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Telescoping camper

red750

By red750
in Auto Discussions

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spacesailor Grand Master

spacesailor

Posted
Posted

No different to the expanding caravans, now on the road !,  pull out bedrooms & pull out lounge. 

Except the tube type looks Dam Ugly. 

Have you seen those Prices on the luxury vans, same price as medium house price.

spacesailor

  • Agree 1
onetrack Grand Master

onetrack

Posted
Posted

My missus, who is not a camping or caravanning person (although we took a hired Apollo Motorhome - the biggest one they have, with dual rear wheels and shower and toilet) from Perth to Darwin in 2012, and she coped with that O.K. Emptying the toilet cassette was not something she liked, though!

 

But when we went to the local Royal Show a couple of years ago, I was surprised how much she was taken by the pod camper trailers. I could cope with one, but I think SWMBO might have second thoughts about actually living in a pod camper, particularly if the weather turned a bit adverse. 

I must say the Rover Stockman is very well done though, and if I was still a camping person, I'd probably have one of them. But the problem is, I spent around at least 1/4 of my working life, working out of caravans, and I have no real desire to spend any time in one, in my twilight years! I much prefer 4 star hotel accommodation. But the problem then is, if you want to get into "Outback" (or even rural towns), then good quality hotel/motel accommodation is pretty hard to find.

 

https://podtrailer.com.au/campers/rover/

Old Koreelah Grand Master

Old Koreelah

Posted
Posted

Some very clever designs there. There has been a boom in sales of RVs, Campers, Caravans, etc. in recent years. I believe lots of talent from our defunct car industry got work in this booming sector.

Lots of people you meet have bought a unit and are planning to hit the road.

 

 Last year my wife announced she was buying a small camper, which would use up all her savings.

I told her I’d build a better one based on my large box trailer, so she could keep her Super.

400 days of hard work and about $5k later our camper is about to get used over Easter.

I spend weeks dreaming up various exotic designs to maximise space, but eventually realised that everything that folds, slides, rotates or expands adds enormous complexity to a build. Time, money and skills I’m short of, so I opted for simplicity. We can park, open a hatch and climb in. The camper is largely made of left-over materials from building aeroplanes, is very streamlined and can be lifted off so I can use my box trailer. 
 

Tomorrow I plan to connect the solar and get the 12v system powered up, then start on the swing-out kitchen benches. This is almost as exciting as building an aeroplane!

 

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Old Koreelah Grand Master

Old Koreelah

Posted
Posted
3 minutes ago, red750 said:

Post a pic.

I woz worried someone would ask that!

Wait till Sunday, when the kid and her family arrive- I need them to complete the paint job before I take pix.

 

This is what the inside looked like six months ago:

 

image.jpeg

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old man emu Grand Master

old man emu

Posted
Posted
9 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

I woz worried someone would ask that!

Wait till Sunday, when the kid and her family arrive- I need them to complete the paint job before I take pix.

 

This is what the inside looked like six months ago:

 

image.jpeg

Another entrant into the "What I did during Lock-down" competition.

  • Like 2
Old Koreelah Grand Master

Old Koreelah

Posted
Posted
16 hours ago, onetrack said:

OldK - You could've at least washed those grubby handprints off it, before you took it out!

The best part of it! I waited months for the perpetrators to come and do their stuff.

  • Like 1
Yenn Rising Star

Yenn

Posted
Posted

You can buy a pretty good camper for a reasonable price.

I have a Jayco Penguin which has done nearly 100110km around the country, A lot of that on dirt roads and also 4WD tracks, still in good nick, but i did have to remanufacture the awning when it got damaged in the aftermath of a cyclone. I could have bought spares, but cheapskate me had to make the needed pieces to repair it.

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nomadpete Grand Master

nomadpete

Posted
Posted
2 hours ago, Old Koreelah said:

No unfolding; just open the rear hatch and kitchen hatch.

That's what I am asking. Kitchen innovation.

Everybody works out their own list of 'must haves', so it is always interesting to see the result when it is not shop bought.

In our case, we have an old, basic 1980's soft campertrailer.

I like simplicity when I camp. But when I go away, it is important to avoid being a slave to the kitchen, and many campers spend too much time packing and unpacking kitchenware from plastic tubs. So I made a plywood kitchen that fits in our alloy toolbox canopy on the back of our twin cab ute. It contains all cooking utensils and most of the food for a couple of weeks away from shops, yet is simple to open up for roadside lunches or a quick cuppa.

 

So, OK. Show us your kitchen?

kgwilson Experienced

kgwilson

Posted
Posted

I saw a design some years ago that intrigued me. Basically it was a Caravan that doubled in size like opening a swiss army knife. The bit that folded out had a floor and roof and the rear wall folded down when it was open & it was a large space the size of the original caravan that was then used as a lounge or living area.

  • Informative 1
spacesailor Grand Master

spacesailor

Posted
Posted

Hey !,

I don,t think its hard,  just ' scratch a hole for the highest wheel and blocks under the low wheels.

Then use your jacks ( plural ) to tweek, that ' just right '  for your lady.  I have springs under my car/van.

 

spacesailor

Yenn Rising Star

Yenn

Posted
Posted

Sometime the ground is so hard that you cannot scratch a hole and putting blocks under a wheel lifts that side, which may make it hard of access.

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onetrack Grand Master

onetrack

Posted
Posted (edited)

I delivered some unique fibreglass sandwich sheeting to a mate in Nannup last month, he's building a caravan with it. The business is called Advanced Fibreglass Australia (and it's owned by a Kiwi!).

He utilises an advanced Italian-made fibreglass sheet, and bonds two sheets of this fibreglass to a slab of high-tech Dow Corning styrofoam (the thickness varies according to buyers specifications), to make a thick sandwich panel.

 

These panels are then used to make caravans, cool rooms, insulated truck bodies, insulated lunchrooms, and a host of other types of bodies and rooms. 

My mate bought a pop-up caravan chassis and is going to build a new caravan on the pop-up chassis. The sheets come in huge sizes, I think you can get 14M x 4M width.

 

He bought one slab for the roof and ends (the panel is slotted with closely-spaced cuts on the inside, and then curved - with a sheet of fibreglass glued to the inside to hide the slots once it's curved), one slab for the floor, and a slab for each side wall.

The edges are fitted into aluminium extrusions that hold the slabs securely at 90° to each other, then you just glue the slabs in place with a big tube of Sikaflex sealant/adhesive.

 

It's not all that cheap, IMO, my mate paid $10,000 for the 4 slabs, but he reckons he can build a van for about $25,000, because there's no buggering around with sheeting, rivets, timber, bracing, brackets, or all the other fiddly stuff that consumes a lot of time in building a conventional van. You just cut holes for windows and doors and other openings - and for running wiring and piping, you get rectangular PVC tubing inserted into the sandwich panel, when it's being made.

 

Scroll down the FB page and check out the charcoal-coloured caravan a bloke is building with the sandwich panels.

 

https://www.facebook.com/people/Advanced-Fibreglass-Australia/100057266747123/

 

 

Edited by onetrack
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