According to Law

There is nothing worse than having your trip interrupted by the men in blue. Don't get me wrong, they have a job to do and in the vast majority of cases that job is to your and everyone else's benefit. There are a couple of things you should be aware of that are kind of specific to the purchase and conversion of a van.

Weight

All vehicles have two basic weights: the Tare or kerb weight and the Gross Vehicle Mass (GVM). These are important for a couple of reasons. Firstly unless you go to a lot of trouble any modification of a van and the loading of a van must result in a total van weight that is less than the GVM. My Hiace is about 1500kg empty. I can carry a legal load of another 1000kg giving a GVM of around 2500kg. If the police stop me and weigh the van and it is over that amount, then I will be fined.

Seconly like most people, I have a basic license allowing me to drive cars and small trucks. The dividing line on an Australian license is 4.5 tons. To legally drive something heavier on a public road you will need the next license up the light rigid vehicle (LRV) license.

Apparently the middy buses like the Toyota Coaster are right around the borderline of this weight limit. It is highly likely that a converted coaster with a camper van fit out will be just over the limit. There are stories of people being told by a seller that their coaster is under the 4.5 tons but being pulled over by the police, weighed and then booked.

Registration

Many of the vans you will see have Western Australian registration. Tin Lizzy when we bought her had WA registration. Often the seller will encourage you to retain that registration because it is the cheapest and easiest to manage. It is often portrayed as a selling point making the van more valuable. Western Australia has done a lot of work to allow many interactions with government to be done on line. This is the basis of this statement.

However like all other states in Australia, Western Australia registers vehicles on the basis of a garaging address. This is the location which is the home base or place that the vehicle mainly resides. For most people that means their home in an Australian state. Registering a vehicle in a state different to your garaging address is illegal in Australia.

One of the immediate issues I see is that backpackers have no garaging address. If they purchase the van in WA and start there, they will sometimes use the address of their initial hostel to allow the WA government to send them the initial paper work. Unless you live in WA, taking over a WA registration will involve bending the truth liberally in answering questions on the required forms. In addition you will never have the normal paper work that goes with the van. It is sent to the WA address that you quote.

Our experience pretty much mirrored this description. We purchased Tin Lizzy from a German and an Asian guy living in Sydney. They praised the WA registration situation and recommended that we don't move the registration since it was the cheapest in Australia and so easy to manage on line. They didn't have any rego papers and the title transfer was by a downloaded bill of sale form.

We were left concerned on two points. In middle of the purchase, I was checking the history of the van and found that it had been written off – repairable. The way both NSW and ACT legislation read, this suggested that Tin Lizzy couldn't' be transferred. With only a bill of sale, I didn't even know how to access the WA registration details on line.

Thankfully, my interpretation of the registration legislation was incorrect. Because the van had been registered after being written off, it must have been inspected and passed. This meant we had no issues with registration. Even the fact that we didn't have rego papers, just a bill of sale, caused no issues. We did need an inspection – this is standard for all vehicles over a certain age in the ACT.

Repairs

The inspection went reasonably well. We had three issues to be dealt with:

• The front washer bottle was leaking
• The exhaust was leaking
• The middle foldable seat wasn't locking.

The exhaust was an easy fix, we booked into a muffler shop and it was done. The water bottle was perhaps the hardest. We ordered a new one - $48 for a piece of plastic. However when I went to fit it, I discovered why the old one was leaking.

The Hiace locates the washer bottle in behind the step to help passengers get into the front seat. At some stage in the past, Tin Lizzy had had a collision on this point. This had pushed in the metal slightly crushing the bottle. Somehow I needed to push the metal back out to house the bottle. Using a scissor jack and some scrap wood, half an hour of fiddling had opened the space up enough to mount the bottle.

The folding seat was also challenging. I pulled it apart and looked at the mechanism. Took about an hour of looking and thinking to figure it out. It was missing some parts. I purchased an extension spring from Bunnings to make the seat lock. Then there was the issue of unlocking the seat. I manufactured a new lever from some steel bar. That with some washers and a E clip completed the fix.

I reassembled the mechanism with the plastic cover and it stopped working. I had a slightly wrong angle on the lever. Some surgery on the cover and it worked perfectly.

Over all the process of registration transfer was straight forward albeit stressful. I was pleased with the limited amount of repairs required. Not bad for a 25 year old that hadn't been inspected for quite a while.