Expedition.Report
Explorer
To some of those that know me or follow me on Instagram (@ministry.of.adventure), this won't be a surprise as I have been posting and talking about this for quite some time, my wife and I have decided that we would like to upgrade from a truck & RTT to a four-season expedition rig.
A quick recap of our thought process that led us to where we are now:
Let's do a flat deck ¾ ton or 1-ton truck with a flatbed camper, nah we want more room. So a 4x4 sprinter it is… nah too #vanlife. So a LMTV with a composite box ? Nah that’s $12,000 for just the shell of a habitat box with some windows, and we still need to design a sub-frame and then have 1000 un-knows about the truck and need some heavy duty tools….. So a flat deck 1 ton with a camper?.... It went on like this for over a year.
How we found the truck:
Then finally I found out that my pop’s (being close to retirement) was going to be selling off some of his equipment and taking less work as he eases into retirement. One of those pieces of equipment is a truck that I always told him I wanted if he ever decided to sell:
It’s a Topkick with 4x4, turbo diesel, Allison transmission and enough room for a 12” camper body without modifying the chassis.
As soon as he let me know he wanted to let it go I decided to jump on buying the truck!
Figuring out the habitat portion of the build:
Options on the table were quite simple
A big guiding principal I used to make decisions and guide me so far is that I don’t want this build to look “homemade” … even though it is.
My first thoughts were to take a fiberglass truck camper and make it into a flat deck camper by cutting out the sides and extending the walls down to maximize internal space. (you know the space thats missing to make room for bed sides on a norma; truck)
That left me with one big issue… truck campers aren’t generally very long, so I would need to also extend the body to fit the length we were wanting.
At the end of the day, I didn’t have confidence in my abilities to blend all of these changes and not have it look homemade.
We went with a 5th wheel camper…
While searching for the longest fiberglass truck camper on the market I came across a company that has been making fiberglass trailers and campers since the 80’s called “Bigfoot” what I also found out about them is that they make a 5th wheel trailer that is 19’ long; 12’ for the main body and 7’ long for the cab over portion.
Now if you read this whole thing, you will note that I had 12’ of capacity without making any changes. PERFECT!
With the 5th wheel “all I need to do is fill in the wheel wells”. Granted this is a lot less work then I was originally thinking of taking on, it will still take a lot to have it seamlessly blend into the rest of the body.
We found up a beat up old girl that needed some love
Most of these fiberglass trailers seem to hold their value and were more expensive then I wanted. That being said they came with appliances and insulation and hoards of testimony stating that these little buggers are excellent and worth the $$.
We checked out one locally for $8,000 to take some measurements and see if it would work. We were happy with how it appeared but we figured with winter coming there was bound to be an offseason deal to be had.
And there was! I came across an ’84 that had not been used for 2 years and needed work for $2,800. The problem was that is happened to be 300 km’s away and I knew it wouldn’t last long.
So ignored the urge to do what any responsible person would do bought it sight unseen.
High end** Render of what we are looking to achieve:
**ms paint render
Initial Plan:
The original plan was to get the camper mounted onto the truck, use it for a year and then see what we would like to change and do a bit of a remodel after having some time in it. That never happened! After cleaning out the dead bugs and other disgusting items left behind (check Instagram for that video) we realized that there was/is a water issue and that we would not be able to wait before we do a remodel. It had to start now!
Work done up to now:
This basically brings us up to date. The camper has been stripped of its interior, holes have been filled and my neighbors are confused.
I am currently working on the subfloor and hope to start filling in the window voids (new windows will be installed later).
Next we will be framing the walls and ceiling next. That will be followed up with insulation, wiring, plumbing and basically everything else that needs to be done…
This will likely be much more of a discuss and a recap of what we do, for detailed posts we will be posting that stuff on our website:
ministryofadventure.ca
A quick recap of our thought process that led us to where we are now:
Let's do a flat deck ¾ ton or 1-ton truck with a flatbed camper, nah we want more room. So a 4x4 sprinter it is… nah too #vanlife. So a LMTV with a composite box ? Nah that’s $12,000 for just the shell of a habitat box with some windows, and we still need to design a sub-frame and then have 1000 un-knows about the truck and need some heavy duty tools….. So a flat deck 1 ton with a camper?.... It went on like this for over a year.
How we found the truck:
Then finally I found out that my pop’s (being close to retirement) was going to be selling off some of his equipment and taking less work as he eases into retirement. One of those pieces of equipment is a truck that I always told him I wanted if he ever decided to sell:
It’s a Topkick with 4x4, turbo diesel, Allison transmission and enough room for a 12” camper body without modifying the chassis.
As soon as he let me know he wanted to let it go I decided to jump on buying the truck!
Figuring out the habitat portion of the build:
Options on the table were quite simple
- build something from scratch
- heavily modify something that is already in existence
A big guiding principal I used to make decisions and guide me so far is that I don’t want this build to look “homemade” … even though it is.
My first thoughts were to take a fiberglass truck camper and make it into a flat deck camper by cutting out the sides and extending the walls down to maximize internal space. (you know the space thats missing to make room for bed sides on a norma; truck)
That left me with one big issue… truck campers aren’t generally very long, so I would need to also extend the body to fit the length we were wanting.
At the end of the day, I didn’t have confidence in my abilities to blend all of these changes and not have it look homemade.
We went with a 5th wheel camper…
While searching for the longest fiberglass truck camper on the market I came across a company that has been making fiberglass trailers and campers since the 80’s called “Bigfoot” what I also found out about them is that they make a 5th wheel trailer that is 19’ long; 12’ for the main body and 7’ long for the cab over portion.
Now if you read this whole thing, you will note that I had 12’ of capacity without making any changes. PERFECT!
With the 5th wheel “all I need to do is fill in the wheel wells”. Granted this is a lot less work then I was originally thinking of taking on, it will still take a lot to have it seamlessly blend into the rest of the body.
We found up a beat up old girl that needed some love
Most of these fiberglass trailers seem to hold their value and were more expensive then I wanted. That being said they came with appliances and insulation and hoards of testimony stating that these little buggers are excellent and worth the $$.
We checked out one locally for $8,000 to take some measurements and see if it would work. We were happy with how it appeared but we figured with winter coming there was bound to be an offseason deal to be had.
And there was! I came across an ’84 that had not been used for 2 years and needed work for $2,800. The problem was that is happened to be 300 km’s away and I knew it wouldn’t last long.
So ignored the urge to do what any responsible person would do bought it sight unseen.
High end** Render of what we are looking to achieve:
**ms paint render
Initial Plan:
The original plan was to get the camper mounted onto the truck, use it for a year and then see what we would like to change and do a bit of a remodel after having some time in it. That never happened! After cleaning out the dead bugs and other disgusting items left behind (check Instagram for that video) we realized that there was/is a water issue and that we would not be able to wait before we do a remodel. It had to start now!
Work done up to now:
This basically brings us up to date. The camper has been stripped of its interior, holes have been filled and my neighbors are confused.
I am currently working on the subfloor and hope to start filling in the window voids (new windows will be installed later).
Next we will be framing the walls and ceiling next. That will be followed up with insulation, wiring, plumbing and basically everything else that needs to be done…
This will likely be much more of a discuss and a recap of what we do, for detailed posts we will be posting that stuff on our website:
ministryofadventure.ca
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