We’ve actually been tossing around the idea to build our own truck camper for a few years now really.  We’ve dismissed it as being ridiculous because you can just buy these things, so why build it…  We’ve tried other vehicles and ways to camp, but seem to keep coming back to wanting a dry place to cook and sleep that can be easily heated but isn’t too heavy for the truck at a price we want to afford.  Last time I looked you can barely get a used 4 wheel camper for $14000.  That’s more than I want to pay, so we’re putting in the elbow grease instead!

We talked about a hard side pop up, but decided against it because the cabover part would be too thick.  (and also ugly. and heavy. and terrible.) That leaves us with a canvas pop up similar to the land rovers and VW busses.  It’s a pretty standard way to go about business actually.

Despite actually getting paid to draw things in autocad all day long, I do actually still enjoy designing things on the computer.  The way that I designed our little camping trailer was to model it in Google Sketchup to get the basic shape and layout quickly and easily nailed down and then to transfer the model to Autocad to get actual dimensions and cuts.  I plan on doing the same process with the truck camper.  After the obligatory creation of a new board on Pinterest and the associated pinstorm of ideas from the internet, I slowly worked my way through the rough shape and size of the camper that would fit on the truck and not be too large.  We compared various layouts for the inside of the camper, but eventually decided to only have a single sleeping space in the cabover section. The truck is too small for a third person to sleep in the camper.  We ended up with the dinette section at the forward bulkhead, galley to starboard and the fridge and storage to port. No real reason other than it felt right to have the cooking stuff on the left. Maybe it’s because jason always drives and he always cooks so all his shit goes over on that side?

We’ve been refining this model for a few weeks now as we narrowed down what to actually make this thing out of. (fun fact: two engineers on the same project over-engineer the everloving crap out of it!) One thing I learned is that the big square storage boxes at the back of the campers to fill in the space behind the wheel wells? That space is big on fullsize trucks… on our little Colorado it’s only like 6-8″ wide… so no need to bother building anything into there… I guess that saves us some time. We’re still arguing about the best way to get the roof to pop up.

Sometimes the simplest programs are the easiest. Here’s good ole’ microsoft Paint showing us what the camper is probably going to look like on the back of the truck.

So yeah, I know I only included a few screen shots of the camper.  I have 3 full 3d renderings, an autocad file in 3d, and an autocad cut plan.  😉 I didn’t think y’all needed to see all of that. Let’s just sum this up by saying that I’ve gone as far as I can in theory… it’s time to finally make a decision on the material and get to building if we’re actually gonna do it!