A home-made, self-designed truck camper. Part Three: Construction

I began construction on April 10. Total lumber costs came to around $750.00, the majority of which was spent on 20 sheets of top-of-the-line birch plywood at $30.00 each. Assuming that each sheet of plywood weighs 50 lbs, I’d guess that 2x4s included the dry weight of the camper is around 1000 to 1200 lbs.

For tools, I already had a few Ryobi 18V cordless power tools around from the cabin I built in ’04. To these I added the Ryobi 18V impact driver (an absolute MUST for driving 3 1/2″ screws), and a Ryobi 10″ miter saw.

Although school was still in session, I hit the project hard during two weeks of glorious weather. After ten days, my driveway looked like this:

Notice the angled braces in the wings, which I decided were necessary for support if I chose to install camper jacks on the corners. Also notice the access holes at floor level on either side, which allow for storage forward of the wheel wells.

By April 26, just over two weeks into the project, I had most of the siding and roof on. Here’s me pulling a typical late night to get a few last boards screwed in.

About this time school was drawing to a close and I took a week off to study for finals. By the time I got back to the project, the weather had taken a turn for the worse, and it was raining every other day. I began applying epoxy to the outside surfaces for waterproofing. This eventually cost me about $300.00 (2 1/2 gallons from Glen-L). This is also where I made my biggest mistake. Epoxy is a wonder and a curse. It is relatively easy to apply to a flat horizontal surface, but to apply to vertical walls or, worse, the underside of a flat horizontal surface is very, very difficult. I did succeed in fully waterproofing the exterior, but I ended up with a lot of drips along the walls. Also, some of the coats turned milky because I applied them before a rainfall or on a very humid evening. I had been planning to apply a spar varnish to achieve a natural wood color, but after achieving less than stellar results with the epoxy, I finally chose to finish the camper with three coats of white paint.

Putting the camper into the truck turned out to be more of a challenge than I anticipated. Rather than drop another $500 or so on four corner mounted camper jacks, I bought two ‘farm jacks’ for about $100 and planned to use a method wherein I would raise one end of the camper at a time, and support it with concrete blocks while I raised the other end. I needed to raise it a total of five blocks worth. In this way I lifted it the first two feet on my own with little difficulty. I called a buddy for help, expecting the rest of the job to take 15 minutes or so. In actuality it took us over four hours. The jacks grew MUCH less stable the higher off the ground we used them. At one point one of the jacks slipped without warning and the entire structure dropped six inches, fortuitously landing directly on the four-high stack of bricks. In the end we succeeded, however:

I then drilled a hole in each of the four lower corners and attached eyebolts, to which I connected the Tork-Lift mounting system I’d purchased for the last camper.

I started construction on April 10 and had it in my truck on June 2, about 8 weeks total.

The last major problem with the exterior I discovered about two weeks later. After two days of heavy thunderstorms, I found 2 inches of water standing in the cabover area. Knowing that it couldn’t be leaking through the epoxy coating, I was able to identify the problem as the left front window. Water was streaming down the sliding pane, filling up at the bottom in the track, seeping across to the inside of the other pane, and spilling over into the camper. Stopping at the RV shop I was informed that I had installed the window 90 degrees off from its designed orientation, so that the “weep holes” were not able to drain the track as they were designed to. I fixed the problem by drilling new weep holes along the bottom of the sill, and since then the camper has not leaked a drop.