Zoe & Razz have been enjoying their winter coats during the recent cold spell here.  All things relative of course so that has been temperatures down to as low as 2C/36F at night and not getting much above 10C/50F in the daytime.  But it is always sunny here so that makes it pretty easy to take and feels much warmer as long as you stay in the sun.
However with Christine’s return they are now just back from their day at the Puppy Spa so thought you’d enjoy these before and after pics.
As for this week’s update I’m going to bring you up to present time with the latest project I’ve just completed; installing the new Fiama awning!  I’ll get back to catching up with all the progress on Lance since we got back from our summer maiden voyage out to the East Coast and back but I thought you’d enjoy seeing the latest project.  To be honest I’m doing this in part because it will be a bit shorter update as I’ve been taken down a peg or two with my first experience with Shingles.  Ouch!  As those of you who have had them will know this is eXtremely painful and not something I’ wish on my worst enemy.  However I’m recovering well and not looking quite so much like an escapee from a Leper Colony but fighting this off has definitely zapped my energy a bit for the past two weeks and hence this shorter blog post today.
When the weather is nice we like to spend most of our days camping enjoying the sunny outdoors, such as this spot in Dinosaur Provincial Park just east of Calgary in Alberta this past July.  But we’re heading for Baja in a few weeks and we do like the hotter weather when some shelter from the sun and at times the rain allows us to stay outside longer.  So we’ve been researching what retractable awning would be the Goldilocks, just right, just for us.
We wanted an awning that would extend out from the Passenger Side PS as that’s where we tend to set up our table and chairs when camping and one that would be very quick and easy to extend and retract so that we’d use it frequently.  After some research we settled on the Italian made Fiama 14’ F45S awning with a “Titanium” colour housing. 
It took a few weeks to get to us but I was able to get a good price with free shipping from Vanlife Outfitters and I picked it up from a freight terminal in Las Vegas which is less than an hour’s drive from our place here on Road Runner Ranch.  The box it shipped in was just a bit over 14’/4.3M long so that roll down rear window in Totu (our 2006 Toyota Tundra) comes in very handy for extending the length of items I pick up without sticking out the rear too much. 
It was very well packaged for shipping with lots of very tough angled cardboard corners on all sides so it arrived in perfect condition.
The awning  comes with three of these extruded Aluminium brackets which hook into the extruded Aluminium on the back of the awning body itself so I just needed to come up with a way of securely fastening these brackets to the top PS roof corner on Lance’s Hab. (Habitat/Box)

The awning housing needed to clear the top of the doors on the PS which extend almost all the way to the top of Lance’s Hab so I set out to design some strong brackets that would be eXtremely strong and secure to mount the awning housing at the front, middle and rear.
I keep all the cut offs from the XAL or eXtruded Aluminium that I used to build all the cabinet framing inside Lance and just love working with this stuff so I was particularly delighted to find that the T-slot in the 10 Series 1 inch square XAL wedged itself perfectly into the L shaped aluminium gutter rails that runs down the top sides of Lance’s Hab.  Sometimes you luck out!

This is the design I came up with.  Solid and Simple; four small lengths of XAL with four corner gussets to bolt them all together. 
You’ll see that I’ve built these such that the top edge of these XAL brackets ends up at the same height as the top of the steel Super Strut rails you saw me affix to Lance’s rooftop for mounting the solar panels.  This allowed me to bolt a short length of 2” wide 3/16” AL bar stock to the top of the XAL squares and then bolt through the Super Strut into the captured nuts that slide into these rails. 
These captured nuts twist lock in place using the blue plastic flanges to hold them right where you want them before tightening the 1/4” through bolt. In the middle bracket you see here as well as the rear one, the flat bar supports fit nicely into the 40mm/1.5” space I left between the bottom of the solar panel frames and the Super Strut.
Here is what the finished installation looks like with the Fiama bracket now bolted into the top T-slot of the XAL bracket.
This closeup shows how perfectly the bottom T-slot fits into the L shaped AL rain gutter that is part of the top corner extrusions on Lance’s roof. 
After I had them all dry fitted and checked that the three brackets were where Fiama wants them, I put in a bead of that same 8X Loctite industrial adhesive I used to affix the Super Strut to the roof top so these brackets are definitely on there for good! 
Being all aluminium construction whole awning only weighs 27Kg/60lbs so it wasn’t too much of a lift for Christine and I on two ladders to lift it up and slide the awning into the brackets. 
Once the awning is in place the final step is to drill through these holes you see on the bottom lip of the Fiama brackets and bolt the awning securely to the brackets.  
We like to keep things simple whenever we can so we went with the fully manual style that uses the little crank you see here to roll the awning in and out.  If we ever wanted to Fiama makes an electric motor that bolts to the end and let’s you roll the awning in/out with the touch of a switch but we think this simple crank method will suit us best.

To help secure the outer edge of the awning these two extendable legs clip into brackets I mounted on the bottom edge of Lance’s Hab.

I have Lance parked too close to the 40 foot shipping container that is my workshop and on the far left here so I couldn’t get a picture for you of the awning fully extended to the 2.5M/8.2 ft that it goes but I’ll be sure to grab a photo when we hit the road down to Baja in a few weeks.   
And that’s the wrap for this week and likely this year folks!  We leave in Lance next week to drive down to spend Xmas week with our Granddaughters in the LA area and then we’ll hit the road and point ourselves South to spend the first few months of the new year exploring the beautiful Baha peninsula. 

My sincere thanks to YOU for taking the time to join us on these adventures and send us your questions and comments.  Adds SO much to our experiences to have so many others to share it all with.  Hope you too have a fabulous holiday and I’ll be back early in the New Year with more updates on both our travels and the ongoing work to transform our beloved Lance into the XRV of our dreams!

See you next year!!!

Wayne, Christine, Zoe & Razz