The Broken Horseshoe Lodge (99 F350 with a Skamper)
I only just recently discovered the forum here through Gregor’s “Subtle Shuttle” thread and made myself a login to post up some 7.3l Powerstroke advice for him, having stuck around to browse further I’ve now found the pop-up forum and after browsing for a couple of day’s I’m excited to post up our rig and share a little bit.
I wouldn’t expect this to be the most exciting thread in the forum. It’s probably not going to have rapid and radical progress nor sexy high end fabrication, but I hope ya’ll dig our little rig and I’ll really appreciate the exchange of information as we gradually make some changes and modifications to our setup.
Our backstory:
My wife and I have been married for going on 8 years, but we’ve been friends and had common friends for over 20 by now, as we are both long standing members of this planets tribe of rock climbers and mountaineers. Though over 40 now, we aren’t doing anything too radical these days, though in the past both of us have climbed a variety of big-walls and desert towers, in some cases adventures near the top levels of the sport. At any rate, we’ve put in our time as tent campers and several years we decided that sleeping in a tent within sight of the car seemed kind of stupid, and thus the search for a slide in truck camper was begun. In addition to rock climbing and mountaineering, I’m also a very avid mountain biker, skier and backcountry skier. Amber is new to backcountry skiing but is digging it, and recently we’ve decided to get into the river game. Though some whitewater is likely in the future, our goal right now is to explore the longer stretches of flatter rivers in a pair of touring kayaks. We also have a nicely modified 1950 Willy’s CJ3a for some occasional moderate rock crawler and deep snow wheeling. I’m originally from Midland, MI and my wife hails from Alverado, TX though about 10 years ago we escaped the gravity of those places and find ourselves living in paradise in lovely Louisville, CO which is a great home base for a whole lot of outdoor adventure.
The truck:
We’ve owned our early 1999 Ford F350 for about 7 years, she’s a Lariat model with the 7.3l Powerstroke and the ZF6 six speed manual gearbox. Though she has about 310,000 miles on her long block, she doesn’t have much of the original parts anymore and has received almost constant repair, preventative maintenance and general mechanical love. If anybody is curious I’m more than happy to elaborate, in a nutshell she runs over 600hp with the parts to handle the abuse and she’s a total hoot to drive both on road and off, though obviously she’s a bit large for a lot of trails. Recent projects include a transmission rebuild (I blew up 6th gear, passing multiple trucks on highway 287 pegged at 3200rpm and 58psi of boost), a new South Bend Superstreet dual disc clutch, Morimoto HID projector retrofits (best upgrade ever), a rebuild of two of the King front shocks and replacement of the other two King shocks (shaft damage) in the front with Fox and the rears as well. Parts sitting in the garage waiting for me to have the time include a Hellwig rear sway bar and parts to fabricate some rear traction bars, as I get a fair bit of axle wrap and have a habit of destroying u-joints.
The camper:
Up until finding this forum, I didn’t even know what brand of camper I had! So, needless to say, I’m happy to have found an information source for this kind of stuff! So, now I understand it to be a Skamper, and I think it’s a model 100S. We’ve had it for about two years, and bought it off of craigslist at a very reasonable price from a nice young couple in Erie, CO. They were about to have their first kids (twins), and though they intended to stay outdoorsy didn’t think the bed camper was applicable to a family of four. It was a no-brainer deal for us as they had completely cleaned up and redecorated the interior, including painting it white, installing new faux wood floors and all new upholstery. Other than some organization it was pretty much move in ready for us. When the previous owners rebuilt the interior they found a broke half horseshoe, so it got named the Broken Horseshoe Lodge, and the name stuck.
The Good:
The electrical works fine, the water plumbing and pump works fine, the stove and heater work just like new. The interior is clean and functional, and after some extensive organization we’ve found a place for everything that needs to stay in the camper, and plenty of additional storage as may be needed depending on our recreational goals for the outing. The camper itself appears to be pretty darn solid and I don’t have any major structural concerns.
The not-so Good:
The fridge is toast, it’s never worked, not via electricity nor propane. The anchor for the driver side rear tie-down appears to be quite “soft” and needs to be looked at. The roof vent is broken and does not open. We are currently using a borrowed battery from our sons old car for power. I HATE the tripod jacks, they sketch me out and do not work well given how wide our truck is, especially when we have the 20x12 summer wheels and tires mounted up.
The Stuff We’ve Done:
We haven’t done a whole lot of projects with it since we’ve bought it, as I said it was in overall good condition.
First up was organization and properly securing all of the cabinet doors. For the first couple of trips half our stuff would end up on the floor, thankfully some bungies and hooks provided a good, easy and cheap solution.
We added a 10 watt Battery Tender solar panel with a built in charge controller. We have fairly minimal electrical demands at this time, so its worked quite well so far.
