Month: May 2024

It was nice to see many of you at Overland Expo West.

It’s been really great to take the camper out lately. In total, Yvonne and I have spent 20 nights out with it, and it is so much better now with the final interior and finished pop top. It’s really comfortable and cozy for the two of us, and all of the interior storage makes everything stay nice and organized, and that keeps it from feeling like car camping.

There is so much room now with the pop-top up. It makes a huge difference in comfort during the day, when changing clothes, when cooking meals, and it was great to sleep with the upper windows zipped open on hot nights down in the Sonoran Desert. That being said, a few of the nights at Expo were a little cool, so we experimented with sleeping with the top down for those nights, and it was cozy and warm that way. We are really happy with the bed being down below and how it gives us the option of sleeping and sitting with the top down or top up depending on the weather.

The camper systems work great so far, so I think we are ready for more trips. It feels strange having the build “finished” now, and I’m finding myself in an odd mental transition period between build and travel. We need to start pulling together some travel plans.

The last two weeks have been a bit of a blur in the shop with a ton of progress. Long story short: the Jeep camper is done! The last two big things that I finished were the water system and the new lightweight carbon fiber bed platform. The interior has a really nice feel with a “daytime mode” couch arrangement that converts into a nice bed that is way more comfortable than before (with backpacking air pads under the Hest mattress).

In other big news, Yvonne and I put the camper on the scales yesterday before going on our first test trip with the finished camper. The new curb weight with a full tank of fuel and everything finished is 570 lb under the gross weight rating, so I’m pretty happy with the current vehicle weight. With Yvonne and I both in it, that should give us about 250 lb of capacity for all of our provisions. We’ll do an all up weigh-in with us and our provisions in it as we head out on our next trip.

Our test trip last night went really well. It was really comfortable and nice to finally have all the creature comforts working. Note in the interior photo the little red light on the oven means that our tacos were being cooked.

Among other things, I’m happy to report that I finished the pop-top cloth sewing and installation last week. Sewing the cloth was a good bit of work, but I learned a lot, and I’m happy with how it turned out. Having the cloth finished makes the interior feet a lot larger.  There is 7’3” standing height in the back, and at 6’2” tall, I can stand as far forward as the middle of the habitat.  With the top down, you can comfortably sit and the pop top cloth bunches up nicely with straps along the top of the wall and doesn’t get in the way of sitting.

The Sailrite sewing machine that I used was great, and I like the Top Notch 9 cloth that I selected.  In the end, I decided to use 10mm molded zippers for the window closures and fine no-see-um mesh for the screens.  I cut all of the cloth with a DIY hot knife (I made a blade tip for a normal soldering iron), so the cut edges of the cloth are fused and won’t unravel.

I attached the cloth to the aluminum angles that I previously installed on the camper and roof using marine grade hook and loop.  I then added (with Yvonne’s help on the inside) small stainless steel bolts every ~10 inches as a secondary attachment.

With the weight of the finished roof assembly, the gas struts feel really nice and have a very solid feel when the roof is up, but the force to close the roof is reasonable.

The finished pop top cloth with hook and loop, zippers, and screens only weighs 4.7 lbs. Not too bad.