Up next in 10
Custom Kitchen Galley Build!
24K views
May 2, 2025
Let me know your thoughts on this kitchen galley design, although simple, I have not found a pre-fabricated one at 38" for a Ford Transit for sale. This is a perfect fit for my current customer. Have questions? Ask in the Chat! Don't forget to check out Odyssey Custom Vans latest build currently For Sale here: https://www.odysseycustomvans.com/ Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways we can help you: 1. If you need a vetted parts list, download our → FREE DIY Van Build Cheatsheet to help you save time and money on Van Parts and Gear: CLICK HERE: https://vanbuilderhq.com/ 2. If you want to get Done-For-You Van Build help, book a → FREE Consultation with my Calendly Link: CLICK HERE: https://calendly.com/odysseycustomvans/intro-call
View Video Transcript
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[Music]
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he
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[Music]
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hey everyone welcome back to the live stream it's been a while it's been about a week since our last stream and then our last stream we were putting together
1:51
our professional cabinet saw and uh we're going to go over a tour of that um
1:56
how I got everything set up in a minute but the main part of today's video is going to be on the custom kitchen Galley
2:02
that I put together so I'm going to give you a little look at it really quick and then we're going to bring it on the
2:10
table so that's the inside of our van this is our kitchen Galley that we I've
2:16
been working on and we're going to bring them the table we're going to talk about a couple of the details of this kitchen Galley
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specifically because um as you guys know I usually put pre-fabricated Kitchen
2:28
gallies in vans and then we bolt them into um L Trak and that sort of thing um
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but uh every van is completely different so if you have an adventure van or you
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have any type of Van that you're converting um everyone's needs are going to be completely different so uh in this
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case in particular we wanted to have a certain bed orientation uh and then we wanted to
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have a uh the refrigerator lifted up so it's nice nice and easy to get to you don't
3:01
have to bend over to open it um and then also a microwave uh built into the top
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of it so what we needed to find was uh maximum storage really needed to
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maximize storage and a lot of the stuff that I saw I didn't think would work really well plus uh it's very expensive
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you get a prefabricated kitchen Galley so I decided to um uh begin
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fabricating these uh kitchen galys and I got pretty excited because one uh the
3:32
challenge I had with uh the last adventure event that I built that we took to um Adventure event Expo in
3:38
chattanoga Tennessee you guys said check out that video uh that one is just too long it was 41 in and that really
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decreases the amount of space that you have in your van to get in the van um so
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as you can imagine um you know maximizing the kitchen Galley is going to decrease
4:00
getting into the van typically uh you want to have you know about 24 in is
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something that is comfortable to get in and out uh and if you can stick to that and then kind of make up for it in the
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inside of your van that's nice however um uh for what we're doing with this
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van so uh this is John and Susan's van that we're working on and their uh
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sleeping rangement is going to be north to south so not doing bump outs um not doing side to side and by doing north to
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south um it's easier to get in the bed and get out of the bed as opposed to if you do east to west with bump outs um
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somebody has to kind of go on top to get out and uh it's not you know as easy or
4:45
comfortable so we're doing north to south but what that does is instead of taking a width of 60 in and being able
4:53
to extend your Galley Towards the bed in a 148 Transit um we're having to consolidate
5:01
all the room because we're taking 60 in and we're having to extend it to 74 in
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so we lose um uh was that 14 inches of
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space and that's a lot I mean if you can imagine 14 in added to your kitchen
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Galley um that's quite a bit so so what do you do so kind of went to the drawing
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board and I found out uh through the other Vans I've built what is something I wanted to do better with this kitchen
5:29
Galley since I had the chance I'm building it from scratch uh so where do I even start so I'm going to turn the
5:36
camera over here and then I'm going bring the kitchen Galley up we're going to take the tape measure and we're going to go
5:42
through and we're going to uh show what I decided to do with
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it now I'm actually lifting this up by myself which is really
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nice because the materials that this is built out of is Bal
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Birch and first up this is a prototype this is not the one that is going in John and Susan's van this is a
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prototype it has shipping labels it has all kinds of stuff and it's a funny
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story so let's see
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here all right that's pretty good so the funny story is uh
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ABC rig that's the company that I get like the foot threshold like Steps from
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uh the floor drawings and then for this van in particular was the wall panels kit so the wall panel ceiling
6:43
panels um so they ship it to you in a really nice custom Baltic Birch shipping
6:51
container and what they want to do is they want to minimize waste so they're they're putting nice plywood in the box
6:58
so that you can use it for other projects and I said you know what I'm going to take that apart and I'm going to use it to mock up my demo
7:07
piece um so I can kind of verify all my dimensions and make sure that I'm happy
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with what I'm building and I don't need to change anything or tweak it later um
