It seems like there are roughly two types

There’s about three 🙂 There’s your absorption fridge, which drives the coolant round with a heat source, either an electric element or a gas flame. That’s your usual caravan/motorhome “3-way” fridge, the ones that only run on 12V when attached to an engine. Then you’ve got compressor fridges (like your Waeco) which have an electrical compressor in them and use little enough juice that you can run them off 12V. And there’s thermoelectric (or Peltier) coolers which have the advantage of no moving parts but aren’t as efficient as the others — those are the ones that can only cool down to 18 or so degrees below ambient.

We’ve taken to doing without a hookup and running the fridge off gas, it’s often cheaper and broadens the campsite options 🙂

I guess I just like building stuff at every opportunity, even if unnecessary

Very much fair enough 🙂 Actually I might steal that idea for mine 😉

Some sites won’t let you use anything without its own RCD in it. You’ll need quite fat flex, too, because you’ll be wanting 20m of it. Caravans and motorhomes all have RCDs, a tent doesn’t seem less likely to need one. Yes, the site wiring should have its own RCDs, although they’re not necessarily accessible and having seen the state of some campsite wiring I’d rather rely on one I brought with me 😉

Currently fitting it out to take 3 bikes with the wheels off and 3 people on a Euro roadtrip.

Forgive me, but what “fitting out” does it need for that?

Impressed that there are people having good results with these, I’ve never seen one that looked even slightly reassuring. Although I’m assuming that the people I see towing bikes with stabilisers just haven’t read the instructions 😉

This fibreglass bit — is the high top itself fibreglass or have you got a fibreglass patch in a steel roof? If the roof’s fibreglass it’s almost certainly not painted, so the paint won’t match.

You should be able to sort out some scrapes and blisters on a white van easily enough. Metallics I’d run a mile from, but white’s fine. Warm the can, spray it on, don’t mask too close to where you’re painting so you get a feathered edge to the new paint, fine wet and dry between coats, cut it in afterwards. Got to be better than rust, anyway 🙂

Possibly your colour-matched paint isn’t colour-matched — there are a lot of different whites 🙂 However, if the van’s fairly old the original paint may have gone dull and make the fresh paint obvious. T-Cut on the original paint should help to blend it in.

Rusty bits really need grinding back to shiny metal then primed and painted, or it just comes back.

Some of what you list is more “skilled trades” than “manual labour”, though. Building maintenance and car servicing, for example. Being a car mechanic may not pay all that well, but it’s still costing you £40-50 an hour or so. Obviously if you earn more than that it’s a no-brainer unless you like tinkering with cars 🙂

I’ve been working from one of these for three years:

http://dunsterhouse.co.uk/garden-offices/insulated-log-cabin-range/3m-x-3m-avonsup-sup-plus-300-sunlight-office

Started with this:

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Then a bit of this:

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And some of this:

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And then a couple of days to put the actual building up, compressed here into about twelve seconds:

http://flic.kr/p/6FqeEG

And then paint and stuff. Dug a trench to the house for cables, electrician did the actual wiring on account of tedious Part P building regs stuff and also he was here doing the house anyway. Trench has armoured mains cable and plastic conduit containing phone line/CAT5/doorbell wire 🙂

It’s good. Not the most expensive, but warm enough (have a small oil-filled rad for the winter months). Full of junk and mess, of course, but that’s me, not the building 😉

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Indoor use only 😉

It seems to be lacking most of the bits that made it an SM1000 in the first place, so to an enthusiast it’s a frame and fork. I got an SM700 (same frame, same year, nearly all the original bits but in considerably worse condition) for £45 a couple of years back, but you can probably get more than that for it. Have a look at the For Sales on http://www.retrobike.co.uk, there’ll be some on there I’m sure 🙂

My old motorhome had 90bhp (2.0TDi Fiat based) and at 3500kg was very slow.

That does sound a bit weedy 🙂 Mine’s 90hp (or at least that’s what it claimed to have when it was new 18 years ago…) but MTPLM is a mere 2500kg. Racing weight 🙂

My camper has about 40bhp/tonne, I’m amazed my entire family hasn’t died.

Surely if it was some sort of black-ops assassination it would have been done in such a way as to not raise lots of questions, a 21 month police enquiry and high-profile inquest? Not exactly covert, is it?

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While we’re chin-stroking at average speeds, can anyone tell me what’s going on with the top 8 or so here?

http://app.strava.com/segments/630236

:-O

Executive summary:

pointless foghorning

Carrier-style steam catapult 🙂

Or, to maintain human-powered credentials, enormous bungee cord and pedal-driven winch.

And I’d definitely go with a recumbent, possibly with a fairing, and powered wheel(s).