We added two stacked 2x10’s to the front of the camper to space it back in the bed about 3” and keep it from rubbing on the trucks taillights. We also added two 1x6’s to the bottom of the camper to lift it up a bit and keep it from resting on our bed mounted gooseneck hitch plate. This worked well and spacing the camper back a bit provided some room between the camper and the truck cab, we use this space to store a folding camp table, two camp chairs and two extendable paint poles that can be used to setup a Kelty Noah’s Tarp 20 if want to be outside in the rain.
I also added a 40” lightbar to the top of the camper. We’ll regularly get out of work at 4pm on a Friday and head west to the Utah desert. When you get to the desert at midnight and start looking for a campsite, you can’t have too much lighting. The very high position provides excellent peripheral vision.
Stuff we want to do:
Mentioned above, the fridge is toast. So far, we’ve been happy to just use our Grizzly cooler, but it would be nice to have a functional 12 volt fridge and reclaim that space for something useful and then maybe not need to drag along the Grizzly unless we are on an extended trip or have need for LOTS of beer. This is something I could use some help from ya’ll on, suggestions for a good model to replace this fridge with.
I assume we’ll have to upgrade our solar charging capability if we add a 12 volt fridge. I also plan to upgrade the batteries. Right now it just has a random car battery. My thought on this was to get two Group 63 AGM batteries for the camper. This way, the camper would have two identical batteries to the truck and add some redundancy to our electrical needs and the simplicity of just having the same stuff in both places.
I’d really really really like a better jack system for this thing. I actually take it in/out of the truck quite a bit as our needs require and I find the stock tripod jacks very unstable and inconvenient. The tripod feet of the jack are also very wide and its nerve wracking as I actually run the feet over with my rear tires. To help alleviate this I’ve added some 2x6 spacers, but this makes the jacks even sketchier.
That driver rear tie down doesn’t look very good. I’ll have to peal open some of the outer skin and give that a lookover and repair sometime soon.
I’d like to replace all of the lights on the camper with LED’s, including the interior dome lights, exterior marker lights and taillights. None of them work well, or at all.
I need to devise some better ways to carry some of our outdoor gear, most pressing is ski’s mountain bikes. Right now those just get tossed inside the camper, and this is emphatically not convenient and definitely very messy. I’d also like to conceive of some method to carry our kayak’s, though I expect this is going to be a real challenge.
Okay then, enough rambling. Since this post went beyond the allotted character county, the next post is photos!
I only just recently discovered the forum here through Gregor’s “Subtle Shuttle” thread and made myself a login to post up some 7.3l Powerstroke advice for him, having stuck around to browse further I’ve now found the pop-up forum and after browsing for a couple of day’s I’m excited to post up our rig and share a little bit.
I wouldn’t expect this to be the most exciting thread in the forum. It’s probably not going to have rapid and radical progress nor sexy high end fabrication, but I hope ya’ll dig our little rig and I’ll really appreciate the exchange of information as we gradually make some changes and modifications to our setup.
Our backstory:
My wife and I have been married for going on 8 years, but we’ve been friends and had common friends for over 20 by now, as we are both long standing members of this planets tribe of rock climbers and mountaineers. Though over 40 now, we aren’t doing anything too radical these days, though in the past both of us have climbed a variety of big-walls and desert towers, in some cases adventures near the top levels of the sport. At any rate, we’ve put in our time as tent campers and several years we decided that sleeping in a tent within sight of the car seemed kind of stupid, and thus the search for a slide in truck camper was begun. In addition to rock climbing and mountaineering, I’m also a very avid mountain biker, skier and backcountry skier. Amber is new to backcountry skiing but is digging it, and recently we’ve decided to get into the river game. Though some whitewater is likely in the future, our goal right now is to explore the longer stretches of flatter rivers in a pair of touring kayaks. We also have a nicely modified 1950 Willy’s CJ3a for some occasional moderate rock crawler and deep snow wheeling. I’m originally from Midland, MI and my wife hails from Alverado, TX though about 10 years ago we escaped the gravity of those places and find ourselves living in paradise in lovely Louisville, CO which is a great home base for a whole lot of outdoor adventure.
The truck:
We’ve owned our early 1999 Ford F350 for about 7 years, she’s a Lariat model with the 7.3l Powerstroke and the ZF6 six speed manual gearbox. Though she has about 310,000 miles on her long block, she doesn’t have much of the original parts anymore and has received almost constant repair, preventative maintenance and general mechanical love. If anybody is curious I’m more than happy to elaborate, in a nutshell she runs over 600hp with the parts to handle the abuse and she’s a total hoot to drive both on road and off, though obviously she’s a bit large for a lot of trails. Recent projects include a transmission rebuild (I blew up 6th gear, passing multiple trucks on highway 287 pegged at 3200rpm and 58psi of boost), a new South Bend Superstreet dual disc clutch, Morimoto HID projector retrofits (best upgrade ever), a rebuild of two of the King front shocks and replacement of the other two King shocks (shaft damage) in the front with Fox and the rears as well. Parts sitting in the garage waiting for me to have the time include a Hellwig rear sway bar and parts to fabricate some rear traction bars, as I get a fair bit of axle wrap and have a habit of destroying u-joints.