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but I mean for a DIY that's kind of hard sometimes you just want to do it right the first time or as best as you can do
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the first time um but in this situation uh what I'm wanting to do and I love to hear you guys feedback in the comments
7:30
but I want to uh I'm going to be building a couple of these and I'm going to be taking it to uh a show that I'm
7:38
going to uh down in Florida and then also get some feedback see what people think of this Kitchen Gallery
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because now this is a Balta B Birch kitchen Galley it looks pretty typical
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you've got a door here you've got four drawers um it's pretty standard setup uh
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what I think is special uh or makes mine different is the one is the dimensions
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and uh some considerations that I'm putting into this to be able to One Flat pack this so that it can be shipped at a
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low cost um a lot of kitchen Galls that you buy that are pre-fabricated the shipping costs are extremely high and
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even though uh the vendor says free shipping the shipping cost is obviously
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baked into the price so um you can find these anywhere from $2,500 $3,500 for
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from some companies and if you go to Van Builder hq.com we do have a blog post
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talking about uh the best kitchen Galley um this one's not on there yet but it
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may be on there uh shortly so let's um let's go through and go through the
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details on this and this the first time I've filmed in this setup so I might look like I'm
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confused in my own Studio but the first thing let's just turn
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let's do this yeah looks pretty cool I like that all right the first thing about
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this uh kitchen Galley and what I think is the most important let me get over here so I can actually be on camera a
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little bit is the width so the width of this kitchen Galley is uh 38 in so we got 38
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in wide and that is kind of uh when I say
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that's the kind of the golden number those are numbers that I have made up it's not something I read online um so
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in a Ford Transit we only we have limited amount of space you know front to back especially in the 148 uh and one
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thing I do with the builds is I'm actually going to um I've got an engineering drawing
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that I put together it's handdrawn but it's I kind of uh it's it's my map to
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the the van so it's allows me to if I want to make a design change is that something that's actually
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going to fit in the van when I get there that sort of thing so if you guys can see
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this just kind of briefly hold it up so this
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is the map of the whole entire van so you have the van from one View and then
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you got the van from the top down View and so this sheet allows me to find
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out where my Lim are whether it be the the refrigerator um part of the van the
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refrigerator stack that we're doing or the kitchen Galley itself kind of what I'm limited to now after measuring
10:41
everything the bed the north to south bed the mattress size is going to be 60
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by 74 and I believe that's a short queen so that is something that's going to be
10:53
your your footprint and you're going to use that to work off of you can't
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measure from the back doors of a van and then measure to the front because the
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doors are going to have a radius on them uh both on the back so it's going to kind of arch and it's going to uh it's
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going to skew your measurements you're going to think you have more room than you do what you need to do is go back to
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the back pillars of the van um and we might draw this on the drawing pad but the back pillars and then measure from
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that towards the inside of the van now some a way to get a quick uh measurement
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that makes sense is if we go inside the van here if you guys see this seam where
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these panels come through get this seam so this seam uh is right out about 75
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in uh towards the back space of the van where you you don't have usable space so
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from this seam in a 148 in uh Ford Transit back back there's a comfortable
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75 in that's not going to run into the door of the
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van um so technically I could move 1 in forward but I've moved one inch back and
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that is giving me my 74in bed so that's our first measurement from 74
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in forward 38 is our next measurement and
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then that will give us uh this opening here so I'm not adding this up right now
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but we might talk about it later but we've got 74 we've got
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38 and then now this allows us to have a door opening of 202 in which is what I
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have on the adventure wagon build that I did um
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earlier so with that 30 38 in uh that's what I was looking for and
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I couldn't find one that I liked uh plus budget wise that was wasn't really
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something that we were going to do anyway um and after doing my research on
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how I wanted the drawers and the sizes I said you know what I think I'm going to start building these because I think
