Step 6 – Insulate your van

Note: If you want your electrical wires to run through the bodywork of your van, you’ll have to check step 7  first. 

Insulation time! 
When you’ve properly placed all parts in the bodywork, it’s time to insulate your van!
It’s important to insulate sufficiently! It will not only dampen outside noise. It is also a very crucial step to keep the temperature inside consistent, whether you are going to place air-conditioning and/or a heating system or not.

First you can attach anti-drumming plates onto your bodywork (walls, floor, roof and wheel housings) to make the metal heavier. In this way vibrations and noises, while driving, will be minimized. But also, when parked, the surrounding sounds are muted.

For the insulation there are many different types of insulation material you can use. To know what material you want to use, you have to compare the pros and cons depending on your requirements, keeping in mind the moisture management, the flexibility, the quality and the price. We used Armaflex because it is very convenient to work with.

A few advantages of Armaflex:
– Self-adhesive, so no mess with glue and no moisture can get behind
– Good insulation capacity
– Price to quality ratio
– It comes in different thicknesses, so it is as flexible as needed 
– Light weighted

We used 19mm for the floor, the big parts of the walls and the ceiling. For the bridges, the wheel housings, the frame of the doorways and on the doors themselves we used 6mm. 

Before you start insulating the floor, you have to place a floor base first to ensure the floor will be stable in the end. If you place the floor base on top of the insulation, your floor will no longer lie firmly. We glued wooden beams evenly spaced along the full length of the bus with polymax. Make sure you use beams that are slightly higher than your insulation. 
After you placed the beams, you can put on some weight and let it dry as long as needed, depending on the kind of glue you used. As soon as the beams are fixed properly, you can start laying insulation in between.

To have the best result, it is best to cover as much as possible. Once you covered everything you wanted to insulate, you can finish all seams with insulation tape where needed.