malibubts's 2015 Ram 1500 CCSB Build

[tyler.armijo]

I just finished reading your entire thread and I love your pickup and how often you get out and explore. I wanted to ask a couple of questions. Do you know what gearing your truck has from the factory and how is the camper shell holding up after a couple years of use?


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[malibubts]

I just finished reading your entire thread and I love your pickup and how often you get out and explore. I wanted to ask a couple of questions. Do you know what gearing your truck has from the factory and how is the camper shell holding up after a couple years of use?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Thanks! Wish I could get out even more, but such is life. Need to find a new gig where I'm not on call!

I've got the 3.55 rear end with the anti-spin.

Camper shell has been pretty solid. I've only had it on the truck for about 2 years now, but I haven't had any issues with it. I think I've said it before in my build thread, but if I could do it over I would have carpeted the interior and gotten a mid rise for how I use the truck.

 

[Dyllin]

What's the newest update, bud?

 

[malibubts]

What's the newest update, bud?

Unfortunately not too much, I just switched jobs in the past couple of months and it's been a fairly wet spring here in NEO so I haven't really been out. I do finally have a bit of comp time saved up though and probably going to do a 3 day trip to another part of ANF or maybe Bald Eagle State Forest next weekend.

Truck, tires, and all have held up well and I actually just paid it off this month which is nice. Only recent mod is a Ram Mount for my laptop; the tablet mount I had didn't work to well and I switched to a Chromebook 2 in 1 for navigation. I'll have to get a couple photos of that. Ram settled on the EcoDiesel emissions so I'll have to get an ECU flash here in the next year or so for an extra 40k of warranty and a $3,000 refund. Looking at putting new brakes on later this summer, but nothing else really in the plan for now.

 

[Dyllin]

Unfortunately not too much, I just switched jobs in the past couple of months and it's been a fairly wet spring here in NEO so I haven't really been out. I do finally have a bit of comp time saved up though and probably going to do a 3 day trip to another part of ANF or maybe Bald Eagle State Forest next weekend.

Truck, tires, and all have held up well and I actually just paid it off this month which is nice. Only recent mod is a Ram Mount for my laptop; the tablet mount I had didn't work to well and I switched to a Chromebook 2 in 1 for navigation. I'll have to get a couple photos of that. Ram settled on the EcoDiesel emissions so I'll have to get an ECU flash here in the next year or so for an extra 40k of warranty and a $3,000 refund. Looking at putting new brakes on later this summer, but nothing else really in the plan for now.

Getting my ram dialed in as well. I went with the AT3s & I love them. Good tire.

 

[Halligan]

Nice practical build. Did you do the ECU flash yet and if yes how bad was the MPG hit?

 

[malibubts]

Nice practical build. Did you do the ECU flash yet and if yes how bad was the MPG hit?

Thanks! I actually owe this thread a few updates, might try to get around to that with my morning coffee this weekend.

I have not gone in for the AEM yet.

Right off the bat I didn’t want to be the tester of everything; some people seem to complain about lag and mileage pretty bad and others say no difference. There are rumors actually of a revised tune coming out, we’ll see if that pans out.

The other piece is I’m at about 80k miles. In addition to the $3,000 check they write they throw another 40k miles onto a ton of components (EGR, DPF, etc). A good chunk of this hardware is under factory power train until 100k. My thought here was to get to about 85-90k and get it done for the longest warranty with a bit of safety overlap between the components not covered in either warranty.

Finally as of about a week ago they are now recalling the EGRs for the potential to start a fire. No fix as of yet, so I’d like to wait now to get both recalls done at once. So that’s a fun one.

 

[malibubts]

Better late then never, but did a quick 2 Day, 1 Night trip to ANF about four or five months ago now. To this point most of my time spent there was on the northern edge of things so with this trip I wanted to head a little further south.


2019_06_08_Route by ebeiersdorfer, on Flickr

First stop was a little light house near Tionesta. It wasn't the most interesting place in the world, but it was nice to get out of the truck and stretch the legs a bit.


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I then wanted to head on towards camp as I knew where I wanted to stay would be a bit of a toss up. A while back I'd stayed at the Minister Creek campground, but there really aren't a ton of spots there. I knew I'd probably be pushing my luck trying to get a spot on a Friday so I at least had some dispersed campsites as a backup. Sure enough Minister Creek was all full up and I was on to the dispersed site.

There are a number of these spots of off FR132 and all that I saw were pretty nice. I grabbed the first open one I passed and settled in.


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With where I ended up camping I knew I was going to have to double back to get to where I wanted to hike the next day, but had planned on heading all the way south on FR132 first. A washout though changed my plans pretty quickly, the whole road had basically been taken out and was closed. The excavator in the background wasn't even at the lowest part of the ravine.


