Redeth's Overland Trailer Build

[Redeth005]

My dad and i finally got around to finishing up the cooler slide out this week. We wanted to make the slide out built to be adjustable to i drilled 2 holes and connected them with a jigsaw creating these oval holes that could then have a bolt through it and be adjusted back and forth then tightened when it was centered at the door.



Here is the inside of the trailer. We welded the bolts onto the metal floor rails so we can use a nut on the top side of the slide out bracket to hold it in place. We achieved this by centering the tray that the ice chest would sit on first.




Here you can see how his design would make the rails adjustable.


After we were happy with the fit my dad went on to welding the slides making sure not to weld on the areas where the plastic stoppers are on the back side to avoid damaging the slide out. We had a pressurized water spray bottle on stand by in case the rails got too hot which we did have to use a couple of times.

Centering up


Inspecting where the plastic stoppers are


Tack tack tack


and ready for welds


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over a couple of days i primed it and then painted it. 3 days later i was ready to install. As you can see it is a pretty tight fit between the door frame. Approximately 3/16" to 1/4" spacing left on each side when you include the thickness of the slide outs. Just enough space to adjust back and forth.





The slides only go up to that point but the remaining portion behind those brackets is going to be for a spice-rack/pantry so the end of that slide out exposes the little cabinet that will eventually be made. You can see the tray for it here on the left.


I bought these steel Hook/eye tie downs for the cooler to keep it in place while on the read, hwy, trail.

 

[Redeth005]

Cooler slide out is done! All set for camping. Now all that is left on my to do list is to fabricate a propane tank holder/mount, install the Propex heatsource forced air heater to warm my cvt roof top tent. Install my @all4offroad rock lights, mount the solar panel and begin with electrical fuse block/wire harness and deep cycle battery bank.




Not sure if any of you guys use BlueApron to order meals online that include everything you need to cook a delicious meal but these 14"×11×1.5" ice blocks that they ship your food with fit perfectly at the base of my 80qt Engel DeepBlue cooler.
I may be able to get away with just one small bag of ice to keep my food cool all throughout a weekend camping trip whenever that time comes.


Cooking station ✔ Check.
I have this awesome old-school Coleman 3 BURNER stove that runs off of coleman lantern fuel. My red Coleman road trip grill with cast iron grill top which runs off of small propane bottles and burns as hot as 20,000btu; I'll eventually have a nice hose to connect that grill to my future propane tank.




Great thing about having bare aluminum side walls is that you can use the wall as a reflector to enhance how much these Coleman lanterns will light up the camp ground. I found that the newer propane lanterns are much brighter then the old-school liquid fuel lanterns. But the propane ones won't last as long as the old-school ones. just FYI


I picked up these 2 babies from a guy who sells blemish Optima batteries out of Long Beach CA. These are optima blue top batteries. He sells both blue and yellow top batteries for 120 each or 220 a pair; with a 1 year warranty on all the batteries he sells. I scored both for 200 since that's all I had on me. Lol. But still a great deal considering it usually costs about $276 plus tax at a local autozone/o'reily auto parts for just 1 of these batteries. I had planned to only buy one. But i really don't want to take a chance at draining the battery past 50%. So 2 should be way more then enough for the applications i plan to run. With my 100watt solar panel and the 12v charging wire going from my 4runner's 7pin tow wire harness I'm sure i will be plenty to keep by batteries charged.

 

[Mccaf]

Nice work, love it! Can you PM me the Long Beach battery guy?

 

[2180miles]

[/URL]

FYI - If you go to Home Depot to the garden section, for $1.30 or so you can get hose washers to put in between the pin lock and trailer hitch, which silents it and keeps it from banging around. I did it with my Factor55 Hitchlink and was exceptionally pleased with the cost to result ratio...

http://www.homedepot.com/p/Orbit-Hose-Washer-and-O-Ring-Combo-Pack-27937/100659295


Hitchlink w/ D-ring by 2180miles

 

[zonedriven]

BTW Look at getting an annex channel from CVT. It makes putting the annex on almost a 1 man job

 

[Redeth005]

With a such a nice clean trailer that has a new clean coat of paint it was only fair that i gave my 4Runner some love. The bumpers and rock sliders were beginning to look grey from being so faded. Using some impervious surgical drapes as an overspray shield this thing came out looking sexy!

