This is a travel rig concept that I’ve been working on in the background for the last few years. It would be a vehicle for the 2 of us to travel in for long overland trips. The habitat has a 4′ by 6’2″ bed (convertible to a dinette), a small kitchen, and a composting toilet. I’ve played around with 23 configurations, and I kind of like this one. This is a pop top with standing height.
I’ve checked the weight and center of gravity and it would work on multiple chassis. Shown here it is incorporated into a Jeep Unlimited JKU, but it would also work on a Land Rover (130?), a G-Wagon (G320?), or a Land Cruiser (HDJ80?).
It’s just a concept, but I’d like to get input from you. What do you think?
For the last few weeks, we have been working hard making a composite hardtop for the Pinzgauer cab. We finally finished all the composite work and trimmed it this weekend, so we wanted to share the process sequence. It still needs painted before final installation, but it’s basically finished.
We started out by bonding a stack of extruded polystyrene foam into a large rectangular block the size of the roof. We then spent a lot of time carving, sanding, and sculpting the foam into the desired roof shape. We then released it with masking tape and packing tape so that the composite would not stick to the form plug.
The composite layup is 6 ounce woven fiberglass cloth and 4 ounce woven Kevlar cloth in epoxy resin. After all the plies were stacked, wet out, and cured, the roof was body worked and primed before being removed from the truck. After trimming away excess composite material, the roof fits very nicely on the cab. Overall we are really happy with the process and it will be a great improvement over the canvas top.
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Styrofoam Form Plug
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Finished and Shaped Plug
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Released Plug and Masked
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Dry Fitting Fiberglass Cloth
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Epoxy Saturated Fiberglass and Kevlar
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Finished Bodyworking and Primed
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Removed and Ready for Trim
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Final Trimmed
Making Custom Pinzgauer Cab Hardtop – Final Fit Check
Well, you might not be hearing from us for a little while as we regroup a bit. We sold the truck to a great experienced overland couple and they came and picked it up. You can follow along on their adventures @searchandrec on Instagram.
Last Truck Photo
We had a lot of mixed emotions as they drove away. It’s strange seeing all of our hard work leave us, but we hope they enjoy the truck as much as we have and they certainly have some cool adventures planned.
We are regrouping a bit for the moment and doing a lot of things on the home front. We have some crazy future ideas, so stay tuned. It will likely be quiet here for the next few months.
These are a few clips as we drove north along the Dempster Highway and crossed the arctic circle. We saw a lot of wildlife along the way. This particular grizzly ran ahead of us and then circled around behind us to check us out again. It ended up coming extremely close to the truck, so we decided to leave the area.
We just finished the hot water heater installation. While we were working on the water system modification, we also added the provision to winterize the water system. We made a little fitting that snaps into the jerry can quick disconnect under the sink so that compressed air can be used to blow all the water out of the system.
We ended up going with the 12V Elgena NC6-E Water Heater from Total Composites. It seems like a nice little unit, and we think it is about the right size for the intended use. It takes a little while for the water to come up to temperature, but after testing it, it seems to play nice with the solar panel system in the truck. The water heater draws around 200 Watts, so as soon as the heater kicks on, the charge controller starts charging the batteries. With 600 Watts of solar panels on the roof, the battery capacity never drops below 100% while the hot water heater is running on a sunny day. Pretty slick.
We put a quick disconnect in the shower to easily disconnect a stainless braided 5 foot long shower hose and spray head. It’s a nice length because it can reach out through the door of the habitat, so you can choose to shower indoors or outdoors. Prior to our trip, several people said that they liked to shower outside and we were a bit skeptical. However, we found that we completely preferred showering outside during our trip, so I’m not sure that we would use this setup to shower inside very often, but it’s all set up for indoor or outdoor showering with hot water now.
We’ve also been doing a lot of little things on the truck. The truck is in about the best shape it has ever been.
We are going through more of the video clips that we made along our trip. This is a timelapse of one of our camp spots in the Yukon along the Dempster Highway between Tombstone Provincial Park and the arctic circle.
Now that we have the truck all cleaned up, we have moved it back to the hangar to do a little bit of maintenance and some minor mods. Our driveway is at a terrible slant for doing some work, so it’s great to have it back in the super level hangar for a while.
The first thing on the to-do list was to change the engine oil. It’s always fun to work on this truck because everything is super accessible. I always dread changing the oil on smaller cars because you have to jack them up and crawl underneath them. Not so on our Mog! It’s great to just sit cross-legged and comfortably drain the oil and change the filter at eye level. The filter is also a super easy to service paper cartridge inside of an o-ring sealed aluminum casing. We’ve always been happy with how serviceable the truck is.
Oil Change
Oil Change
Oil Change
While I was at it, I serviced a few other things. I changed out a ball valve that I installed to turn off the auxiliary air system. The ball valve that I had previously installed was working fine, but I didn’t like the handle on it, so I replaced it with a much nicer valve. While I was down there I did a lot of other little things like inspect the air system and lubricate the battery box locks. I also got a good chance to inspect the chassis. Everything looks great. Overall, a good day of maintenance and the truck is happy.
