Hi all! I stumbled upon this site quite recently, though I've been planning a DIY motorhome on a Toyota chassis for about a year now. I used to live out of a BMW wagon, but somewhere between having to sleep with my contact lens case to keep it from freezing, to getting stuck on a gently sloped, slightly slushy driveway, it became bleeding obvious that the vehicle and its (non-)amenities were restricting where I could go and stay. But I got hooked on the vehicle-dwelling lifestyle in general, so I decided to do it right.
Here's the wagon, which was a down-to-sheetmetal restomod project over a year or so back in its day:
After months of intensive searching, I bought myself a 1981 Toyota 4x4 longbed, and here I am deep in drawing up blueprints for building my own motorhome on the back:
Why DIY when I can find a Dolphin or Chinook, a factory 4x4 if I look hard enough, or convert to 4x4 with some wrenches and a welder? Cost on one hand, fussiness on the other, and "for the fun of it" thrown in for good measure. My plans are to make it just long enough to sleep, just tall enough to sit up, just wide enough to fit a bed, a heating, and a cooking stove. It's more of a "life-box" than a motor home, but living out the back of a station wagon gave me perspective on just how much space I really need. Turns out it's not a lot, less than even the smallest commercially available RV. Less space means less weight and aerodynamic drag, which I'd be happy to transfer into improved fuel economy, given that I drove about 20k miles in the first 12 months of car-camping. I've also increasingly found myself going off-road places where a big RV simply wouldn't fit. Making a 3-point turn on a logging road is hard enough with a small pickup!
Seems that most people on here have Sunraders, Chinooks, Winnebagos... mostly big and factory-made stuff. Is there anyone here who's built their own on a cab/chassis platform?
How much and what kind of thermal insulation do the commercial motorhomes have, and how satisfactory do you find it? I'm thinking that 3.5" (the width of a 2x4) of rigid foam, maybe a bit more on the roof, and some heavy curtains over the cab windows, ought to be enough? My heat source is going to be a tiny woodstove, either a conventional one, or a rocket stove. I'd like to keep it above visible-breath temperature inside when it's as low as -30 outside (I'm definitely not a snowbird ). I hear a lot about propane heaters... is anyone here using a wood-fired stove?