 

[Redeth005]

My family and i all agreed to have a 3 day camping this past weekend. My girl and i would be going early friday morning with our 3 year old. And my Parents wih my 21 year old brother would be joining us later hat night around 8pm.
so here are pix of the trip...

Mostly packed up with the items i need.



Rise n shine. All packed up and ready to head out at 6am friday morning.


Not too saggy


On our way to the lake. Not the safest thing to do while pulling a trailer but I just wanted to show how well the trailer pulls with my truck. The Tekonsha Prodigy P3 brake controller helped out so much! especially when having to make sudden stops. Gotta love electric trailer brakes!


So i dont know much about RV's and trailer but i didnt know we werent supposed to use this water at the dump stations to put into our water tanks. It isn't poo water but it is, however reclaimed water. We didnt use it for drinking water or cooking we basically only used it for showering but still i felt kind gross letting my family shower with that water. I eventually ran fresh water through the tank 2 times through to wash it out. But i still need to mix up some bleach and water to run through the system a couple of times. To clean up my water storage again.


Close up of the water fill area on the passenger side of the trailer.
That is a 15 gallon Valtera water tank under there. I am actually thinking about adding another water tank. IT should be more then enough to shower my family of 3 and soon to be 4 but since i had my parents and brother join us this past weekend so 15 gallons was NOWHERE near enough. If i buy anoher 15 or 20 gallon tank i can run it on the rear side of the trailer and mount it higher then this tank here and just run one hose to the bottom tank so it will fill by gravity pulling the water to the lower tank. This is most likely what i plan to do ..


Perfect camp site on the lake front!


We were the only ones on the lake most of friday then people trickled in as the weekend approached. Luckily i had already reserved a pretty large space


Good view of the CVT Summit series Mt Rainier tent. It is definitely an eye sore but it is definitely a good thing. You can spot my tent from super far away. and for people who don't know where my camp is at only have to look for one thing... "The bright green roof top tent" not to mention when we go swimming most people at all camp sites have similar colors. So this is easy to spot and easy for everyone to know when they are drifting off too far away from camp when having fun in the water.


Gotta love a 1st gen 4Runner!


For each of the 3 days we stayed at this camp we had people rolling up asking me questions about my trailer, truck and especially my roof top tent and the shower tent set up. People really loved everything about the set up


With my portable 6ft table and the one provided to us we had more then enough surfaces to use.


My Parents eventually met up with us for the remainder of the weekend.



The view from my camp site at 5:30am in the morning







Gotta love having a battery bank on the trailer. Even if it isn't permanently mounted yet having the deep cycle batteries really helped out. We kept on the exterior LED's which are mounted on my canopy on all night. IT provided just enough light for us to get up to use the restroom in my shower tent without being too bright and keeping us up



Since day one reached nearly 110°F during the first day i had my parents bring me my extra large tarp and telescoping poles with clothes line rope to our set up to give us more shade. Once set up it added at least 1.5 - 2 times more shade then the canopy provided. We used the trailer and my trucks roof rack/bumper as starting attachment points then used poles extend the tarp further. It worked like a charm and is so much cheaper then buying a tiny ARB pull out shade or fox wing because his one i believe is 20 by 15 feet. I actually want to buy the larger heavy duty harbor freight tarp for the next trip. But this one worked great!

 

[Redeth005]

My two loves


Little Isaac was having the funnest time finding all sizes and shapes of rocks.


I don't think anything hit the spot more this past weekend then this delicious sweet watermelon. These full sized bamboo kitchen style chopping boards Really came in handy this weekend. I get down when it comes to cooking when we camp and one of my best buddies is a real professional private chef" so i added these with both of us in mind for some good prep surfaces.


Sun is starting to go down and almost time to begin setting up the night time set up before mosquitoes come out to suck the blood out of everyone.


