White Van Man’s Lambo

Every now and again you meet a vehicle that’s just plain bonkers. The path to glory for this particular one is kinda odd though, even on the Fruit-Bat scale. Originally a customer’s ride, this bloke walks into Cartoonz’ shop and asks for something a bit different for putting Big Audio into an ex-works van. A Peugeot Partner 1.9L diesel workhorse to be exact. Just like so very many other faceless midsize white vans….
Zak Hedges was one of the dudes asked to do the impossible. He told Talk Audio “When he told us the list, we didn’t know whether to believe him or not! In the end, we had the van for two months.”

What the bloke wanted was the best. He also wanted Lamborghini-style scissor doors. On a works van!
So Cartoonz call up self effacing ice legend Paul Richardson (Rayner’s vote for top installer as he combines virtuosity with love of bass) and gets him to design his bass box. It’s a real “How do you get five elephants in a mini? Two in the front and three in the back!”, sort of a job as there are no fewer than EIGHT bloody great dustbin lid sized air shifters in there. He has eight Rockford Fosgate Power T115D4 fifteen inch subwoofers. Dual 4 Ohm voice coil bass behemoths. It was Zak and Dave Dunmow (Essex aristocracy, Lord Dunmow of Dunmow…) another top technician, as did it.  
That’s 1,414 square inches of cone area, even if you don’t account for cone angle and these bitches are deeper’n Slavic toms’ slots. As such, they can Ping Pong a lot of air around and now that the owner has tired of driving slow and gone on to get a Mitzy Evo, it has been sold to the guys who built it, making it their demo van.
The Cartoonz guys absolutely love it and drive with it running hard. They also know how to set up the sophisticated Rockford Fosgate system controller called 360.2 that you can see in the middle of the rear wall. It’s as cunning as a weasel with a masters degree in electronics. You can use a PDA or a laptop to set it.
But starting at the head end, there’s 7in touch screen fully motorised single DIN Pioneer AVH-P5900DVD headunit running the tunes and movies in the dash and being such a bang-on new piece of ordnance, there’s no need for processors and extra bits there, that’s all she wrote, bling enough. But look down in the doors and you are seeing more Paul Richardson subcontractual work in the shape of some finely sculpted door builds. These house two pairs of quality T162S components on each side, Rockford Fosgate Punch Series six inchers with nice shiny passive casings. One is shown displayed on the outside of the door build like a feature item but another is hidden away on each side as these are simply hooked up to a channel each of a Rockford Fosgate T600.2 to show a nice low 2 Ohm load to this stereo amplifier.
And so, despite the fact that the van can raise ruddy Cain at 149dB way down at 29Hz, it has just the two amplifiers. Mind you that T40001BD (also known as ‘Badbass Motherthumper’) is running at just an Ohm by virtue of the double series parallel array of sixteen voice coils of four Ohm-ness he has hooked up back there.

Here’s how: Each Dual 4 Ohm Voice Coil woofer is series-hooked to show an eight ohm single load. This is then paralleled with its neighbour to show four Ohms. Each four ohm pair is then paralleled with its neighbour pair to show two Ohms and each 2 Ohm cluster of four woofers is paralleled once more to offer just one Ohm loading to the huge amplifier. Whew!
Rated at 4,000 watts, the amp actually comes with a test ‘birth certificate’ that in this case showed that the van is running 4,872 continuous watts when it goes boom! Two yellow top Optima batteries  provide the juice via thick one over gauge cables and Rockford distribution blocks.
Security is fierce with a Clifford Concept 650MKII on board with tilt and motion proximity sensing. It has a SmarTrack GPS/GSM tracking system and the Trackstar pager as well that’ll alert you by SMS if your vehicle is moved without your say so. You can even text the van to remotely start or kill the engine.
The only sad items are the after-market visor screens by C-KO that were fitted in place of the regular sun visors. They are in line with the diamond hole and get slapped at nearly 150dB and have frankly died of the beating they have received. Such a shame as they are really smart screen products. Bit like owning a kite but dragging it behind the car at 100mph until it breaks! They still look cool but are no good for watching films on any more.
We went to take White Van Man pictures at a cinder-covered car park at a nearby fishing lake where they have a burger van and works vans show up there for their owners to get a bacon roll. When we pulled up, two other almost identical vans showed up. When we opened up the doors, the other blokes were like “Stone the crows, where do you put yer tools?” and the boss of the fishery said to go onto the lakeside and snap the van alongside some old WWII stuff he had hanging around…..
Kinda seemed right lining the boom up alongside the boom.
link 0208 554 5554
Congrats also due to:
Greg Lockhart – manager
Dave Dunmow – senior tech
Paul Burgan – proprietor
Paul Richardson – consultancy