11 - Solar Cover, Windshield Tint, Shelf

This is a post of some of the first of several additions or fixes I have made to "Phrynie," our Orion. (Aside...Our RVs acquire names. This Orion is named Phrynie and our Smart toad car is named Dot. If anyone has watched "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries" on TV, you will understand where those names came from.)

1. Solar screen windshield cover. I took Phrynie to Arizona RV Parts Center, aka SunPro Manufacturing, in Wellton AZ to have a solar cover made. I had purchased two of their covers previously for our two former motorhomes, a class A and a class B. Their screen is an excellent product and the ones I got were made to order from stock patterns. However, they had not made a cover for a Transit so Phrynie was their first Transit unit. I got a great discount plus some extras because they were able to create a pattern from my unit to be able to use for future stock orders. I use it whenever we are stationary for more than a couple of days. You cannot see in during the day but can see out well and it really cuts the sun heat. It also is a decent window screen when lowering the side windows.

The SunPro cover mounts using corner pockets at the top rear edge of each door, strong magnets at the bottom, and a strap through the mirror arms. It also comes with the wiper covers, the wipers also helping to hold the cover in place. SunPro also made pockets like these for my original solid vinyl Orion windshield cover, which has made it much more resistant to slipping or blowing off.

2. Windshield tint. I felt right from the start that the Transit windshield came up too high and directly over me. So I had a local window tint installer put a tint band across the top of the windshield. It is actually two bands either side of the dark expansion matrix behind the camera monitor and about the same distance down. It seems just right and really cuts glare and heat.

3. Sofa shelf. There is a fairly big gap behind the sofa, and our cat was more than willing to go down behind and get herself stuck under the sofa. And stuff like blankets and pillows easily slipped down. So I mounted a 1x4 finished board as a shelf using a couple of brackets. I tried to mount it using the sofa side panels, but as the picture shows, the panels are different height and the shelf slanted. So I just mounted the low end bracket to the wall to level the shelf. Nothing shows when the sofa is up, and things (and cats) don't slip down.