The first night the wind blew extremely hard. So hard it blew down a tent at a neighboring camp ground. and this canopy was blown right over my truck! We eventually used some clothes line rope to anchor it in place. ...and despite all the wind that blew so hard and destroyed a few camp set ups my CVT roof top tent help up great and barely moved at all when when the wind was at its worst! This CVT tent is definitely rigid enough to hold up against some nasty winds.


Out of all the camp sites on the camp ground ours definitely had the most light. I'm glad we had my dads super bright LED lights. Those were the ones that attracted the bulk of the mosquitos so I set those up as far away from the camp as possible. Although it didn't keep them all away I would say it kept about 90% of them away from us. Literally there had to have been over 500 mosquitos flying each of those 2 center nights and another ton of flies on the far right propane lantern.



My All4OffRoad rock lights lighting the under carriage of my truck helped out a ton when we had a temporary power outage with my trailers onboard deep cycle battery. Kept them on until I was able to get the battery charged up again with my truck.


Here you can see how large the bed really is on this roof top tent. It fits all 3 of us comfortably look at little Isaac all comfy sleeping across on us lol





I love the fact that this tent has an on board LED and 2 USB charging ports. It worked great to charged our phones!


Here is a basically what i ran this weekend. As you saw in the other pix i have a Cabelas Shower tent which we use to shower and use as a port-a-potty. i dont use the hanging 5 gallon bag anymore. Instead i use this EccoTemp water heater for nice warm/hot showers. Happy wife happy Life. Plus nothing beats a warm shower especially when you are all dusty. This shower does not work unless you have water pressure. So i use this paired with a 1Gallon per minute water pump whcih works off of 12v power. For this trip i only took 1 of the two blue top optima deep cycle batteries that i recently bought. and to make use of battery power i have a 3000watt (6k watt peak) inverter that i have had for almost 2 years now to use with my 3 gallon compressor to air up tires when i go Rock Crawling. Its a bit overkill for this trailer but i don't want to buy another one since i already have this one lol i works. I may get a lower wattage one eventually. And last this eccotemp shower works with two D batteries not 12v power.

 

[Curtis in Texas]

Wow! That worked out do well for you. I have only one suggestion.

When you are expecting more guests than you have on board water capacity, have them carry in their own water jugs for the camp out. This way you don't have the weight to haul, and everyone has enough for their needs.

I learned this the hard way too when camping with extended family and my pop up. I even bought 6- 7 gallon plastic water jugs and made sure everyone coming to join us had a jug. And they were told to fill it and bring it with them. If they " forgot" the jug then they were expected to buy some at the grocery store if they wanted to shower. Most brought sodas to drink, so they weren't dehydrating. Of course some campsites had water hook up so the jugs weren't needed.

Water is heavy and if you are trying to accommodated 10 people primitive camping, then your looking at a minimum of 5 gallons per person for a three day weekend. More if you're doing desert camping. Make them haul it!

Personally, I like the green tent. Adds character to the experience.

Great job.

 

[DanCooper]

Just freaking awesome! Wonderful job, and I am so glad you finally got to use it.

 

[pyrate]

Wow! That is fantastic! I am glad all your hard work has been worth it and you get to use it now.

As to showers, if you can put a pull chain on the nozzle. Or something that can't be left on continuously. Once people realize it's to get wet and rinse off vs running non-stop it will help in your conservation.

 

[JandDGreens]

It looks like the CVT tent is going to work out very nicely, and you should be very proud of how your trailer turned out. I wish I could work on my trailer as much as I end up working on my rig and my buddies rig. I think I would be so much further along than I am.

 

[kyzooper]

Love your work!!!
couple of questions:
Are you going to mount a solar panel some where to keep your battery charged?
Do you or are you planning to run a 12v fridge in your trailer? with all your great work seems a shame not to have a fridge, eskies are good but a fridge is better!!!





Saw this on a another site thought it was a good idea. Would work really well for you I thought.

