Thread: Spudboy's super-sized camper replacement for a 130 - and no it's not a Unimog!

Progress for the last fortnight mainly revolves around ablutions.

The toilet is in, and we now have a hand-basin in the bathroom with running hot and cold water.

I can't remember if I have posted anything about the toilet before, but it is a composting toilet, with no chemicals. It is really a yachting toilet, but I thought it would work well in a camping situation too.



More details on the toilet here: Composting_Toilet

The basin sits in a stainless steel bench, which incorporates a bin. Because the bathroom door is by default open unless you are using it, it was a good place to locate the foodscraps & etc bin. It's easy to reach from the kitchen bench and because the toilet has a permanent ventilation fan sucking air out of the bathroom, any bin smells will go the same route.

This is how it got fitted to the wall:


And the finished product, with a boating sink from Whitworths, and a bin from Ikea:


More details in this blog post: Bathroom-basin-shelf-bin

I also fiddled around with the rear mudguards, as I felt they were too close to the tyres when articulating. Turns out I probably should have left things well alone, as my estimate of 2 or 3 hours per side to do the mods turned into about 8 hours per side. Funny how a simple looking job can turn to poop! In the end it was a good thing to do, as I now have much better clearance, but at the time I wondered why I bothered.


Blog post is here Improving-rear-wheel-guard-clearance if you want more details

If nothing else the mod you did to guard actually Looks a lot better, not that looks count for much on these trucks. I might do similar to my Iveco as my factory guards are actually bent and twisted under my body .

Is that because you have fitted larger tyres? Or did they get bent when you were travelling around?

neither, when I originally made my body I had the guards off and mounted the subframe about 10mm lower than where the top of the guards were supposed to be, ( I'm not too good at measuring) when I refitted the guards I realise they would not fit so mounted them with a twist inward at the top, to get them to fit. No one has noticed but it looks wrong to me, now Im motivated to fix it, esp as Im about to be going up a size in tyres again.

I take it your fabrication skills are coming along? I'm impressed with all the different things you manage to make, like bend up that bench from stainless. It looks great!

Thanks! Fabrication is getting better, but still not perhaps what you'd call "professional quality"

Am getting better at TIG welding, and bending stuff up, but on every job there seems to be some minor item that I've overlooked or not thought about. I guess you get that a lot when you are prototyping.

We took the truck for a 'long weeked' down to the beach. It was 4 days of doing pretty much nothing at all.

The truck went well. It was the first time I've driven it in sand, and it did that very well. Initially I got partially bogged because the tyres were at road pressures and I was in rear wheel drive only (with no diffs locked). It was fine on the flat stuff, but as soon as I pointed it up to a sandhill, it went no further.

So - Lock the center diff; Lock the rear diff; drop the pressures from 65PSI down to 25PSI; out she climbed, no dramas. I left it like that for the next 4 days, and it laughed at everything we threw at it. I didn't lock the front diff as we never needed it.

This was our camp:


The view out the window in the morning:


More details and fuel stats and so on here : Four-days-on-the-beach

The shower and toilet were great successes. The shower has a strong flow and when it cools down a little, as time goes by, you just top it up with a bit more hot water and off you go for another 4 or 5 minutes. Brilliant! The composting toilet was excellent. Easy to use and zero smells.


I also took a new toy with me - a little Phantom Vision 2+ drone. It was a lot of fun! See some of the footage we took here:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2j5849CpmJ8"]Yorke Peninsula Camping in MAN 4x4 Truck/Camper - YouTube[/ame]


Watch in YouTube to see it in a bigger size (or try full screen mode). It was filmed in 1080p, but when uploaded to YouTube it seems to be very low resolution, so it's a bit blocky, but you'll get the idea. Still working on getting my head around video stuff.....

Awesome, Love it when a plan comes together !!

(how did you switch to left hand drive at the end of the video.)