Now that we are back, we are starting to go through little video clips that we shot during the trip. It’s kind of fun because we can relive little bits of the trip as we go through the files. We think we will probably post some video clips periodically in the coming weeks.
We shot this series of clips leaving an area that we really liked along the Dempster Highway in Yukon, Canada. This spot was a bit south of the arctic circle. We really liked this area for a lot of reasons. The geography was pretty interesting with big, treeless scree covered mountains that were in clouds most of the time. The lower elevations were covered in scrawny muskeg forests. We camped in the area several nights and the weather changed continuously while we were there.
Rainbow at this camp spot
A lot of the time it was gray with clouds moving quickly through the valley. We were also treated to some warmer weather, rain storms, and really amazing rainbows while we were there. This spot gave us some of the best wildlife viewing along the Dempster Highway. We saw many Dall sheep, grizzly bears, and falcons.
At this point along the Dempster, the truck was pretty covered in mud. We also drove this area pretty slowly keeping an eye out for wildlife and just enjoying our time. Other than being a generally rocky area, the road was pretty good.
Now that we are home, we spent quite a bit of time inspecting the truck and cleaning everything. It did great on the trip and shows very little wear. The bulk of the cleanup was just washing little bits of arctic mud out of the nooks and crannies of the exterior. The exterior cleaned up really nicely. We gave the whole habitat interior and cab a nice deep clean. We thoroughly wiped everything down, vacuumed, touched up paint, etc. The inside of the habitat looks almost exactly like it did when we finished it in the spring.
All Clean After the Trip
We were really happy with the way the Tern Overland windows handled the nasty conditions up north. They didn’t leak at all, the integrated blinds and screen were awesome, and the double thickness was super warm and cozy. We were a little bit concerned that they would get scuffed by tree branches, but it didn’t end up being as bad as we thought. They did end up with some scuffing, but this week, we tried a 3-part polishing compound that really cleaned them up. They look as good as new, so we are really happy with that.
There were a few things that we had mentally been keeping track of to work on when we got home. We cleaned, prepped, and re-painted a few areas on the undercarriage of the truck that had gotten a bit chipped by pebbles along the way (front of the fuel tank and rear fender guards). We replaced the rear muffler mount as we didn’t like how it behaved on the rougher roads; it’s much better now. We also fixed a minor clearance/rubbing spot on one of the rear fenders. Basically, the to-do list was super small considering the length of trip that we went on.
The truck is in super great shape now. Other than the hot water heater upgrade work that we are doing, the truck is ready to take on another adventure.
In the spring as we were finishing up the truck, we had some specific dates that we wanted to hit for starting our summer travels. The prime window of travel in the far north is pretty narrow, and we wanted to make sure we got there as soon as some of the river crossings opened. As our departure time approached, we had made it pretty much through our entire truck to-do list, but we decided to defer installing the hot water heater until we got back. Surprising as it might seem, we did the whole 5 month trip without a hot water heater and really didn’t miss it. We found that because we stored our water inside the habitat that it was always in the 70-75 degree F range which was quite comfortable for washing hands, face, and dishes. For showering, we would heat a specific amount of water in a kettle on our alcohol stove. We had a digital thermometer and we would heat the water to 107 degrees F. It actually worked perfectly; the water temperature was great and it really helped us ration water as we knew exactly how much we were showering with.
Now that we are back, we are finishing the hot water installation. There is a large area for the hot water heater reserved underneath the forward dinette bench behind the shower wall. From the beginning, we only planned to plumb hot water to the shower as the kitchen seemed fine with room temperature water.
SureCal 22 litre 5_81 gal Horizontal Single Coil Calorifier
Originally, we planned on installing a sailboat calorifier that would take hot coolant water from the engine and circulate it through a heat exchanger in the calorifier’s insulated tank. We liked that it would heat the water while we were driving using waste heat and that we could use our engine pre-heater to heat the water when not driving. Some of the downsides to the calorifier option is that the calorifier that we have is really larger than we would ever need; it is 5.8 gallons. Also, it has some system complexity by tying the engine coolant system to the habitat hot water system.
NC6-E 12 volt electric hot water heater
SureCal 6 Litre 1_58 gal 12V Water Heater
On the trip we were really pleased with how our solar and lithium battery combination performed. Even when the weather was cloudy for several days in a row, we used a lot of power extensively in the evening, and we had the truck in a dark ferry hold, the lowest we ever got the batteries was 88% charge state. This lead us to start thinking about using some of the battery and solar capacity to run an electric hot water heater. There are several nice, small 12-volt electric hot water heaters available now. Even at full power they only draw 200-300 watts, so with full sun on our 600 watt solar array, they wouldn’t even put a dent in the battery capacity. They are smaller, though, at only 1.5-1.6 gallons, but in a way that is nice because it would heat quickly.
So we are in comparison mode and looking at the pros and cons of the systems. Both would be great for different reasons.
Wabi-sabi Overland 