profdant139
Member
We do a lot of off-pavement boondocking in the national forests in our 2012 Fun Finder X-139. It is very small -- the box is 139 inches long and seven feet wide. They no longer make this model, and that is why I am posting this message: what do we do when this little guy wears out?
It has everything we need and nothing we don't. The queen bed makes into a dinette. There is a toilet with a shower, fridge, freezer, and stove. (We almost never use the air conditioning because we rarely have hookups.) . There is a 30 gallon fresh water tank, 25 gray, and 25 black. With Navy showers and careful water management, we can go a week without dumping the tanks. (The gray tank fills long before the black tank does.) . And we can easily replenish the fresh water using our plastic jerry cans, even when we are camped in a remote location.
The big advantage of this trailer over an RTT or expedition unit is comfort: we often camp in the snow and rain, and we are perfectly comfortable, with no worries about the fabric getting wet and mildewed. This is not quite a four season trailer (although I am working on further insulation for the underside), but it is a "three and a half season" unit, good down to about ten degrees.
This is what the floor plan originally looked like:
Click For Full-Size Image.
I then replaced the flimsy stuff on the back wall with floor to ceiling cabinets, made with light birch plywood.
We upgraded the axle to 3500 lbs., and flipped the axle for great ground clearance -- the trailer has more clearance than my Tacoma! We often tow on rocky forest roads, and this trailer goes into some very sketchy places. Not fast, though -- we crawl along at between five and ten mph, to avoid damaging the frame. The frame is pretty good (so far), but it is not designed for zooming at high speed across really rocky terrain.
So given those slow speeds, we rarely camp more than ten miles from the pavement. Not a true expedition trailer, but close enough for our needs. We use the trailer as a base camp and then take day trips in the truck to various nearby trailheads for day hiking and snowshoeing. By leaving the trailer in place, we can take the truck on really difficult roads (I'm looking at you, Colorado) and then return to the trailer in the evening.
We also added heavy leaf springs and shocks. The beefy undercarriage is very useful not only on rough forest roads but also on the crumbling highway system.
If you are interested in reading about our modifications, here is our blog about the trailer:
Trailer mods
If you are interested in descriptions of the trips we've taken (mostly in the Western US and Canada), here is that blog:
Trips we've taken
I'm sure other folks have modified a stock trailer for similar types of travel, but we almost never see trailers anywhere near our campsite. We do see truck campers, though. And we rarely see the small RTT trailers or expedition units. My guess is that we are not far enough back in the boonies to reach the type of terrain that is reachable by the true expedition units, so that is why we don't see them -- they are in the way outback!
If you know of a similarly-equipped small hard-side trailer that is currently manufactured, please let me know!
It has everything we need and nothing we don't. The queen bed makes into a dinette. There is a toilet with a shower, fridge, freezer, and stove. (We almost never use the air conditioning because we rarely have hookups.) . There is a 30 gallon fresh water tank, 25 gray, and 25 black. With Navy showers and careful water management, we can go a week without dumping the tanks. (The gray tank fills long before the black tank does.) . And we can easily replenish the fresh water using our plastic jerry cans, even when we are camped in a remote location.
The big advantage of this trailer over an RTT or expedition unit is comfort: we often camp in the snow and rain, and we are perfectly comfortable, with no worries about the fabric getting wet and mildewed. This is not quite a four season trailer (although I am working on further insulation for the underside), but it is a "three and a half season" unit, good down to about ten degrees.
This is what the floor plan originally looked like:
I then replaced the flimsy stuff on the back wall with floor to ceiling cabinets, made with light birch plywood.
We upgraded the axle to 3500 lbs., and flipped the axle for great ground clearance -- the trailer has more clearance than my Tacoma! We often tow on rocky forest roads, and this trailer goes into some very sketchy places. Not fast, though -- we crawl along at between five and ten mph, to avoid damaging the frame. The frame is pretty good (so far), but it is not designed for zooming at high speed across really rocky terrain.
So given those slow speeds, we rarely camp more than ten miles from the pavement. Not a true expedition trailer, but close enough for our needs. We use the trailer as a base camp and then take day trips in the truck to various nearby trailheads for day hiking and snowshoeing. By leaving the trailer in place, we can take the truck on really difficult roads (I'm looking at you, Colorado) and then return to the trailer in the evening.
We also added heavy leaf springs and shocks. The beefy undercarriage is very useful not only on rough forest roads but also on the crumbling highway system.
If you are interested in reading about our modifications, here is our blog about the trailer:
Trailer mods
If you are interested in descriptions of the trips we've taken (mostly in the Western US and Canada), here is that blog:
Trips we've taken
I'm sure other folks have modified a stock trailer for similar types of travel, but we almost never see trailers anywhere near our campsite. We do see truck campers, though. And we rarely see the small RTT trailers or expedition units. My guess is that we are not far enough back in the boonies to reach the type of terrain that is reachable by the true expedition units, so that is why we don't see them -- they are in the way outback!
If you know of a similarly-equipped small hard-side trailer that is currently manufactured, please let me know!
