SKOOLIE BUILD: Junk in the Trunk

Building on our experience riding in Sprinter's and Van's we didn't want to feel short on storage. Also, I play in the winter, back-country skiing and ice climbing; Heather didn't want me and my buddies hauling wet gear into and throughout the bus. The solution, external accessible storage - and lots of it. Storage is the largest reason we chose a front engine bus, we wanted to turn the back portion into a truck bed to haul skis, packs, bikes... That solves a lot of the storage.

While replacing the drive shaft, I started joking with my Dad about how much room there was under the bus. Dad said, "You can use a grocery cart as a creeper under there." This gave me some pause, there has got to be something we could do with all that space... Cargo Boxes. They were hard to find at first until I figured out the search term "JoBox". Armed with that, I was off. JoBox is the name brand and those boxes look super sweet. In my mind I had created a mounting system where the frame would carry most of the weight and the boxes would be just a weatherproof shell. I took the more affordable route and ordered some no-name brand from Amazon. Here is the link: LINK HERE. For the money, they turned out to be perfect.

After measuring out where the boxes would go. I used a circular saw with a metal blade to cut out the bus panels. Here is a video link. I tried really hard to make my boxes flush with the frame and am super happy with how it came out. However, I think I could have saved myself a ton of work if I placed the boxes just behind the bus panel. After cutting it out I lined the bus panel with some metal reinforced edging to give it a finished look.

Mounting the boxes, I used 2 pieces of 10 foot hat channel per side of the bus to hang the boxes from the inside of the bus, this might make more sense with an image. The passenger side of the bus has 3 boxes while the driver side has 2 (on account of the original battery box being on the driver side). For each box, I drilled 4 holes through the bus sub-floor and through the frame member. Then I landed a 12" bolt through the hat channel, through the subfloor, through the fram member, through the box, and connected it with one of two pieces of unistrut that would sit inside the box. When bolted tight, the unistrut pinned the box to the frame. I sealed all the holes with sikaflex.

(NOTE: the main floor wit hthe puke pad would come up and those mounting brackets would be directly on the steel floor. This picture was from a test fit.)

Inside the box, I used a length of allthread to hang a shelf from the unistrut holding the top of the box. That shelf sits 1/4 of an inch off the box bottom. Now nothing sits on the box, all the laod weight is supported on the cross members of the bus body. The shelf fits snugly so I am not worried about it banging around either.

The end result came out great and we added a lot of external storage the bus. With very little impact on the overall clearance of the vehichle. I could squeeze a couple more on past the rear axel but, that is where I am going to put the gray water and hopefull an underbody propane tank (at some point in the future).