The next step in this camper project is to actually start on the side walls and cabover.  We had a little more prep to do before we could dive right in.

We started by laminating strips of foam together to form a beam.  We’re going to cut it in half and use it as a support for where the main body of the camper transitions to the cabover part.  This area will see the most direct loading, so we wanted to make sure it was structurally sound! 4″ of foam should cover it…

It ended up fitting exactly like i wanted it to! 🙂 everything fits and matches the drawings and the truck.  We were worried about cabover height.  I didn’t want too much space between the truck and the bottom of the camper because that looks pretty bad. Overall I’m super pleased with how it’s turning out!

We did change our design a little bit.  Instead of having the cabover just come straight out, we’re going to taper it over the front a little bit so it looks a little sleeker. Similar to the Earth Cruiser GZL. (That’s way out of our budget…)

So we started by cutting the cabover floor at a taper… but it turns out that “measure once, cut twice” was the name of the game. So we had to glue our cut back on and try again tomorrow. Overall for our first major measuring fail, it was a pretty easy fix.

We cut a lot of large panels of foam and have an equivalent size pile of fiberglass.  It was the end of the day and Jason and I were in the garage staring at that pile and both thinking “I really don’t want to do that”… so we didn’t. Needless to say, we will be laying up a LOT of fiberglass tomorrow.