All Cherry; No Pits! Lance XRV Progress Update 2 August, 2026
Lance is headed for the finish line in terms of completing the transformation from his origin as a 2016 Kenworth T270 Horton Ambulance to our awemazing eXpedition Recreation Vehicle XRV aka “Lance”. He and I are now back up at our place on Saturna Island where I have a great woodworking workshop that I am thoroughly enjoying as I complete the last phase of the internal buildout of the original Horton 14 x 8 ft ambulance box. This is the only wood I’ve used so far as everything else is either extruded aluminium or XAL, Aluminium Composite Material ACM for the surfaces of the walls and ceiling and then LVT solid vinyl planks for the floor and solid surface acrylic for the countertops.
No surprise to those of you who have been following my adventures for any time, the lead up to this post is a great story and the wood itself has its own which I’ll outline first.
Mother Nature + Friends Converge
I have some dear friends, Rick & Sherry and we lived and worked together when Rick & I were teachers on the Canadian Armed Forces jet fighter base in Baden Baden Germany in the early 80’s. Hard to believe that is now more than 45 years ago! Rick and Sherry live in Vancouver and have had a lovely property I’ve been to many times over the years on Gambier Island off the coast of North Vancouver as you’re driving up to Whistler mountain. Their son Colin was just a young boy when we were all together in Baden and has grown a wee bit since then. On our way back from our “sea trials” with Lance last summer when we drove across the US to attend the wedding of my niece in Portland Maine and then back across Canada, we stopped in to see Rick, Sherry and Colin while they were at their place on Gambier Island. We stayed overnight swapping stories and catching up. In the course of our conversations they told me about a very large old Cherry tree, over 200 years old they think, that had come down in a big wind storm a few years ago. Colin lives on Gambier full time which is saying something as it is totally off grid and only accessible by private boat, so he grows all his own food and is very talented and self sufficient young man. Over the years, he and I have developed a growing friendship discussing some of our respective DIY projects and he has been following my progress in transforming Lance into an XRV.
In telling the stories about the stories about this big old tree coming own, Colin told how he had salvaged as much as he could using a chain saw milling machine he had assembled and he was anxious to show me the planks from his handiwork. As we looked over these massive planks he had hewn that were about 75mm / 3” thick and 4m/12ft long I asked him what he planned to do with them and he said he didn’t have anything in mind just yet. Well, you know where this is going and so yes, Colin ever so generously insisted that it would make him very happy if I would take some and use them for the interior of Lance! 
Unfortunately I didn’t get any photos of the whole stack of Cherry planks but these are the ones we pulled out and loaded onto a cart to move down to the boat dock. Why the cart you ask? 
Well, as you may recall Gambier can only be accessed by private boat so we now needed to figure out a way to get these planks off the island and back over to the mainland where Lance was parked. 
After all his years on Gambier, Rick is used to this so he helped load up the planks and drive them from up on the property down to the boat dock, which as you can see is a looooooong way down. 
Rick and I carried them down the last way on the ramp and had them all ready to now load onto his boat. 
Easy peasy as we Canadians say and Rick put his boat into gear and we were off on the 10 minute ride over to the dock and then carried them up and loaded into Lance! 
Christine and I bid them all adieu and headed off on the final leg of our cross North America trip to get Lance back to our place on Saturna Island where I carried the planks on their next voyage into my workshop. You can see some of the planks now standing up on edge to the Left of the yellow table saw. 
A few weeks later my awemazing son Skyler came over for a few days to help me out and after a bit more wood wrestling and we had the first slab horizontally on the sawhorses ready for to be cut down to size. What we needed to do is cut some of these into strips about 20mm/ 3/4” square that would be glued to the edges of 13mm/ 1/2” Baltic Birch plywood and then to cut others into very thin sheets that would be glued on top of the edged plywood to create all the drawer fronts and cabinet doors patiently awaiting inside Lance’s Galley. 
Skyler is a very talented cabinetmaker and woodworker and he had brought over his Fein Track Saw with him which was just the right tool to cut the rough sawn slabs down to more usable size. 
Cherry is a lovely wood to work with and over the years I’ve used it to built quite a lot of furniture and cabinets with. 
These thick planks were a bit of a challenge but Skyler and his saw were up for it 
and along with the table saw we soon had these planks cut into about 150mm/6”wide boards for our next step. 
Which was to move them over to the bandsaw which had a sharp new 1” carbide toothed blade I had just bought and fitted. We made up the wooden fence you see here to guide the planks that were now up on their edge ready to be run through that blade a bit like a meat cutter blade shaves thin slices of ham. 
After a few test cuts we had the fence set just right to give us consistently thick slices. 
This yellow feather jig clamps to the slots in the bandsaw table and keeps the plank pressed tightly against the side of the fence. 
Each slice is about 3-4mm / 1/8” thick and will be the “veneer” that I glue onto all that edge banded plywood drawer fronts and doors. 
Net result was four of these stacks of the 6” wide Cherry veneer. 
For the solid Cherry edging we needed for the perimeter edges of each Baltic Birch plywood blank we ripped them to rough size using the table saw and then fed them through our thickness planer to take them down to be just a wee bit thicker than the 1/2” plywood so I can trim them down to be perfectly flush with the faces of the plywood. 
There are a LOT of drawers and doors each of which needs four solid Cherry edges so we set up a bit of a production run between the two of us using the table saw and the thickness planer and started putting them all into this plastic waste can.
The past few weeks I’ve been busy cutting all the BB plywood pieces to size and then gluing these lengths of Cherry edging and getting them ready to laminate with my vacuum bagging press to create what I’m calling my “Cherry Burritos “ But I’m going to going to leave that whole process for the next update here which I will do my best to put together in the next week or two before we take off on our next adventure over to Europe for a few months!
Hope you will stay tuned for that and join us here again.
My sincere thanks again to Rick, Colin and Sherry for their kind generosity in donating this gorgeous Cherry to the cause here.
And thanks in advance for all your questions and comments that you can put in the “Join the Discussion” box below and thank you SO much for taking them time to follow along on these adventures in Wayne’s World.
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