Category: Truck Build

Now that the truck is home, its time for a plan. I measured the truck and made another revision to the plan. It looks like it should work.

The cabover will be a bed for our daughter, and a cabinet on the passenger side. There will be a small dinette on the drivers side, a crawl through to the cab in the middle and the kitchen on the passenger side. The back will have ski storage accessible from the outside, and a bathroom and bed for us in the back corner.

The truck arrived as a box truck, one light in the center, some plywood on the walls and some tie down tracks. Not very RV like.

Notice the trash can? Yeah the roof had a bog hole, well a piece of plywood covering a big hole, it leaked, a lot. That became the first order of business. We had decided not to do a roof top AC unit, the truck is already about 12′ tall, adding more height didn’t work for us.  So for ventilation we decided on two MaxxFans. This gives us one above the kitchen to help with cooking venting, and one over the bed. They can both blow in or out, hopefully this works!

Fans ordered and arrived, time to find a dry day to install.

Next order of business is to strip the walls down, and strip the back of the cab so I can cut the pass through in!

Where to start, we got into this mess when we looked at renting an RV to go ski bumming in.  As I am sure many of you have found out, renting an RV is extraordinarily expensive! So Instead we purchased out own! We both volunteered with the local Search and Rescue group when we were younger and just happened across the old communications van on CL. It was a 4×4 converted small Winnebago.

 

Aptly named “the Beast”, it was loud, it was bouncy and it was awesome. We took it skiing all over BC, WA, OR, ID and MT. We had so many good times in that truck, but it was big, it had some water issues when we got it that we had band aided to keep it alive, and it was time to move on.

I had half heatedly been looking at cab chassis trucks, to build a replacement on. I was looking F450 and 550’s mostly as they are the most common “medium” duty trucks, lots of fleet trucks available. I had made drawings of a layout using a cab over and a 13′ floor, and a box built by a local company, but it was almost prohibitively expensive.

That is when I happened across an add for this, out new truck, on CL. I was searching under some obscure title for box truck when it popped up.

It was nearly perfect, we needed a crew cab, our daughter has gotten big enough to not need a car seat which made us not feel so good about her sitting at the dinette in the old truck. It had a body from the same company I was looking at getting one done at, but it didn’t have a pass thorough. It was also a foot shorter than I had designed, I redrew the plans and it seemed to still work, just a little tighter. It seemed to run well and had a newer motor put in it at some point. The deal was struck and it was brought home.

Now the real work begins. We need to sell the old truck, and get the new one usable as fast as possible!

Next Installment: Make a Plan