I just finished reading your whole thread and I am rather impressed with your ingenuity!
I work at McMaster-Carr up in Aurora so I have definitely been considering building something like what you did, using our catalog of neat things! My lack of expertise with sewing is what has primarily stopped me from acting on this intention.
I have a 2016 Nissan Titan XD with the Cummins - I was gonna go with the Ecodiesel Ram but I read too many horror stories of engine problems. So I will get a bit worse MPG but have higher towing (12500 lbs) and payload capacity (1750 lbs). I specifically bought the vehicle with a trip in mind about 4 years from now, across all 50 states plus a good piece of Canada, in a row over the course of a year. Your homebrew version of a Flippac is what I was leaning towards for MPG, payload reasons, lower costs, and the all-important necessity for simplicity of building and therefore fixing.
Do you feel that the cantilever'd tent design would be able to handle the wind load on mountains and so forth? Given that I am not super far away, how might you feel about my coming to see it in person, and also maybe contracting out some of the work to you??
Do you notice any appreciable MPG drop when driving with it?
(This is my first post on these forums after years of looking, so your thread did a good job of breaking me out of my shell!)
-Mike
I work at McMaster-Carr up in Aurora so I have definitely been considering building something like what you did, using our catalog of neat things! My lack of expertise with sewing is what has primarily stopped me from acting on this intention.
I have a 2016 Nissan Titan XD with the Cummins - I was gonna go with the Ecodiesel Ram but I read too many horror stories of engine problems. So I will get a bit worse MPG but have higher towing (12500 lbs) and payload capacity (1750 lbs). I specifically bought the vehicle with a trip in mind about 4 years from now, across all 50 states plus a good piece of Canada, in a row over the course of a year. Your homebrew version of a Flippac is what I was leaning towards for MPG, payload reasons, lower costs, and the all-important necessity for simplicity of building and therefore fixing.
Do you feel that the cantilever'd tent design would be able to handle the wind load on mountains and so forth? Given that I am not super far away, how might you feel about my coming to see it in person, and also maybe contracting out some of the work to you??
Do you notice any appreciable MPG drop when driving with it?
(This is my first post on these forums after years of looking, so your thread did a good job of breaking me out of my shell!)
-Mike
