As my purchase through Wildroaming NZ for the roof conversion from Alucab supplier was smooth and worth to put my money in Greg’s hand (Alucab supplier in NZ), I decided to get the 270 awning and shower cube from Alucab too, I’m not sure about difference between the quality of other brands vs Alucab for these two add-ons, but at the end Alucab for long time has been in the game of the fabricating and developing these parts and if in the future I wanted to get any spare for sure will be easy and available, other brands might be today and next week you would struggle to find any spare part from them if needed, so for these two part of my equipment made sense to me to get them from AluCab too,
As you see in the above photos even my Narava side exterior work lights installed on the lower face of the Alucab Awning and shower cube, I’ve been struggling for while how to avoid any hole on my Toopy to mount work lights, once I installed these then showed to me oh that’s the place to mount the lights, and absolutely end result is neat, as you can get idea about placement of the shower box (right hand image) shower box is opening exactly where is needed to be, above of my water filler and shower head plug, (to get more idea about installation of my water filler and how water shower system from AusJ pls refer to the related post) the placement of the shower box and my access points on the factory vent location on the side of the Troopy made an ample access for showering, I absolutely loved using the shower box, very secure and easy to open and close, also placed just on the right place close to plug my shower head point.
Regarding the 270 awning, it feels very solid and stable, this awning is coming with one extra pole in the case of higher wind you can secure it on the ground, but in not very high wind without the pole is working good enough too and for sure is very usable product for living under a harsh sun and rainy weathers.
For the gap between the rear end tail of the Troopy and the awning to avoid extra water droppings on your rear entrance way, they have a gutter to purchase separately but because its mounting part needed to be riveted on the edge of AluCab Hercules roof conversion, I decided to avoid it and live with this for now to see if in the future I can get better idea to avoid such extra rain droppings in that area.
Also to avoid drilling the awning strap mount piece I came up with other solution to fix the end edge of the awning when we are opening it, the provided piece from AluCab should be rivetted on the edge of the roof conversion and I hate to drill extra if needed to be sorted without extra drilling for sure my option is to avoid any extra hole, second image bekow is showing you how to use the edge of the shower cube rear bracket for securing the strap of the 270 awning.
Now lets get to installing these two:
I have to say I absolutely hated how Alucab guided on their instruction, how to mount and secure these on the Troopy roof conversion, their instruction needed to be corrected and more clear for users, they showed two LOWER holes of the mounting brackets to be secured by M8 and two UPPER holes to be secured by long M8 bolts / square washers and nuts, on the edge of inner factory Troopy lip,
Be careful here: first of all using both scenarios (Rivnuts/Longer bolting) is great, but most of the installer use only rivnuts to secure all the holding points, and this is for ease of their installation and very lazy, the x2 extra M8 long bolts supplied for each bracket and showed in the Alucab instruction are to secure the products much more reliable and future looseness free, their x2 extra rivnuts are only for supporting everything even more, but using all the holes only with stainless steel rivnuts on an Aluminum body of the roof conversion is prone to future looseness on the Hercules roof, all the vibration and heavy weight of the awning could loosen the rivnuts edges on the softer material very easy, so if the installer is doing the job for you be sure they do use the long bolts/square washers/nuts for you too, this is to secure the brackets much more reliable for your future.
If they do the bracket mountings before installing the Hercules conversion roof it means they didnt get the whole point of using the long bolts with square supplied washers and nuts to be secured on the vehicle factory body interior lip,
And now what’s wrong with the Alucab instruction? you might notice on their PDF file they are showing some different arrangement between securing the 270 awning and the shower box on the Hercules roof conversion, these two are sharing exact same style bracket and holding design/supplied parts, so the instruction should be exactly same for both, but in their PDF parts the listed items and the shown graphic is incorrect and different, which I informed them about this issue, maybe they would correct their future PDF manuals, another important stuff here: as the UPPER longer bolts will seat on the Troopy roof lip from inside (shown in below images) the square securing washers should be little longer to seat much better on the inner factory lip from inside and I tried to correct this manually as much as I could, another point was to access these longer bolts and nutting them from inside you need to be sure they will not land just exactly behind the Troopy/roof fixing pillar brackets because suddenly you will not be able to hold the nuts by any spanner from inside to tight up the bolts! by a sudden mistake here you will end up to drill your roof conversion from outside, secure the long M8 bolts in place and then hit the inner pillar roof conversion structure brackets and totally end up to have no any access to the nuts from inside, I was super super lucky here that the shower just missed it and the awning holes have been chosen correctly by chance on the first rear end L shape combined bracket and the second bracket’s nuts landed where they got enough access to be secured from inside, so if you are aiming to do this install be sure you measure landing points correctly to get good access to the securing square washers/nuts properly and that’s by only passing the inner brackets shown below, also from outside I used structural Sikaflex 252 adhesive/sealant on the entire touching face of each brackets to get much stronger contact between the brackets and the Hercules roof outer surface, this will even more secure any future looseness of the awning or showerbox when you drive on the corrugated roads.
As you see in the above snips the short bolting (top x2 M8 bolts) on the right hand instruction for awning is not working at all and long square washers shown here should be cut in size correctly when you get close to the inner pillars or arc shape of the inner lip at each corner.