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it's something that you can't find on the market for a Ford Transit for a couple reasons one the width but also
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over here inside the van um there's this post this uh
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structural support that comes out right here and it's really annoying so if any of you guys have a Ford Transit and you
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try to build around this little uh bump out that's for the frame of the van
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you're either going to have to cut out the kitchen Galley that you bought I had to do that on the Flatline vanco kitchen
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Galley I had to jigsaw out the aluminum so that this the kitchen galy would fit
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into to the van itself um so this back here we have a
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couple of options and I think I've decided on
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what I want to do we're also going to be talking about pocket hole screws the
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pocket hole jig all that good stuff so right here we've got um two of
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these support pieces so pretty much this whole entire thing is connected together with this Balta Burt plywood and pocket
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holes again it's designed so that you guys um can purchase this and then just
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assemble it um but this is a one of the supports and
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what's nice is during designing this I went through and found out you know where that bump out is in the bottom
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here so for example in the instructions this would be where this goes that way it's not interfering the back here of
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your uh of the van itself and then you can just um put some more structure back
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here as well now you can take this and you can move it anywhere you need to to mount it
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uh in your van so these pieces will all be pre uh cut but you know you don't
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have to follow the rules as far as how you actually assemble everything um because your build might
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be different for example the way that I'm doing the drawers down here uh I'm leaving just enough height
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so I'm I'm increasing this bottom toe kick which this is not a toe
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kick a toe kick would be indented so your toes go in it but you're losing a
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ton of uh precious space when you use a toe kick and I think the space is more
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valuable than a toe kick itself so what I'm doing is this bottom piece is going
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to be uh raised to 2 and a 12 Ines so this lip will be another half inch
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higher and the 2 and 1 half Ines is going to allow you to do um any type of electrical pass through underneath here
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uh as well as what I'm planning on doing on this corner back here um this is where the plumbing is going to come through so the two hot and cold water
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lines will come through and into the sink over here so that'll be the uh kind of the
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first modification to this cabinet so next let's talk about and by
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the way if you guys have any uh let's see here chat is unavailable
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give me one
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second
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yeah so the chat is not live on my computer but definitely just put your
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comments in the chat I've got it going on my phone let's see if this works there we
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go okay chat is
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back okay so we have uh let's talk about the width of the drawers and the width
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of the uh sink area so I'm going to flip this
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down and we kind of work our way from the top going down and again I'd love to hear you guys
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feedback on any any part of this as I'm putting this
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together let's see if I can get this whole thing in the the video here there you
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go all right so we're looking at this this
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is the drawer side and this is the sink side so right here we're going to have
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the RVA sink and we're not going with a 15 by 15 we're going by 15 by 20 size
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sink which is going to be perfect so to accommodate that the width
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of the kitchen Gall actually needs to be 21 1/2 in we'll talk about why the 212 is
18:27
important for the inside of the van right here is going to be the uh
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cutout for the sink so once that's cut out and you put your uh top on it you'll
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be able to uh fit the sink nice and flush right in the middle and I think everybody
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really loves the rat sink it's nice um comes with a bunch of accessories so that's going to go in
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this side and the revi sink actually it defined this measurement so for body
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sink you need a minimum of an 18in 18 in width and then you come back in 1 in on
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each side and that just allows enough room for the sink to go in and for the hardware to actually mount it so that
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defined this uh Dimension so now we have our 38 minus the 18 and that gives us
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our final Dimension over here uh for the uh this side over here which
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is essentially uh 20 in now Baltic Birch is different than uh
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standard plywood not only in the way that it's uh the layers are put together or the Plies but um the way that they
