This is a temporary floor, so I’m using cheap 14” maple plywood, mainly to see how well it stands up. We decided to paint it with remaindered house paint, again since it’s temporary.

Eventually we’ll put down a more robust floor, probably covered with sheet linoleum or vinyl, but this will do for now.

painted floor

To locate the holes for the tie-down points in the plywood, I used a trick (borrowed from someone I’m sure) for marking the plywood. Basically, take an M8 1.5”/40mm bolt, drill a hole in the center of the head, insert a point (small wire, ball bearing, etc.) and set the bolt so it is slightly proud of the surface. Then place the plywood on top, and hammer down over each tie-down point. This marks the tie-down points on the plywood, and then I could drill appropriate (oversized) holes at the marked points. I didn’t have any ball bearings, so used finishing nail tips, secured with epoxy. Not ideal, one of the points eventually fell out, but good enough for the 8 locations I needed. A bit of permanent marker on the nail head also made it easy to find the mark.

marking the plywood

Marking the tie-down points on the plywood

marks the tie-down points

With appropriate equipment and materials, it would be much more effective to take M8 rod, cut it to length and grind a point onto it. Lacking access to Tech Shop, I asked my father to mail me some M8 points, but only requested 12” length, not 1.5”, so couldn’t use them for this. They’ll be helpful on the walls.

Since polyiso is fairly easy to compress or damage, I didn’t want to have it right at the door entries. Instead I added a 1”x1” HDPE strip at each door.

1"x1" HDPE strip

This took more work than I expected, since the corrugations in the original floor of the van were within 1” of the edge of the plywood at the rear doors. I routed a 38” channel in the 1” HDPE and that worked well. I also covered the plywood with 34” aluminum angle, screwed to the plywood and HDPE. That gives a simple and fairly clean edge at each door sill.

clean edge