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But I made it to the Beaver Meadows area and did some hiking before grabbing lunch.


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After hiking around Beaver Meadows I headed south again and dipped out of ANF into the Cook Creek State Forest, they had a pretty cool hiking system around a fire tower that I wanted to check out. The fire tower unfortunately was super crowded and it was too hot to leave my dog in the truck by herself so I just stuck to hiking some of the trails. It was a pretty cool set though as it took you from up top all the way down to the river and back up again.


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After hiking around the rest of the afternoon I headed back home as I had some things I had to knock out on Sunday. While a short trip it was still definitely a good time.

 

[malibubts]

Last year when I went to the Monongahela National Forest, my girlfriend was unable to make the trip since she couldn't get the time off. I also didn't have the best weather and wanted to try and make it back there when the weather was better. So we had the chance a few weeks ago and made the trip back there again. I hit some of the same spots again but also stopped at a few new areas along the way.


Route_2019_10_21 by ebeiersdorfer, on Flickr

I had originally planned on entering from the North East and camping in the Dolly Sods Wilderness area again, but there was a whole mess of traffic on the highway on the way out so I changed my plans a bit to save us some time. We camped at the Bear Haven Campground, which also took us past Bickle Knob so we stopped by on the way.


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We unfortunately had to rough this trip in the tent; the landscaping crew at my work popped up a rock when they were mowing shortly before the trip and busted the whole side window on my truck cap. We obviously survived but I forgot about how much of a pain dealing with a tent is between setup and teardown.


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I managed to also run myself out of propane after dinner the first night, so it was up to a campfire in the morning to heat up some water for coffee.


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The overlook and little hiking trail at Spruce Knob warranted a second visit so we headed off that direction after breaking camp in the morning.

To get in a bit of hiking before hand and try to wear out the dog we stopped a Spruce Knob Lake for an easy walk around the lake first.


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From there we were off to the top of Spruce Knob.


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After spending a bit of time hiking around there and eating lunch we headed off towards the Seneca Rocks area. My girlfriend has recently rolled her ankle so we were trying to take it easy and didn't end up hiking there, but it was definitely still a cool spot to stop by. Last time I didn't see any climbers out on the face but there were a bunch out there this time.


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It was probably the much nicer weather this time around, but the whole area was packed. Last year everything was about deserted so I didn't put down any reservations for camp sites. We decided to camp at the Seneca Shadows campground and at about 4:00PM we grabbed the very last spot available in the whole campground. Unfortunately it was in the 'walk in' tent area, which wasn't quite as private as I like but it was a place to sleep.

Definitely had a cool view though.


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Making some dinner without the propane.


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We had planned on checking out the Blackwater Falls and the Olson Fire Tower this trip around, but woke up to a bunch of rain and fog. We broke camp in the rain and I remembered really how much more I hated tents. But we got on our way and at least the rain cleared up.


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We killed a bit of time at Blackwater Falls and allowed a good portion of the fog to burn off. I'm glad that was the case since I also missed the fire tower last year since you couldn't see 20 feet in front of you from the fog.


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All considered it was a pretty solid trip. It was a little more crowded than I thought things would be this late in the season and the weather was a bit spotty but it was worth the drive down.

As a side note I finally got a call that the replacement truck cap window is in after about 6 weeks of waiting. Hopefully I'll be able to keep that tent in my basement and the rocks stay away from the glass.

 

[Dyllin]

Solid updates brother! You're inspiring me to get out and explore some in my neck of the woods. Much of this is close by me considering I'm In Pittsburgh, PA. I may have to venture out here sometime soon. I want to get some winter camping in as well. Btw that aerial view of the truck though is nice!

 

[malibubts]

Not your traditional overland trip and wasn't actually taken in my truck, but I went up to the UP for some grouse hunting towards the end of October.

We stayed at these pretty cool little cabins right on a lake in Crystal Falls.

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My Dad has a 2016 Ram built out fairly similarly; he has the V6 and stock suspension still though.

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Out hunting.

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I should have grabbed a few photos, but one of the guys ended up burying his Tacoma pretty badly the one day. We were heading towards the next hunting spot when we turned off of decent forest road onto pretty much mud and I knew things we're going to go well. My Dad actually stopped the truck for a hot second and said "Why don't you drive this, do you think this is a good idea?". I responded with "Well do we want to do the rest of the afternoon, hunt or dig out trucks?". Sure enough as soon as I said that I looked up and saw the Taco buried to the body. We had no proper recovery gear, but eventually got enough dead fall down for traction and a ratchet strap to yank him out. One of those things where you're along for the ride and wish you had your truck with the proper recovery strap, shackles, shovel, etc.