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measure the thickness so this is slightly less than a half inch so you do
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need to take that into consideration when you're making these uh pieces that
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take the two measurements um when you're when you're building this uh but if you
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get this one you don't have to it'll be I think everything will bee pre-cut but technically see one two 3 4
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five so the inside drawer size uh or
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cavity is 19 and 58 so that's that
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size um so yeah we got 17 19 and 58 and then we got three half in panels Al
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together making 38 in wide so now that this side is fixed the sink
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you know we really can't do anything with the sink um the next part we're going to work on is the drawer or is
20:38
finding the drawer sizes now you guys can interpret this
20:44
any way you want if you want to have this as inspiration on what to do and not to do when you're making your own
20:49
kitchen Galley um I think that would be a good way to to start the other other way is right here
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uh this this section which is 10 in uh that's the depth of the sink so this rot
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sink will actually come down to here you'll still see the drain but the
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actual bottom of the sink comes right here and may because we've gone with 21 in uh that's only giving us an inch and
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a half on the front and back so you're not really going to have anything on the front and back as far as room some
21:26
people like to have a little dish rag spot here but there's not going to be enough room with the uh we want to keep
21:32
this low profile because this is helping us keep our walkway going to the bed and accessing
21:38
the fridge um comfortable we don't want to go too far if you can imagine if we went 24 in wide it'd be nice for the
21:46
kitchen Galley but you've it's 3 in of walkway space that you've lost in the van that's already you know pretty
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tight um so now we have a door that's that's left over and it comes to it's
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about a 16 in wide by 23in tall door and that's going
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to allow us to fit uh you know two Jerry cans in
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here uh or pretty much whatever gray water tank that you want to put in into
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here um pretty comfortably so you got a nice open size and I mean you can do
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whatever you want if you wanted to put shell in here you could do that um what I plan to do is I'm going to put a kind
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of a false bottom in here and I'm going to router it out to where uh it was going to hold the Jerry
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can um so the Reliance ones from Walmart are the one I'm actually going to get for this so they'll be two of those and
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they'll have two kind of placeholders now if you don't want to use that you can just take the panel out
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uh that sort of thing so that's the left side um now we'll look at the right side
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which I think is the most important so first I was only planning to do three
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drawers because I had this toekick in mine which not only reduces what size
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Jerry can you can put over here but it also reduces um how many drawers you can have
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so uh it's pretty incredible that we have four drawers in here and what I do
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when I whenever I design anything so say it's a like a a little jump seat or battery box in the back that sort of
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thing um even something like in my personal van where I have a uh a seat
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for somebody to sit down in the back just like an additional passenger uh you can go online and you
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can look up the ergonomics of stuff like that so you can go online you can type
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in you know what's the typical restaurant Booth seat height uh how deep is it for your legs when you sit down
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it's kind of furniture making one 101 and all those measurements are pre-done
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it's you know been there forever you know 18 in 18 in high and by building it to those
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ergonomics it's going to feel like you know something you sit down at a coffee
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shop or a booth at a restaurant it's going to be nice and comfortable it's not going to feel weird like somebody
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randomly made some measurements in a van uh you want to kind of go by that now
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you can you can use that for uh Building kitchen galleys so these drawers so
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ignore the width uh but the drawer height specifically is uh 4
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in because a standard drawer uh itself is 3 and a half Ines
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typically tall so that gives you a/ quarter inch of room on the top and a quar inch on the bottom for it to slide
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in and out easily also allows for the drawer Hardware to be installed as as
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well um but we have two normal drawers right here those are the drawers for
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silverware uh so what I was thinking about I bought a flatline vanc Co
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kitchen Galley and I was pretty excited because it already had bamboo drawers and stuff like that um however I want to
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go get a bamboo organizer for the cutlery and no matter which one I bought
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the drawers were not sized uh ergonomically so it wasn't a standard
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drawer size it was some weird width and some length good for storing things but bad for getting something off the shelf
