That is awesome Jeff!!!! Great job.
A well deserved spot for a very well designed product.
Thank you very much! The Trail Kitchen exceeded my expectations on the camping trip - easy to deploy and store, lots of counter space, easy access to the fridge and very convenient running water.
With the Trail Kitchen heading for production, the next question is which options should be available. I'm thinking the starting point would be the base slide/drawer/table system, which didn't include the extra table on the driver's side. That table would be an option because some people might not need all that counter space, although after using the kitchen on my camping trip I found I used all of the space and wouldn't want less. Another option would be the Molle/Rotopax/Rubican panel on the side of the fridge, which I used on the trip to hold my kitchen water supply in a Rubican with a spigot.
There are two other options I could recommend to the company - first, the power system I designed for the fridge. This consists of a "fridge battery" strapped into one of the company's inner fender ammo can trays, a wiring harness and volt/amp meters. The fridge runs off it's own battery when the Jeep is not running, and when the Jeep is running the fridge runs off Jeep power and the fridge battery gets charged from the Jeep as well. It could be offered as a "plug and play" wiring harness that would be very easy to install, and would end up being much less expensive than your typical dual battery system. The thing a typical dual battery system has over this is that the Jeep can be started from both batteries, with this less expensive solution if your main Jeep battery died and you needed to start the Jeep off the fridge battery you'd have to use jumper cables (or swap the fridge battery in place of the main battery). The wiring system worked perfectly the entire trip, keeping the fridge running 24 7 and not putting a drain on the main Jeep battery, and I figured in the unlikely event I had to start the Jeep from the fridge battery, the rarity of that need would more than compensate for the much lower price of this wiring vs. a typical dual battery system.
The other possible option is a sink. It's a replacement section for the fold-down table with a hole in it that the sink drops into. There's a spigot on a bracket that's held in place by the sink. The spigot is plumbed to the Rotopax or Rubican mounted to the bracket on the side of the fridge. For folding/stowing the table, the sink pops out of the hole in the table and is stored separately. A second Rotopax/Rubican would be used for "gray water" drained out of the sink, and if you had three containers they could be rotated, as one emptied of water it could become the next gray water container, etc.
What do you guys think? Should I recommend those to the company as options?
Any other features/options the Trail Kitchen should have?
