Not so normal living conditions

So this is my home now, a 4×4 ex-firefighter truck from 1976. Bit older photo, but from the outside it still looks like this. Except it has a licence plate, means it’s street legal now. It’s misssing some creative lettering though. I plan to write “UM” on it’s side in big black letters one day, to confuse some gangstas. I think they call it mimikri in the animal kingdom, and it’s perfectly legal there 😀

For introducing you to this little beast called “Erwe”, know this: I have just this place to live and work now and these 9 m² just fit me (ceiling is 1 cm above my head). But I own this one, which is a relief: no rent, no interest, just a bit of vehicle tax. And while I say I live in it, don’t expect a living room. It’s more meant to be an expedition truck for the decades to come  So, you’ll find lots of waterproof boxes instead of furniture, more truck tools than kitchen tools, and even a beautiful aluminium carpet (pictured below). Not sure where my expeditions will go and what my tasks will be – currently it looks like I want to go to the Balkans or Southern Italy and see what I can understand and do about the refugee situation there. More ideas are always welcome.

For the moment, my life in this setup works like this (going along the images):

(1) Say it is winter, so fire up the wood stove first thing in the morning and go to bed for 20 min more until it’s all heated up. Not much wood (or free pine cones :D) needed, since I live in a former deep freeze box used for fish. Insulation is 10 cm PUR foam all around, equivalent to 20 cm styrofoam. In German winter, I needed a bit more than one Eurobox (60×40×30 cm) of wood per week.

(2) Make hot water and have a coffee. Coffee machine is very simple yet, so not for coffeephiles for the time being … still looking for a bit larger version of these Moka Pot stovetop espresso makers somewhere …

(3) Put “bed” into workshop mode. Toolboxes are normally stored under the bed, in the middle of the four used Zarges A10 aluminium boxes on which the mattress rests. That seems like a strange choice for a bedframe, but I store everything in stackable boxes here so that moving without the truck to another place for longer is just about shipping my stuff on one pallet (ca. 80 EUR with a trucking company within Germany, or ca. 300 EUR half around the world in a container as LCL). Also note my little assortment of “clubbing utensils” visible to the right, fixed handy right next to the door for personal security. There’s a large MagLite flashlight, basically the only heavy item you may carry when opening the door at night and find police in front (which I expect to happen a lot while travelling). And a bamboo stick, as used by the friendly Nepal Armed Police forces 😛 I brought it from Kathmandu last year, after the earthquake made our garden wall fall on the poor bamboos.

(4) Work on some “home improvement” or “workshop improvement” project. One of my latest projects was creating “sun powered” 24 V power tools, as shown. I do not use an inverter to make 240 V AC from my 24 V DC solar system (because inverters are only ~85% efficient, quite expensive when sizing them for powertools – and worse, they break, and they produce electricity unsafe to touch … while my 24 V DC is safe for all my DIY purposes). So instead, I selected a series of cordless power tools with input voltage that fits for my 24 V DC, like the Milwaukee V28 series shown here. Then bought a defective replacement battery on eBay (ca. 7-12 EUR), removed the LiIon cells from it and connected a cable to plus and minus instead. Plug it into the socket and it will work – no need to connect the temperature sensor (the central pin). Just make sure your sockets are fused, and the fuses can take 35 A – the circular saw draws 800 W max., angle grinder 500 W max., power drill I have to see, did not use it above 150 W so far). If you want to replicate this, also note the cable and plug. Cable is 4 mm² copper cable, of which the cheapest and most available solution is buying speaker cable, and the plug is not a normal 12 V / 24 V cigarette lighter plug as they can’s stand more than 12 A – instead I use SpeakON STX series plugs from PA / music equipment, which can stand 40 A normally and 70 A when using all four pins and a special cascading fuse setup ­– also these plugs are rainproof and made from sturdy aluminium, I really like them.

(5) Have a meal right in the middle of your home construction site mess and wonder if it will ever be a “normal” place to live. Just in that last unsuspecting picture, there are some more not-so-normall things to observe when you look closely:

• I might find a bench vise next to the food. Perfectly normal here. Because it is not fixed, it can move. I mounted it on a small base plate and it likes to move around a lot …
• There are two boxes of small drills and milling bits for a rotary tool that I found, fixed and converted to be “sun powered” as well. Just use any adjustable 24 V DC-DC notebook adapter fitting for the input voltage of the rotary tool, and make a power tip adapter from an exchangeable tip of the notebook adapter which you don’t need for your own notebook …
• Then ther’s my own notebook, and if you look closely to the back left of it, you see a DC plug that has been tampered with. I had to make my own DC tip because it was impossible to buy a 24 V DC-DC converter coming with the right tip … . But it works flawlessly now, means it’s a “sun computer” (minuscle s!).
• There’s a PUR foam insulation block I use in the window over the winter and also as an improvised curtain in the evening. It helps, but I should cover it with something pretty I guess 😐
• There’s a wood stove with an orange metal belt made from the roof of an old street roller, keeping it to the wall.
• Fork and spoon are used ones from German Army, produced sometime in the mid 1960s. Very sturdy, available for cheap on eBay, and they can be neatly arranged for transport when travelling with a backpack.
• There’s a battered table that is at least 35 years old (I know becaus it’s from my childhood … hehe), now featuring a line of holes at the back by which it holds on to the grid hole system I use in the truck (compatible with OpenStructures and Gridbeam).

Hope you enjoyed being introduced to some of the not-so-normal objects in my home … many more waiting in the line, it’s literally full of them here. As you saw, I rather build something from trash metal or pre-owned stuff than spending money to buy it. And srsly, I don’t care how these things look, just that they work, don’t break, and don’t cost much. To me, every alternative is so much better than forced labor in a nonsensical fulltime job just to have money for buying shiny new things.