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and like Bed Bath Beyond or like Walmart and putting it in the drawer so I've
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designed these drawers to fit off-the-shelf uh organizing items so
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stuff for your Cutlery or knives so these front two the height are standard
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um it doesn't really matter how wide you go the height and the depth is what matters so these are going to have an
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18-inch drawer slide and um I'm probably going to make the
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drawers uh maybe 20 inches deep again I'm going to double check that that's why I'm going through this
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as like a demo but these two uh these first two are normal the second
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one um this one is kind of a madeup dimension because I wanted the bottom
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one to be a standard uh uh you know you call it a pots and pans drawer you're
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not going to put a pan in there but because the width uh pan drawers need to
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be wider obviously but the height is standard for a set of pots so if you buy
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you know a stack of pots maybe it's like four or five in a stack this drawer is that St is this
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standard height and the typical standard height for the uh drawer that holds a
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bunch of pots or is uh anywhere from 13 to 14 in so we
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have a 14-inch opening and as long as we're above 13 Ines we're okay so if we take off a
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quarter inch for clearance on the bottom and a quarter inch for the top that's 13 1 12 in for our uh drawers and then if
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we subtract our quarter inch uh or half inch bottom that we're going to
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it's quarter inch bottom but it's offset a quarter inch so that takes off a half
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so you're back at 13 but since you have 13 you can fit a standard set of pots in
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down here in the bottom and these two top drawers are standard set of silverware and then this one is just
27:45
kind of an in in between drawer but it's pretty cool you can go in line and you can go and just uh that
27:51
might be a question you never thought of asking is you know what is a typical drawer height that holds silverware
27:57
what's the typical drawer height that holds pots and pans um because a lot of the kitchen gallies
28:05
out there it's just uh they're R it's a random size
28:11
um I don't know if they did that intentionally but it's very random it doesn't it doesn't really make sense for
28:18
uh what it's used for which is your kitchen Galley so that's how I I designed those
28:26
um and the other thing is this this thing is very
28:32
uh it's not crazy light but it's uh you know it's it's manageable it's something
28:37
that one person could put in and out of the van now one thing that this uh or my
28:44
plan for this project after putting it in this vanand is um it will come with a
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face frame so a face frame is just something that cleans up and
28:56
covers uh all the the openings in the you the drawers so that when your drawer is shut there's a nice clean
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um there is not a reveal it actually covers the the opening so this one's designed to cover
29:11
the opening about a half an inch on each side and as well as the drawers so the
29:16
drawers will come uh there'll be a half inch lip here then a half inch so there'll be just be
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one uh it's probably going to be a you know 16th of an inch uh clearance from here here and here and
29:32
then up here we'll have uh probably do a 1 inch overhang for the countertop and
29:37
that's just going to help you it's just going to make it feel more like a traditional uh you know kitchen cabinet
29:44
or uh a kitchen in your home where you have that kind of nose on the end of a uh
29:52
your kitchen all right let's see what else we got got
30:00
here oh yeah let's go back to the 21 in uh for the width of this so actually we
30:06
got 21 and 1/2 with the face face frame and then that 21 and a half will
30:14
actually be a final 22 in because we have a half inch drawer face that's going on so 22
30:22
in so let's go back to the van and let's uh
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let's move this light so maybe you guys can see a little bit
30:36
better so when we come inside of their van uh in a Ford Transit we got a couple
30:43
things going on so one is we have our entrance from the door to the inside of
30:49
the van and this door uh entrance has this lip this weather seal lip and that's
30:57
what what uh I measure to bump my kitchen Galley up towards I don't want to go past that lip because when the
31:04
door shuts uh the door shuts in and compresses the outer lip and you don't
31:10
want to the door will shut but the back end before Transit actually Clicks in at
31:15
the last moment so you may think that it's engaged over here when you shut it
31:21
um but this back end's not going to close all the time so to measure that that's where I
31:27
go in and I measure from that seal and from the seal not compressed because we
31:32
want to make sure we're not forcing anything in the van we don't want to have any squeaks or anything like
31:38
that but from that seal to the inside of the van I want to limit myself to 21
31:43
Ines because over here we're going to be doing a refrigerator stack with a
31:49
microwave and our minimum that we have on this side uh for our isotherm Cruise
31:54
130 is uh 22 in deep now because the van is curved and
32:02
the fridge is going to be sitting higher our 22 in actually turns into 24
32:08
in so we have to accommodate uh 24 in but we also want to give some breathing
32:14
room to the back of the isotherm Cruise 130 fridge and so we're going to add a/ inch
32:21
so that the the fridge is not directly touching uh the wall from the back side
32:26
so that brings our final measurement to
32:32
242 so if we add all these up we've got 21 and half
32:40
22 so that gives our uh our area to move around on the inside of the
32:46
van that brings us to uh we got 20 22 in I think that's
32:54
what our our thing is and 22 is good
33:02
uh so in a perfect world youd have a 24 in entrance and I'd say a 24 in for the
33:09
walkway but uh by making this entrance
33:14
um where we at we're at 20 20 and A2 and then our walkway to the bed is
33:23
about 22 in that's really good because we're getting the fridge in the microwave stacked that we want and we're
33:29
getting the kitchen Galley uh where we want it to now the way you