 

[Redeth005]

Sorry guys. Been away from updating since the last trip in July. I haven't had much to work on because i found out i have a baby on the way! Whoop whoop! Congrats to me! . With that i have been taking on a ton of work at the hospital. So fitting in trailer time has been out of the question among all the other things i have been up to over the past 2; almost 3 months. Anyway. With that said i was looking over my thread recently and after looking over the pix i found some motivation to want to continue on. Cold months are going to start coming soon and i really want to make sure i have my on board forced air heater ready to go when the time comes for those fall/winter camping months.

Anyway here are the replies to all you guys...

Wow! That worked out do well for you. I have only one suggestion.

When you are expecting more guests than you have on board water capacity, have them carry in their own water jugs for the camp out. This way you don't have the weight to haul, and everyone has enough for their needs.

I learned this the hard way too when camping with extended family and my pop up. I even bought 6- 7 gallon plastic water jugs and made sure everyone coming to join us had a jug. And they were told to fill it and bring it with them. If they " forgot" the jug then they were expected to buy some at the grocery store if they wanted to shower. Most brought sodas to drink, so they weren't dehydrating. Of course some campsites had water hook up so the jugs weren't needed.

Water is heavy and if you are trying to accommodated 10 people primitive camping, then your looking at a minimum of 5 gallons per person for a three day weekend. More if you're doing desert camping. Make them haul it!

Personally, I like the green tent. Adds character to the experience.

Great job.

Thanks for suggesting other guests carrying heir own water jugs. after the trip i made it a point to make that clear to everyone and make a mental note for future camping trips. It was just way too much water o carry all o myself and we still need more lol but conserving water and getting my guests to bring their own water jugs will help a ton! Of course if camp sites have water hook ups then i wont need to worry about water for showers being an issue.

Just freaking awesome! Wonderful job, and I am so glad you finally got to use it.

I'm so happy the trailer is ready for use and to be hauled too. It isnt ready for hauling at a moments notice yet. But at least i can use with minimal preparations now. Ever since my last rip i have been itching to get out there bad! The issue is that i have been working so many call hours on weekends hat its nearly impossible to get out for a weekend. But after looking over the pix of my progress and have it come to a stop has really motivated me to get going again. even if it is slowly one project at a time to tackle i definitely want to get back on it.

Wow! That is fantastic! I am glad all your hard work has been worth it and you get to use it now.
As to showers, if you can put a pull chain on the nozzle. Or something that can't be left on continuously. Once people realize it's to get wet and rinse off vs running non-stop it will help in your conservation.

Yes i had to explain to everyone who came along that we absolutely need to utilize the *on/off* switch when the water is not in use. we will run out in no time if that is the case.

It looks like the CVT tent is going to work out very nicely, and you should be very proud of how your trailer turned out. I wish I could work on my trailer as much as I end up working on my rig and my buddies rig. I think I would be so much further along than I am.

Thank you! It'll come along. With these 3 months i had off im sure you should have had enough time to catch up lol I'll have to check out your build after this comment haha

Love your work!!!
couple of questions:
Are you going to mount a solar panel some where to keep your battery charged?
Do you or are you planning to run a 12v fridge in your trailer? with all your great work seems a shame not to have a fridge, eskies are good but a fridge is better!!!

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View attachment 410701

Saw this on a another site thought it was a good idea. Would work really well for you I thought.

Originally i had planned to buy an Engel combi fridge freezer. but that would cost me so much money. So i decided not to go hat route. The 80qt Engel drybox worked amazingly well on the last trip with temperatures reaching 110 degrees during t he day and high 80's in the night the engel cooler kept all the food in good shape. I do plan to mount my 100watt grape solar solar panel onto the roof of the front compartment somehow. We will see how i do it. I need to buy a few items to get the remainder of the accessories up and running. and solar panel and propane forced air heater are definitely next in line. After i figure out a way to mount the batteries in he front compartment of course.

Great pix of the tarp scaffolding (or w/e it is called) i may have to do something similar. thanks for the idea.

 

[Nd4SpdSe]

I wanted to say, I found your video on your Propex heater review and I really appreciate all the information you provided! Thanks for doing it!