Patching up unwanted holes

In common with most caravans and campers of the day the original Holdsworth Villa 3 conversion was fitted with a mains inlet for connection to a static supply when parked on caravan sites, and was also fitted with a fridge which worked on 240V, 12V and butane gas.

These days it's perfectly feasible to obtain mains electricty from a carefully designed inverter if you're careful about the earthing (more about this later) and we don't plan to have any gas in our new conversion.

Holes are therefore cut all over the van for various sockets, and three openings for the fridge (gas flue, ventilator and an inlet beneath the sink to allow gas vapour to escape and air to enter for combustion.

The edges of these holes appear to have been painted with some green gunk but it hasn't prevented them from rusting, sometimes badly.  Despite having a foam gasket it's very difficult to prevent the holes for the self-tapping screws from rusting, and the screws themselves.  Once that starts to happen the entire surrounding area corrodes.

We don't need these, so we're going to block them all up!

Firstly the inside of the panel is cleaned (good old wire wheel and angle grinder) and then a panel is cut and tacked into place on the inside.  This area isn't structural and these holes have always been there so there's no need to risk warping everything by trying to weld all the way around it.





We're applying underseal to the inside of all the panels as part of the refurbishment.  It's a good way of preventing new rust and it keeps down the road noise.  You can buy NVH material to stick on, but underseal works, especially when you don't expect to want it off again, and is much more cost-effective.

This entire panel will be covered when the interior is rebuilt, so black is fine.

The outside surface of this panel is slightly curved, so we'll have to keep filling it and sanding it until we restore the original shape.

The hole for the electric inlet was repaired in exactly the same way.