33:35
can kind of cheat is we're going to take the top of the kitchen Galley and we're going to extend it one inch and that's
33:42
going to come over the drawer tops so that you have a little bit of a lip on it and it's just going to give you um a
33:50
little bit more counter space I know an inch is not a lot but in a van it's going to feel it's going to feel nice
33:58
so let's move back over just some final thoughts on this and then kind of show
34:03
you what's going on in the shop and that'll be pretty much the the stream
34:08
tonight so the only thing that this uh are that I'm planning that this will not
34:14
have obviously for our customer um they're going to have it but uh it won't
34:20
come with a back because the back
34:25
is you guys might want to do something completely different you might want to make uh you know put some type of
34:32
connection or plug or something over here um so the back is open now I do
34:40
have one thing that I'm going to try to do and if I can template this out I
34:46
think it'll be very valuable so when I was doing the adventure wagon
34:52
install the hardest part of the whole entire van
34:57
was this measurement that I made for the back of the kitchen
35:04
Galley for the ad uh for the Flatline van coat
35:09
cabinet and on a Ford Transit I'm going to show you with his
35:15
panel this is a solid 3/4 inch piece of uh a solid
35:22
bamboo but this piece right here is like a it's like a work of art it took me
35:29
took me hours uh to to make this so this piece right
35:36
here is if you guys look at it this radius right here this special
35:43
cut is specific to a Ford Transit so if I take this
35:50
panel and let's go to our other go back inside the van so I take this panel and this goes
35:58
right here this is something I'm considering
36:03
about making as well but this right here so do you see
36:10
this this um to finish off a c uh a kitchen
36:16
gy install is really important because this does uh two things one closes in
36:23
the back of your uh kitchen galy and then two you can increase the height of this and
36:30
I'm just going to sit it down for a second so the kit your gy sits about
36:35
right here but what you do is you increase this about 4 Ines or so and this
36:41
actually becomes your backsplash to your kitchen galy so that if you're inside
36:46
the van and you're cooking um you don't drop something back inside the door and then have to open
36:53
the door say it's raining outside and then you got stuff that's all falling down um from cooking
37:00
or whatever or just just stuff sitting on top of the the van um so this will hold that back plus
37:06
it gives you something to uh it just it feels homey I guess is the easiest way
37:11
to say um but I'm going to trace this copy
37:18
this uh for John and Susan this this will be um we're not using this material
37:24
we're gonna be uh painting the uh the cabinets in their van so this will be a painted surface but this is super
37:33
valuable to have this um so I'm glad that I have this before
37:39
um uh letting the other van let the other van go all right so let's set this
37:48
down let's see how many people we got on the stream all right we got four people
37:54
nice um by the way if you you guys have any questions can be anything van
38:00
related ask me in the comments uh I'm really looking for feedback on this
38:05
kitchen Galley because I do a ton of research online
38:11
trying to find stuff that uh I really like and think is good for a van
38:17
build and I pretty much put all of that into designing this again it looks like
38:24
a traditional kitchen Galley but the dimensions uh that is where this thing
38:31
stands out because one I can use traditional drawer
38:37
sizes I can use traditional drawer Hardware I don't have to do anything weird
38:44
um you know John and Susan they can go buy stuff for organization in these two
38:49
top drawers it's going to be just like anything in a house and the same with this this
38:54
bottom panel as well all right let's talk about pocket hole
39:00
screws and then we're going to talk about then we're going to talk about the uh
39:05
setup so I wish I could move this
39:14
back okay all right it's not falling off yet and CH my
39:21
lights need to get some more light some more lights in the shop here
39:27
all right pocket hole screws if you guys don't know what they are when you're assembling
39:34
something it can be hard to uh especially if you're painting the
39:41
surface to drill a hole put a screw in and then find something
39:47
to wood filler spackling Bondo over that screw head uh it makes it really just a
39:54
pain in the butt to finish something like that also um strengthwise uh it's good to put
40:03
screw in but again it's just the hassle of trying to finish it to get a nice painted surface so what you can do is
40:09
there's things called pocket holes now a lot of you guys may know exactly what a pocket hole is this is for people who
40:15
have no idea and W to learn so pocket hole drills a pocket hole and what you can do is you
40:23
take a specific screw it's called a pocket hole
40:30
screw and what you're gonna do um now this is not sponsored but Craig is all
40:36
the that's what I'm using for this whole entire um process trying to stick with one
40:43
manufacturer that makes things a lot easier there's a bunch of companies that make pocket hole screws or pocket hole
40:50
jigs but Craig is kind of the uh the well-known
40:57
brand um but you have these screws and they're there they got special heads on them and what you do is these screw
41:05
into uh the hole now I've already drilled through this you wouldn't you wouldn't be able to do this you'd have
41:11
to actually drill the new hole through um but what's cool is it angles the
41:17
hole right in the center of your material and it goes in the center and
41:24
that way when you go to screw it in into another piece right here um this is a
41:30
really strong uh connection it's extremely strong this actually feels
41:35
like there's a metal hinge right here I'm not lying like it's uh it's it's
41:41
pretty unbelievable how strong it is it's especially in Baltic Birch we'll talk about Baltic Birch in
41:47
just a second now well actually we're going to talk about right now Balter bir does not uh
41:57
uh they're using I haven't looked this up but I'm pretty sure it's a it's a
42:02
metric size versus U an imperial size so it's going to be slightly
42:09
thinner you can call it a/ inch when you import it and that's what you're kind of going to look for because it's very close but it's about a
42:15
16th uh it's about a 16th less than
42:21
uh yeah 16th less so it's one two three four five six
42:27
716 um is the size so that by that 16th less or the
42:35
it's thinner you're going to have to make a modification to your pocket hole
42:42
uh setup so right here I have a drill and this is what I'm using for the pocket
42:47
hole the drill looks really wild and that's because this goes down a shaft and it uses the shaft as it's like
42:54
centering device but there's a collar right here and the collar on this it'll
42:59
say inch and a half 3/4 or/ inch and that is dictating the plywood that
43:04
you're drilling through so if you need if you're going through an inch and a half like a
