FULL TOUR - Overlanding Four Wheel Camper - Hawk Shell Pop Up Top Truck Camper

[Music] hello this is patrick with new jersey's outdoor adventures youtube channel here at turkey swamp park in monmouth county new jersey and i bumped into anthony and kathy and they have a really cool pop-up truck camper they're going to give us a tour today and explain a little bit about why they purchased this and how some of the stuff works hello and welcome to new jersey outdoor adventures hi guys how are you today how are you [Music] [Music] we're excited to uh give this tour today we used to drive a travel trailer but then we felt the need to change because we wanted the mobility and the freedom to travel across different highways and go off-road and do many things and not worry about clearances and so we decided to sell our travel trailer and we bought this from a company from california called four-wheel camper and there's really nothing like this on the east coast it pops up you can find many truck campers but they're usually fixed they won't pop up and the other thing about this that i love so much about it is that i have a half ton pickup truck like so many people have and it's so lightweight that it definitely does not exceed the payload we bought the shell model there are two models that you can many models you can buy but the shell model comes really basic and then you can build up on it and you can save yourself a lot of money or you can go with the uh the model that has everything in it but the shell model before we started building up on it weighed in at 800 pounds it's all aluminum framework the outside is aluminum has one insulation in the walls and um so so basically you know it's really lightweight even with my build out i only added maybe 250 to 300 pounds to it what i did do on the outside just just to play it safe because you know they recommend it if the truck squats down a little bit and actually it only squatted down about an inch and a half on the driver's side and maybe an inch on the passenger side so what i did was firestone ride right makes a airbag that you could put in it's very easy to install if you watch a youtube video you can put these airbags in yourself and it only took me about two hours to put in and you can adjust the right or the left separately so you can set the truck right back up to the height that it was before you had your camper in it so when you go down the road you feel no difference it tracks and rides beautifully so you're probably wondering how i get this thing on and off my truck well as you can see you have these very heavy duty aluminum lugs there are four of them on the four corners and with the camper you can purchase these jacks that attach on and it's very easy to install it just takes about five minutes to put each one on the four corners and then they have hand cranks that you could crank down to the ground or they even give you an attachment that you could put on a drill and you could speed up the dropping and lifting of it and you know there are turnbuckles on the inside which is another feature about this that you don't see the turnbuckles on the outside like some truck campers these are concealed so you're not looking at that once you take off the turnbuckles you can just crank up the legs and pick up the truck you pull up a little bit there's a little plug that you disconnect which is connected to the truck which they install when you go to the where you purchase and that plug allows all your marker lights to work and it also allows the alternator of your truck to charge your your batteries in the camper as you're driving so if you're doing a lot of driving and you're boondocking it could definitely um put your battery back up to 100 as you're driving so some of the features when you buy the hawk model complete all these are here and you'll see many more things on the side of this truck but being that this was a build out um i did these things myself and i just put what we needed for ourselves so right over here you see that i added a 20 amp service and you could just plug in into a regular outlet and this thing supplies we have inside when when we do the tour inside i'll show you that we have we only put one outlet in there because we don't use a lot of 110 but it also feeds a charger that charges my battery so when you're in a campground you could plug in and you could it'll start to charge up and build up your batteries also over here is a connection for uh city water so if you're at a campground you could just hook up a hose to here and it'll just continue to bring water in so when you're using the sink inside actually i'm sorry the hookup is here so when you use the water inside it will just continue to go you don't have to worry about it but if you're boondocking we have an electric pump so it runs off for the batteries and with that it will just run the water for you so that even if you're not connected to a water hose you can continue to get water and this is where your gray water comes out whatever you use in the sink and all will come out here generally we attach a hose to it and i generally run it into like a collapsible container or a five gallon bucket and then you can pour it out wherever you'd like but that's generally how we do it and so it's really great once you hook up to a campground with those you don't have to worry about doing anything so you come around the back over here automatically it comes with solar it's wired for solar there's two of these one of these in the back and this one over here is great if you're going to do a a matte solder where you just roll it out you can roll it out and plug it in and you could have solar or if you would prefer to put permanent solar you could put it on the roof and there's another one of these on the roof that it's ready for uh solar so that's a plus if they do that standard they put those on there for you so it's a little bit of a step up into the camper so you know we just use this and this this uh the hitch here step and it's a perfect amount just to get into there um the quality is great i'm really impressed with it just the way you know you have everything here with the like a standard camper lock and a deadbolt and the framing and everything is just it's really superior and the hold open is really incredible it's like all aluminum and it holds the door open there's no bouncing around it's really good oh and then we have a um the screen here so the screen you can also if you want to just hang out in here just like any other regular camper you could just keep the door open and get a breeze and you'll see that there's uh a lot of screens in here when you open it up it's really great another thing that you get even with the shell model is they provide all the curtains so you can see for your privacy these are all here this comes even with the basic shell