Labor Day Weekend
I installed the floor safe. It’s nothing fancy, just a metal box with a battery powered push button combination lock and an emergency override key. I wanted to get a fire proof model, but they were all larger and would not fit between the metal floor joists, and I didn’t want to cut a floor joist for structural reasons. The model I ended up with is $106 from Home Depot. It’s 8 11/16H x 13 3/4W x 10 5/8D and made of roughly 1/8” thick sheet steel. I may line it with some insulation to make it a bit more fire resistant.
http://www.officedepot.com/a/p...ySafe-Security-Safe/
I originally intended to weld the safe to one of the floor joists, but decided to just use several wood screws from the inside out into the floor boards which are 1 ½” thick. You might be able to pound it through the hole if you had a sledge hammer and could get several good swings at it, but mostly I am relying on it being hidden rather than brute force.
It hangs down in plane sight if you know where to look under the truck but I disguised it a bit. It had a few holes in the outer walls for mounting purposes, and one of those was on the back, now the bottom. I bolted a huge nut on the outside, and with a little Goop and black spray paint it looks like some kind of a drain plug. After it was mounted I gave the outside a good coat of PAM (spray on cooking oil) to give it a good start towards developing the black grunge that covers everything else down there. I want it nice and disgusting so no one will look at it twice, let alone want to touch it.
From the inside it will be under a non-descript cover with vinyl flooring to match everything else, and hidden under some furniture where it won’t be easy to get to, even for me.
If you decide to try something similar, make sure you test out your proposed safe at the store before you buy. The first safe I bought (of a different brand) worked fine when mounted in the normal position, but when you lay it on its back it would refuse to let go of the emergency key. Apparently some of the locking mechanisms are position sensitive.
I also installed a couple of standard heating registers in the floor to allow in make up air for the ceiling vent fan. Since they are exposed directly to the outside world under the truck I got some louvered covers and mounted them under the floor. There is enough room under the vents to slip in some filter material which will be easily accessible from above for replacement or cleaning. Since registers come standard with dampers I can close them to keep the heat or cold in, or open them wide for maximum air flow.
The biggest job for the weekend was mounting the generator. It’s a Honda Eu2000i so you might assume it was just a matter of opening the doors to the generator bay and dropping it in. Unfortunately, my generator bay previously housed an Onan generator and had a bunch of large holes in the floor for inlet air, the muffler, etc. I had to weld all those shut except for the inlet air opening between the feet of my generator. My little 120V wire feed welder has a hard time getting good penetration on 1/8” thick sheet steel, so I am afraid I made a much bigger job of it than it should have been.
I also cut an opening in the back of the bay for the exhaust and exhaust cooling air. The Eu2000i probably pumps out 10x as much cooling air as comes out of the exhaust pipe and I wanted to make sure none of that stayed inside the generator bay so I built up a thick gasket of ¾” weather stripping on the inside of the opening to match the back of the generator.
The large air inlet under and between the feet of the generator was covered on the underside with a commercial louver (no damper) I added weather strip around the edges and a layer of filter material and some aluminum screen to try and keep the worst of the dust out. Overall the inlet area is probably 3x the exhaust area, which is generally what you want. It all seems to work fine. I ran it for a while and couldn’t detect any heat build up in the generator bay at all.
I added a couple of ¼” square rods down each side of the inlet opening that fit loosely between the rubber shock absorbing feet of the generator. The idea is to keep the generator from walking around inside the box. I also welded in heavy oval rings to mount a 1 ½” strap with quick disconnect that loops up and over the generator, and through the handle to hold it gently but firmly in place. We will have to see how it holds up to long use and pounding.