43:09
2x4 you're going to use this one and then it goes down deeper 3/4 is more
43:15
shallow and then half inch is even shallower because we're at
43:21
716 um we're going to have to uh take the half inch and we're gonna have
43:28
to move the collar down um about a 16th of an inch
43:34
now by doing that we're raising this up a little bit and we're changing uh these were drilled before I
43:42
knew to do that modification cuz I had a couple screws just poking out the side a
43:47
little bit and I was like well how am I going to fix this but uh yeah you just
43:53
get on Reddit and it'll it'll tell you in 5 seconds seconds I to fix the problem uh or not but by doing that it
44:01
offset my new measurement so that uh I put the I buried these in there really good with a drill and I don't have any
44:08
piercing and it's this is a extremely strong
44:16
uh uh mounting now once you do that and you
44:22
have your screws like I said you won't actually have the screws in here like I
44:27
do um yeah you just get it inside your cabinet and then you screw it in place
44:33
you're going to want to use uh some type of uh clamp to actually hold whatever
44:41
piece you're working on together because because this is coming in at an angle it's going to want to pull itself out of
44:49
square just a little bit and if you anticipate that and kind of go with it
44:54
um maybe move it off just a hair and then kind of follow it in get some practice and you'll be able to nail
45:01
it but yeah clamps and stuff like that make a world of
45:07
difference um so let's talk about The Jig that you use so there's a a kit that
45:13
you buy from Craig it's Craig with a K and what you're going to do is you're
45:19
going to get a little kit like this again this is not sponsored giving you guys really easy information so in
45:25
inside this kit um it's not going to look like this I'm using this to hold a bunch of kits that I've
45:32
Consolidated but inside here what you're going to get is you're going to get
45:37
something looks like this and this comes with a
45:45
clamp and you take these two pieces and what you're going to
45:51
do is a uh let's say you have a blind I you haven't drilled it out yet you'll
45:57
take this and then you're going to flip it upside down and you want to do two
46:03
things one remember we want to set our drill to the half inch and then uh lower it just a little bit so our bit does not
46:10
go down to deep that's only for Baltic Birch if you use half inch traditional plywood put it
46:17
on the half inch Mark um so over here we've got our pocket hole jig and then what I'm doing
46:25
is I'm just putting it right in the center it doesn't really matter where you put it you just want to put it you
46:30
don't want to put it on the edge uh you just really want to put in the center the whole point of this is
46:36
just to secure a piece of wood it's not there for Decorative Touch or anything
46:41
pocket holes are going where you're not going to see them behind drawer faces
46:46
that that that sort of thing then you're going to take your clamp and I've already got this preset
46:52
but just going to clamp it down it's got an adjustment here and then when you're ready what you're going to do is you're going to take your
47:00
drill go in this collar this little shaft right
47:06
here and then drill your hole just do it on both sides and when you pop this
47:12
off it's going to give you these two slots and then you can just take
47:17
it put it where you need to um so this is a pro
47:24
tip make sure you buy the Craig uh tool or this extension tool now depending on
47:32
what kit you buy it's going to come with it and the reason it's long uh it's not
47:39
to reach in hard places though it might actually help so what I the reason it's
47:44
long is the angle of attack right here that you're actually going in to uh screw the the
47:52
bti in it needs to be shallow very shallow like that um so for example this is the drill
47:59
that I use and you can see the drill is uh I've got plenty of room to go down
48:06
now if I use just an off-the-shelf like Milwaukee or DeWalt bit and I try to put
48:13
my pocket screw in the the angle of attack has got more aggressive and this
48:18
is going to cause the screw to poke out from your uh piece of wood so you want
48:25
to make sure you keep the long extension so that instead
48:30
of being at an aggressive angle you can be more mild when you come in and it's going to keep it uh more centered when
48:36
it comes
48:51
out and Jamie says zoom in for the screws uh we we'll do this again in another video uh when we're actually
48:56
building some stuff in the van everything the van's going to be held in with pocket screws so there's plenty of
49:02
footage coming but um yeah so that's the Craig jig uh one
49:08
thing that I would not get don't buy don't buy this okay if you're putting
49:16
pocket hole screws into soft wood like cheap plywood from Lowe's or Home Depot
49:22
you can use this uh I bought this this this uh now this is like a fancy version
49:28
of this it has a built-in uh compress like a clamp Vie or
49:35
whatever but Baltic Birch is so dense that when I put this in here and I
49:41
clamp it you know I'll try to clamp it as hard as I can but you know this is all
49:49
plastic um and when I drill it catches on the Baltic Burke and
49:54
just twist it right it just twists it right out so you can see I've squeezed this as hard as I
50:01
can I've actually got it locked in and see I can pull it right out so
50:07
this was a this is not a good purchase I've already drilled through it ins the side
50:14
so I decided not to return it however it does for like 2x4s you can put a 2x4 in
50:19
here that's it's very soft wood it works fine but for this just get the simple
50:25
piece like this don't get a big fancy kit because this is all you need and and the
50:32
reason that I've found out it's all you need is because if I have a big piece of a big
50:37
wood panel and I bought the kit that actually sits on the table and drills it for you and
50:44
everything you can take this inside of the van and outside of the van you can take this and put it into hard to reach
50:50
places and it makes um this is where simple is
50:58
better okay so they also make a little tool like this to where you
51:04
can uh pull this collar you can pre-drill and counter
51:11
sync uh a hole for if you're doing a flush panel and then you can flip it
51:16
back over and then lock it and then drill it back in I did buy that because there's some panels that I
51:23
um I'm going to go straight in to but anyway so that is
51:31
that see what else um and then the other thing that I'm going to use from Craig
51:38
it's called a uh it's think something for European style hinges so inside of a cabinet you guys
51:47
have seen on the door that you open up there's a circular hole that's been uh cut out it's almost like it's been
51:53
routered out so Craig makes a a jig for a European hinge
51:59
and what you do is you take this and say this is your door for your your hinge
52:06
door for your van you take this and slide it up against the side and then you can do a different
52:13
offset depending on what hinge you purchase um and then you just go in you cut your hole
52:20
out and this will set that uh recessed cutout so that