The camper:
Up until finding this forum, I didn’t even know what brand of camper I had! So, needless to say, I’m happy to have found an information source for this kind of stuff! So, now I understand it to be a Skamper, and I think it’s a model 100S. We’ve had it for about two years, and bought it off of craigslist at a very reasonable price from a nice young couple in Erie, CO. They were about to have their first kids (twins), and though they intended to stay outdoorsy didn’t think the bed camper was applicable to a family of four. It was a no-brainer deal for us as they had completely cleaned up and redecorated the interior, including painting it white, installing new faux wood floors and all new upholstery. Other than some organization it was pretty much move in ready for us. When the previous owners rebuilt the interior they found a broke half horseshoe, so it got named the Broken Horseshoe Lodge, and the name stuck.
The Good:
The electrical works fine, the water plumbing and pump works fine, the stove and heater work just like new. The interior is clean and functional, and after some extensive organization we’ve found a place for everything that needs to stay in the camper, and plenty of additional storage as may be needed depending on our recreational goals for the outing. The camper itself appears to be pretty darn solid and I don’t have any major structural concerns.
The not-so Good:
The fridge is toast, it’s never worked, not via electricity nor propane. The anchor for the driver side rear tie-down appears to be quite “soft” and needs to be looked at. The roof vent is broken and does not open. We are currently using a borrowed battery from our sons old car for power. I HATE the tripod jacks, they sketch me out and do not work well given how wide our truck is, especially when we have the 20x12 summer wheels and tires mounted up.
The Stuff We’ve Done:
We haven’t done a whole lot of projects with it since we’ve bought it, as I said it was in overall good condition.
First up was organization and properly securing all of the cabinet doors. For the first couple of trips half our stuff would end up on the floor, thankfully some bungies and hooks provided a good, easy and cheap solution.
We added a 10 watt Battery Tender solar panel with a built in charge controller. We have fairly minimal electrical demands at this time, so its worked quite well so far.
We added two stacked 2x10’s to the front of the camper to space it back in the bed about 3” and keep it from rubbing on the trucks taillights. We also added two 1x6’s to the bottom of the camper to lift it up a bit and keep it from resting on our bed mounted gooseneck hitch plate. This worked well and spacing the camper back a bit provided some room between the camper and the truck cab, we use this space to store a folding camp table, two camp chairs and two extendable paint poles that can be used to setup a Kelty Noah’s Tarp 20 if want to be outside in the rain.
I also added a 40” lightbar to the top of the camper. We’ll regularly get out of work at 4pm on a Friday and head west to the Utah desert. When you get to the desert at midnight and start looking for a campsite, you can’t have too much lighting. The very high position provides excellent peripheral vision.
Stuff we want to do:
Mentioned above, the fridge is toast. So far, we’ve been happy to just use our Grizzly cooler, but it would be nice to have a functional 12 volt fridge and reclaim that space for something useful and then maybe not need to drag along the Grizzly unless we are on an extended trip or have need for LOTS of beer. This is something I could use some help from ya’ll on, suggestions for a good model to replace this fridge with.
I assume we’ll have to upgrade our solar charging capability if we add a 12 volt fridge. I also plan to upgrade the batteries. Right now it just has a random car battery. My thought on this was to get two Group 63 AGM batteries for the camper. This way, the camper would have two identical batteries to the truck and add some redundancy to our electrical needs and the simplicity of just having the same stuff in both places.
I’d really really really like a better jack system for this thing. I actually take it in/out of the truck quite a bit as our needs require and I find the stock tripod jacks very unstable and inconvenient. The tripod feet of the jack are also very wide and its nerve wracking as I actually run the feet over with my rear tires. To help alleviate this I’ve added some 2x6 spacers, but this makes the jacks even sketchier.
That driver rear tie down doesn’t look very good. I’ll have to peal open some of the outer skin and give that a lookover and repair sometime soon.
I’d like to replace all of the lights on the camper with LED’s, including the interior dome lights, exterior marker lights and taillights. None of them work well, or at all.
I need to devise some better ways to carry some of our outdoor gear, most pressing is ski’s mountain bikes. Right now those just get tossed inside the camper, and this is emphatically not convenient and definitely very messy. I’d also like to conceive of some method to carry our kayak’s, though I expect this is going to be a real challenge.
Okay then, enough rambling. Since this post went beyond the allotted character county, the next post is photos!