The truck camper thing has been on my mind since February this year, at which time I was trudging through my final semester studying honors physics at Purdue. Realizing that I’d spent the last three dreary years writing out depressing equations on bleak whiteboards, I went and had myself a nice little mid-life crisis. I parked my faithful ’91 Camry on the curb and bought myself a shiny ’03 Ram diesel dually:
Talk about a first truck. It was shortly after this, while searching for things to actually DO with this beast, that I stumbled across the Lance truck camper website and decided I must have one. Only problem was, the model I wanted was priced at about $25,000. Too much. I spent a month or two on craigslist and eBay searching for a used camper that fit my budget a little better, and came up with this ’96 Shadow Cruiser for $3500:
I spent about 2 weeks boondocking in and around the Purdue area, and really loved it. However, there were some major limitations which eventually convinced me that I could do better.
For starters there were the storage issues. I didn’t buy the camper so that I could park it next to an electrical outlet. The A/C unit and the refrigerator were useless unless plugged in, and took up a TON of space. The battery space, the head, the sink, stove, fan, and heater, all seemed inefficiently placed. I also disliked that, due to the somewhat flimsy construction, I couldn’t just screw new shelving into the walls. I had a lot of stuff I wanted to keep in there, and there just wasn’t room.
More serious was when I began to discover the hidden water damage. I had looked for leaks when I bought the thing and failed to find any. They were there, however. The interior stayed perfectly dry in a thunderstorm, but all the time water was seeping in through holes in the roof and soaking down in between the walls and ceiling, behind the vinyl wall covering. I discovered the extent of the damage one evening when the bar in the closet tore out, exposing a rotten section of cheap particle board. I caulked the roof at the next opportunity, but by then I had lost my faith in the camper’s long-term structural integrity, and decided it had to go.
I debated purchasing another used camper, but figured anything within my budget range would likely have similar problems. After reading the stories on the Glen-L website, and drawing inspiration from this do-it-yourself builder (picture below), I decided all-of-a-sudden that I would build my own truck camper.
