The idea of this vehicle is to be able to take a camper
anywhere on this planet.
It needs to be able to get down these steep trails
that you could do in a normal off-road Tacoma.
It's not one of those projects that you're just bolting some stuff on
or putting a camper shell on the back of a pickup truck bed.
I mean it needs to be able to climb a mountain.
You can see all the x bracing and added tubes that we put in.
On the outside as you can see we have started putting some paneling on.
We put these guys in here
to unite the shell and the body and make it as one
so when it does go to twist they both twist together.
Well we have got a lot done on this camper.
It probably doesn't look substantially different
other than we have the roof skinned,
we have the rounded corners skinned,
which is a process as well
and then we have you know kind of a body line coming through here
and getting these to all line up and stuff takes a little bit of time and patience.
We're trying to make these fit on here well
which are the stock Tacoma fender flares.
We wanted to keep the width in the middle of the vehicle
narrow it up for the trails on the top and the bottom
obviously for tree avoidance I guess you would say.
There's been ups and downs.
Sometimes we'll go a couple of weeks
where everything seems to be going just perfect
and then other times it just seems like
oh god we got to go back to step one again.
Just last week we had the whole roof done, skinned
all the panels rolled over the side
so that the other panels would meet up to them
and we decided to put a moon roof in it.
We kind of put this little bubble up top right here
kind of give us a little bit more head room
and so we're going to do a lexan center, kind of like a sunroof.
It'll pop up I think six or seven inches above the roof.
This ended up being a pretty good package,
we'll make a gas door
but then you also want to obviously separate gas fumes
and potential dangers from the shell of the truck.
We were able to package two batteries under the hood of the car.
It's a real benefit because it gives us space for storage inside the camper.
This was probably one of the most labor-intensive,
time intensive pieces to make on this thing so far.
I mean i feel like we're literally building a mobile house
and those are kind of two things I haven't ever built
is a mobile house.
Today the paint chips arrived from PPG.
This is the first version of them, there's three of the colors that I'm sold on right now.
I love the way they look together.
Once i could wrap my head around what the outside was going to look like
all the way down to the rendering,
then it becomes let's try and visualize something
that is uh pretty darn cool for the interior.
The floor of this will be covered in a teak sauna style wood
aesthetically it looks really good and it goes well
with what I'm thinking for the interior colors inside the vehicle.
In this kind of a build, usable space is everything.
This door right here had so much nuance to it, that probably,
what would you say Brad?
150 hours into this door maybe?
The hard part is having two different angles
it was never a flat door in the back
they were always going to shape it to the back.
Well that shape makes it really hard for things to open and shut.
Originally we thought it was gonna be a little bit easier than what it was
but we didn't know it was gonna be that tight.
The mechanical side of it
I see as not a whole bunch of unknowns
and that's what makes me happy.
We went bold with this vehicle.
Everything that I see says we made the right choice.
Definitely a one-off,
hopefully you're in another section where somebody's like
did you see that Tacoma over there in the Toyota booth?
Like that's..
I'm hoping for that reaction