52:27
you can put the hinge in the door um they call it a European style hinge I
52:32
might go on the computer and show you guys if you guys have any questions on that um let's let's just go ahead and do
52:40
that let's see
52:52
here make sure my computer is muted yep
52:58
okay so we got European
53:09
hinge okay so this is what I'm talking about uh for European style hinge so there's this kind of
53:16
uh routed out hinge and this is what a European style
53:23
hinge is so the part you're cutting out is the door it's not it's not the inside
53:29
of the cabinet so you set one and then the other one is going to be what is allowed
53:35
you can make it adjustable you're can to have one where the door is inset or you can have one
53:41
where the door is actually uh you know flush or outside of the
53:47
um the door itself so there's a couple different ways you can do it here is a
53:53
uh very expensive uh one for doing it um I don't the Craig
53:59
one is not that expensive uh but yeah this one allows you to do that and you guys can watch
54:06
some videos on it to uh to check it out but it's that's what it's
54:13
called um all right so we are pretty much going to
54:18
uh get ready to end the stream so let me know if you guys have any questions before we go wanted you guys to uh check out van
54:26
Builder HQ if you haven't done that we've got a lot of really cool vid uh
54:32
let me take this off there we
54:38
go so vbl hq.com have we have a lot of excellent blog post on here uh talking
54:45
about everything you know DIY related to Vans Power Systems what board Transit is
54:51
best for a camper conversion true cost of a camper van conversion and much more
54:56
more so you can actually find uh information like this one which is ker
55:01
van countertop ideas for your build and this is just a bunch of uh you know photos and some opinions that I have as
55:09
far as stuff that we s saw at shows and what I think is the best thing for your van whether you're doing it DIY or
55:16
you're looking for something more professional um a bunch of different ideas this is that Flatline vanco
55:22
Kitchen Gallery I was talking about earlier uh it's really nice but the door the drawer dimensions are they're it's a
55:28
little too shallow and it's not um it's a little too wide for certain type of
55:34
Cutlery works great but again you know
55:39
uh little odds but this is uh the backsplash I was showing you guys that I
55:44
built uh and then the Reva sink so the the one that I'm building is going to look really close to this for
55:52
example um yeah so tons of blog posts check it out
55:59
lot of great information and then let's also talk about our DIY van build cheat sheet so
56:06
what is the DIY van build cheat sheet so this cheat sheet is uh an Excel document
56:12
that I put together and developed that organizes the past three years of all of
56:18
my Amazon purchases so if there's something I bought on Amazon for the shop or for a van build it's on the list
56:25
we've got over 250 curated items and uh by being curated I've organized them
56:31
from Electrical uh Fasteners Hardware HVAC
56:37
security solar um and the most important one that I like is the tool section so
56:42
there's a ton of tools on here that I think would really benefit you if you're just doing a DIY build you have no place
56:48
to start uh or don't know where to start tool wise because you may not have a lot of these tools and if you buy a lot of
56:54
stuff that you you don't need you'll be wasting money but this list guys this is stuff
56:59
that I bought and I use on the van so a deuring tool uh drill bits for the
57:06
special metal that's in a for Transit van on the top like if you're working on the roof um stuff down here uh you know
57:15
four o wire cable Cutters uh crimping
57:20
tools propex expansion tool kit for the PEX a that install so all this stuff is
57:27
what I've used um then down here at the bottom we actually have you know Water Systems so water
57:32
pumps motorized ball valves um the stuff that you see on
57:37
YouTube or online I probably have it on this list uh guess what the best thing
57:43
is this list is completely free all you got to do is go to Van Builder hq.com or click on the link in the description
57:49
below but your name and email address is going to be sent directly to your inbox and you guys can
57:55
um check it out you can also search with this so all you got to do is just get it hit contrl F Type in you know
58:02
pump and it'll bring you right down to like a water pump for example yeah check
58:07
it out it's the DIY van build cheat sheet it's completely free you can get it in the link in the description
58:14
below um then also this is brought to you by ay custom van so my custom van
58:20
conversion business that we were talking about at the of this um live stream and
58:28
uh if you want to take a vid check out a video that we did at Adventure van Expo our little tour of the van we got a
58:35
video there and then uh come on down we've got all the specs on the van got some really nice
58:41
pictures of what the build looks like and if you have any questions the best
58:47
way to get in touch with me is this contact information below sales odyy custom vance.com is my email you've got
58:54
my phone number right there um but the number one way is to click this link and
58:59
schedule a call this gives you access to my calendar you can pick a date and a time that's most convenient for you
59:07
we'll hop in a phone call I'll give you all the details about vans that are current for sale um but if you're not interested in
59:14
vans that we have currently for sale and you want to do your own custom build like the one that we're working on for John and Susan right now on the left
59:21
hand side you can go and uh there's just a quick little paragraph to read over it's going to get you set up for our
59:27
consultation and you do the same thing you just pick a time pick a date that's most convenient for you and we will hop
59:33
on the phone call to uh discuss your personal custom van build with Odyssey
59:39
custom vans but guys that is going to do it for this live stream um again I would love
59:46
for you guys to give me some feedback on this tell me what you think about this kitchen Galley is this something that
59:52
you would like to have in your van as far as the dimensions design that sort of thing um love to hear the feedback
59:59
also get subscribed to the YouTube channel we got tons of videos coming out um I try to do a live stream at least
1:00:06
once a week right now I'm uh I've been designing a bunch of stuff um also with this new saw and uh yeah uh more live
1:00:17
streams ready to come but get subscribed give us a like on that video If you enjoyed it and if there's somebody
1:00:23
that's working on a kitchen G and trying to figure out where to start the beginning of this video is a good thing to uh send to them and uh I think it'll
1:00:30
help out so share this video to them and um other than that we will uh catch you
1:00:36
guys in the next live
1:00:42
[Music]
1:00:53
stream
#Cabinetry
#Campers & RVs
#Home Furnishings
#Home Improvement
#Home Storage & Shelving
#Kitchen & Dining
#Kitchen & Dining Furniture
#Living Room Furniture
#Major Kitchen Appliances
#Small Kitchen Appliances