the house alright, but I was to move my shop into a Haul- mark cargo trailer. We would buy a diesel pusher to tow it, and we would use our home-built tandem bicycle to get around at our destinations. That is a story in itself. I won’t go into it here, but only say that over 10 years we put over 22,000 miles on three different tandem bicycles.

F or the first seven years, we got along fine using the tandem bicycle to get around. We were traveling most of the time, and we often stopped for groceries before the end of our travel

the weight of the tools to go in the van would exceed the load limit for the 2500 model, so we bought a 170-inch wheelbase, 3500 series cargo van with no windows.

“Building the shop benches and cabinets was the fun part. I actually inventoried everything that was going into the van.”

Setting Up for Towing The next task was setting the van up for towing. Total cost for this was a little over $7,000. I chose the SMI Stay-in Play Duo brake unit. It came highly recommended and it was a permanent installation. The tow plate and tow bar were by Blue Ox. After a discussion with my installer, Special- ty RV, in Aurora, Oregon, we settled on a 20,000-pound pintle-style draw

day. Even then we did a lot of trips into town for laundry and groceries using the tandem and a bicycle trailer. The one thing that changed the whole picture was my diagnosis with Parkin- son’s disease in April of 2011. Now there was the need to drive quickly into the heart of the big cities to visit doctors. Worse was the specter of eventually having to hang up the keys. The answer was to combine the shop vehicle and the towed vehicle. After much searching and a couple of test drives, we settled on a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van. Van Conversion We did look at some used Sprinters. They come with Dodge, Freightliner and Mercedes-Benz emblems on the hoods, but they are all made by Mer- cedes. They are popular delivery vans you see everywhere. Our problem was that nothing turned up with low mileage. It appears that the industry spits them out at about 300,000 miles. I had calculated that we would need to spend nearly $10,000 to convert the van for towing, so we finally dug into our children’s inheritance and bought a new 2013. In our case, I knew that

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