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As for the next set of tires I've been pretty happy with the Continental MPT81's. Unless the tire compound is soft and might cause some problems in the future I'd probably stay that route. In putting new ones on I was going to take the opportunity to put in a tire pressure and temperature...

There was one point of the trip where we got hit with 8' of snow over three days. Lots of fun stuff happened that week but it's safe to say the tire chains came out. We are using Super Z Cable Chains. When the roads improved and the chains came off I noticed that the cables had cut into the...

That said, I have yet to tie the habitat glycol heater into the engine coolant system so I still have to run the air heater in the habitat when we are driving. This fall I will add a heat exchanger between the two systems so I can steal heat from the truck while driving. (I dont want to risk a...

The main reason I'm so happy with the Webasto for cabin heat is that it's fuel efficient. Even when our habitat is hotter than the thermostat reading the Timberline system wants to keep the glycol in the system at or above 156F (best I can tell). Needless to say the exterior furnace drops...

Timberline Heater gremlins Back in December I noted we installed a Webasto EVO 40 air heater. We are SUPER happy with it for a number of reasons. I'll get to than in a minute. During the install I noted I found a loose electrical connection that resolved the Timberline Error 48 code...

Storage boxes: We carry a lot of recreation gear (skis, boards, bikes, packs, fishing poles, yada yada). I had previously posted about how I rigged a regular roof box on a Saris cooler tray. That concept worked great but the bike rack arms are crap. After a few months one of the swing arms...

It's been sometime since I've put some time into any build updates and I need a good excuse to dodge the heat so here goes. The purpose of this build page was really supposed to be more about sharing mistakes more than anything so I'll get back to basics and start telling on myself. Shy of a...

As I was catching up on your build I noticed you'll be heading up to eastern Canada real soon. We spent last fall up there bouncing from the U-P to Newfoundland and back home through New England. I'd be happy to share some of our north of the border stops and such if you're interested. PM or...

Craig, could you share who your tire rep is? We've got about 30k on our MPT 81's and while they will pass the penny test it's safe to say our Cinderella needs a new set shoes before the next trip. I've hit a few of the truck shops in the city and I'm striking out every time.

Nature's Head Urine Bottle (Never Used) $25 local, $40 w/shipping Atlanta, GA We plumbed our urine to the grey tank as part of the build. Still has the factory gasket zip tied to strap. Retails for $54 plus shipping. https://store.natureshead.net/p/28-Nature-s-Head-Extra-Liquids-Bottle.aspx

Darn, Kevin. I'm bummed you couldn't get the use you deserve out of that rig. I mined a lot of knowledge from your build and would trade rigs in a second as your's is one fine beast. I hope the new owner can put it to use and can hit the trail knowing what an awesome vehicle they are taking...

On a non work related note, here is one of our camp spots just north of Gros Morne Park in Newfoundland. It's not exactly a pot of gold but considering the fun we had that week it's pretty darn close.

Our old bike had was similar in that when the rack is empty the rack can be folds up to reduce length. The pivot point of both the old and the new have a lot of play so even though all the other components have wobble reducers the hinge is just something that will bounce around.....until it...

My solution was to add some cross members to their cargo basket and use those to mount the Thule box. At first I was going to just buy two of their proprietary clamps and fab up my own mounts but I imagined that we would inevitably stuff wet tarps and crap under the Thule so I went the path of...

Saris started making a rack they refer to as MHS. The concept is that you can clamp different modular components onto the center bar depending on what your sport is. The biggest version can carry 4 bikes or two bikes and a cargo basket. Here's a close up of the clamp from the underside:

The last big item on the to-do list before we leave for the mountains was to find a very accessible way to carry our ski's. We do have a huge Packasport on the roof but that's 13' off the ground and getting the ski's out of there between mountains was shaping up to be the most dangerous part of...

There were two other big items on our priority list and we've got solutions to both of them. First, we wanted to go through a dry run of a tire change. Turns out our lugs were torqued to over 500 ft-#. So first we destroyed two 1/2" drive cheater bars. Next we figured out the published values...

Our cabinet situation has been mainly Tupperware and bungee cords but we made a slight improvement to the pantry by adding these $20 slides. We still hope to build real cabinet drawers at some point but when it comes to Form meets Function it's looking like the function side of things is...