Escapees May June 2015 Demo

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May/June 2015 |ESCAPEES .23
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.
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.
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
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.
Building Benches
Building the shop benches and
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 ›››
For 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
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
“Building the shop benches and cabinets
was the fun part. I actually inventoried
everything that was going into the van.”