Saw a fair amount of birds during the trip, but only ended up getting a grouse and a woodcock.

IMG_0280 by ebeiersdorfer, on Flickr

Even though we didn't get a ton of birds, it was a good trip out exploring unimproved roads and walking through the woods with the dogs.

 

[malibubts]

Been pretty bad at updates and getting out here with the 'new normal', life happenings, as well as some issues my truck had been having.

We managed to get out once last summer and meet up with some friends down at Rothrock and Bald Eagle State Forest. We were out for about 4 days exploring the area and our friends met up with us for the weekend.


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Overall the trip was a great time and it was nice seeing some friends as they were able to meet up with us from DC.

 

[malibubts]

Again not your typical 'Overland' trip, but we were still able to make it up to the Upper Peninsula for some bird hunting last October.

We stopped and hunted a day near Grayling to try and break up the drive, but won't be doing this again next year. With the rise of side by sides all the areas that are good for hunting were packed with those things buzzing around.


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After Grayling we made our way North, crossed the bridge, and took the ferry over to Drummond Island. Super cool area and is even more remote than most of the UP, which is hard to believe. This year instead of stopping in Grayling we plan to spend more time on Drummond Island. As a side note, if you plan to catch the ferry back on a Sunday prepare for a wait. We were arriving as most folks were leaving and the road to the ferry was backed up a good 3-4 miles with people waiting get back.


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After Drummond Island we headed West to our 'normal' spots around Crystal Falls. The crew I'm with doesn't like to rough it, so we normally stay in some cabins for most of the trip. Our usual was not operating with everything going on so we picked out a new spot. This place was decked with mounts as the guy who owned it was a big time big game hunter.


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Bagged a birthday grouse!


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We're all lined up again for our trip in October and will be spending more time on Drummond which should be a good time.

 

[malibubts]

Now for the big update! I think like a lot of folks I've been drooling over a wedge camper for years. While the truck shell and the Decked drawers work, they leave a lot to be desired. Even though I have the 6 1/3" bed, at 6' I still need to sleep at a bit of an angle and with the wife and a dog things can get a bit tight. Not to mention with the standard rise cap I got, army crawling back into position and not being able to sit up. We also found the threat of rain held us back occasionally from getting out as we didn't really have a space to hang out if things decided to get nasty.

So earlier this year I put my deposit down on a Snap! Outfitters Treehouse. I sold my old Leer cap much quicker than expected however, which was both good and bad. Snap! Outfitters is obviously not as big as the GFCs, ATs, SuperPacs, etc of the world but I found a lot of positives that lead me down this route.

Timeline was a pretty big part of this, certainly I understand why but it's hard for me to swallow a lead time of a year plus to get into something after putting down the deposit. Snap! Outfitters had me installed within 3 months of putting down my deposit which was awesome. Also with being outside 'The West' a lot of the other options would have been a haul or I would have had to deal with delivery, Snap! Outiftters is fairly conveniently only a 6 hour drive from me and I was able to head over and pick up the camper over the weekend.

I also really like the design of the bed platform as compared to some of the alternatives. It's a full size bed with room inside to get up and down from the platform still, which I've gathered is quite generous in size from a lot of the other options. My favorite part about the bed though, is just like the top the platform is on gas struts and lifts up leaving the whole interior space available.

Picking up the camper at their facility.


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Since the trip out was 6 hours and we left in the morning on Saturday, I certainly didn't feel like driving the same 6 hours back home. We passed through a lot of the PA state forests on the way, so I picked out a spot in Caledonia Sate Park to stay for the night.


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As we arrived though it began raining and did so for a couple of hours. So we got familiar real quick with the OVS 270 Awning I had fit to the camper and the inside space. I will say having all that room for hanging out, sleeping, and changing was pretty awesome.

On Sunday morning we did a quick hike and packed it in to head back home.


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We've only spent a night in the camper, but so far I'm super happy. We've got a couple weddings coming up here, but hopefully we'll be able to make it out again in a couple of weekends. I've got a few small things to work out with the electrical and some sleep platform panels but otherwise we are keeping things pretty much the same for now.

 

[malibubts]

Been busy remodeling a bathroom and haven't kept super on top of the updates here so we'll play a little catch up.

Shortly after picking up the camper last October I made the trip up to Michigan again to chase some Grouse. We spent the first couple of days hunting on Drummond Island, which unfortunately was much busier than the past year so we'll be skipping it this coming year.


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We then headed over to our usual spot near Crystal Falls.


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