Light weight is everything if you’re trying to leave the ground. Fairing? More weight. Recumbent? Longer frame, more weight. Powered wheels? Extra transmission, more weight. It’s a marginal proposition to get off the ground at all. Pilot aerodynamics also pretty moot at a jogging pace, which is all you’re going to be doing.

Look forward to seeing the programme 🙂

I’m always a bit amused by people who seem to think that they’re inflating tyres to exactly 28psi or whatever. There’s no way the gauges on most pumps are that precise, or repeatable. And if you pump the tyres up in a cold garage and then ride on a hot day you’ll end up with 29psi anyway 🙂

We had a splendidly weird thing where the second-nearest school is actually in a different county/LEA, which meant doing two applications. Effectively they were both first choice. It’s all a bit crackers, really. Hope you get it sorted.

road bars are unlikely to ever be in a collision situation in normal operation

I’m guessing you’ve not seen many Cat 4 races? 😉

Bristol, you say? Wait until secondary school time, you’ll look back on this with fondness…

Rotational amnesia

This is what goldfish do, isn’t it?

(Also standing ovation for philconsequence 🙂 )

my tank is already full, how can I panic buy now?

Buy another car.

if there’s one thing in the world that makes me feel excited and brings back floods of happy childhood memories its dinosaurs.

You don’t look a hundred million years old.

[Disclaimer: I have no idea what you look like, I’m just assuming :)]

Dimetrodon’s pretty cool:

I take it my (small) salary doesn’t count as a business expense?

You don’t have a salary, you’re a sole trader. You have revenue, you have expenses, you have resulting profit, that’s what you pay tax on.

I still know lots of sole traders who ‘break even’ tax-wise, paying next to nothing year in, year out

You have to be living pretty cheaply to do that.

I ran as a sole trader for two years, I’ve just set up a limited company and hired an accountant. I went for one who deals with other local small businesses. He also works from home, so I’m paying for his services, not for swanky offices that I’ll probably never visit 🙂

am i right in thinking that an angleset just slackens the bike but offset bushes drop the bb and change the seat tube angle also?

Angleset actually drops the BB and steepens the seat angle very slightly because you’ve got the same length fork at a shallower angle, so the head tube gets nearer the ground. Offset bushes drop the BB and slacken both ends.

Mine are a bit feeble compared to some on here. Combined mileage of the two things on the driveway is 282,000 miles — 2002 Peugeot Partner 1.9D with 127,000 and 1994 VW T4 camper with 156,000. The (very slightly) interesting thing about the T4 is that it’s got the 2.0 petrol engine in. Had a bit of a wobble last year with a weird engine running fault that eventually turned out to be the ECU, which you can’t get any more. Found one from a salvage place but it was from a van a year later and didn’t work. Managed to get the existing one rebuilt, though, so that’s OK. I see no reason why it shouldn’t keep going for a very long time yet.

The Peugeot is being a bit French and starting to fall to pieces slightly, the most pressing issue being the increasingly soggy and lopsided driver’s seat. Had to have new front springs for the MOT ‘cos they had cracks in them. Think the engine is essentially indestructable, though.

I was, but I’ve spanged my ITB — pulled out last weekend. Good luck!

charge them a reasonable and realistic rate but don’t expect to cover you costs and time

Is a rate that doesn’t cover your costs and/or time reasonable or realistic? The job may lead to other things, but if it leads to other things that don’t pay a sustainable rate then it’s all a bit moot 🙂

What were the agreed payment terms ?

^ this is important. If you didn’t agree anything (or put anything on your invoice) then they don’t have to rush 😉

853 steel is very stiff compared to lesser steels

Um, no it isn’t. They’re all equally stiff. 853’s just stronger.

(http://reynoldstechnology.biz/assets/pdf/rtl_steel_alloys_extract.pdf)

No, unique to Klein.

Rear-facing dropouts? Not quite — my Mountain Cycle Moho had them too. Not that anyone would confuse that with a Klein 😉

shame the top tube sticks out the back of the seat tube

I like that bit.

I’ll take back everything I said about you having a poor memory – you obviously have an amazing, almost unbelievable, memory.

Is it possible that you’re maybe taking this excessively seriously?

Although FWIW I was thinking more of early-80s Reagan era Cold War than Cuba. Which I think brings me into the realms of rememberability 😉

it seems to have spanned at least 20 years.

About 18, as I believe is traditional 😉

^ WINNING POST 😀

I don’t know what decade you think you can remember

Quite possibly bits of several, I never said all that stuff happened at the same time 😉

[edit: or in that order…]

Can’t add much to that. Free parking here:

http://bit.ly/HmYXBb (Streetmap link)