model and you could just totally have privacy at night or if you're just going in there to use the uh the porta potty or whatever it might be you can have your privacy we have another window here and then um this is just an exterior light that they give you standard there are six latches going around the camper so as you're driving it's important that you latch each one very simple unlatch your latch all six and then you pop it up and you'll see as we pop it up how easy that is these pistons here aid in the pop-up of the camper because of these pistons and some pop-ups have them inside where they're in your way but not on this they're on the outside so they don't get in your way and it makes it so easy that a child or an elderly person could pop this lid up probably with one hand take you inside and i'm just gonna show you how it pops up and then i'm gonna let my wife give you the tour of everything else inside all right so once you have all your latches popped which is very important you come in and you have a deadbolt here that you need to unlatch that's important so then you push on this piece of wood and that's how simple that is then you come to this end and they they installed uh a push board here so you don't have to climb on top of the bed to push the other end so you just open that snap and you push up and push with the push board and then latch it up and you're done so that's how simple it is to pop it up they have these uh bungee cords so when you collapse it down it'll pull the fabric in so you don't have to go around when you're leaving the campsite and make sure everything's tucked in these bungee cords do the job they're really great so it's a great thought but once you get in here you can take them off so now it's my turn uh come on in and i'll give you a tour so as anthony said this was a shell model before there was none of the cabinetry that you see here or the table that was something that he added on and built and as he was doing it he was asking me what i need so i was very specific about my needs with this i wanted a table that could be set up this way or very easily turns this way it's also easy to take out so you just kind of take this out okay and then the this comes up and comes off and then we could drop the table in like most campers the table drops down and then we can lay our cushions down and we have kind of a couch to sit on this could store easily under here and then we can sit here and just have a couch we have some storage here this was part of the original build so we put some things in here my husband built this little extra cabinet keeps the snacks nice and close here you can see that the curtains again standard with all all um four-wheel campers window slides open this is the emergency exit slides open and closed what i like about this too is we have a lot of ability here this is called a thermal pack this is an addition and this gives us the ability to camp in colder weather and maintain some of the comfort inside this is the privacy this is our window and this is our screen so we just tuck that in and then we have windows there are four of these two over the bed one two and then we also have this one over here over the sink area that can also come down provides a great ventilation also an extra add-on are the fantastic fans these are reversible so you can exhaust or you can draw in and we have two of them here so we can open this up nice and quiet we were down in virginia in the middle of july and uh temperatures were temperatures were pretty high between these two things we were more than comfortable without an air conditioner this is our bed it slides out the cushions come in and once both cushions are in i pulled the bedding over and we have a queen-size bed um east to west side side um you can also uh opt for a king size bed there'll be additional cushions there but all we needed was a queen size countertop is something my husband added on and i wanted a sink so that we could have fresh water even if we're boondocking it's connected to a pump and the water drains out where the gray water would be also i was very specific about uh storage so we have lots of storage in here this isn't even loaded up for a big camp this is just what we leave in here um but it does uh i have a lot of storage here i have two bins it helps keep everything nice and organized on this side we have access to the water tanks and the water pump we put a tray in here just in case there was a little um over spill so just in other words another little safety feature since you know everything is wood i have a little extra storage down here this is where i keep my pans and on this side is all the electrical but again trying to just keep things nice and neat and organized the batteries two um two batteries in there that's my husband's deal i don't know what they're called huh they give you one when you order the model and you can opt to have them put the second one in or you can put it in yourself later we chose to put it in later and then this is also additional storage here this is where we usually just keep our clothes when we're hooked to shore power we have a 110 outlet and these are upping our things this is our battery this tells us the the amount of battery power we have also right here i asked my husband to build something like this it's keep toiletries in there anything handy we'll throw stuff in there when we're traveling this way it's not flying all over the counter but as you can see with this i have a lot of counter space i did not want a stove installed inside the camper because i wanted the ability to cook outside so all we did was purchase a coleman stove and we just stored in this extra storage space back here with the propane tanks we take it out we can cook on top or not then right here is where we have our chest refrigerator okay so we just uh you know we realized that we you know we were gonna just you know again everything is streamlined here so this and um this is a superior to a open door refrigerator it keeps things cooler a little extra storage here we have our buddy heater tucked back here [Music] and i also have some additional storage under this seat and this is where we would keep tools larger objects and i don't know if you happen to recognize that but that is kitty litter and we have a emergency because that would not be my first preference an emergency toilet if we were boondocking it takes bags and the kitty litter is in there ready to go so it allows us to it allows us to use it in an emergency if we need to if we're boondocking you know it gives us that option and we have uh also here standard of course and critically important is a um a fire extinguisher and our smoke detector which is also a carbon monoxide detector this is a retractable seat backrest so you can make it another bed so you can actually have a third person sleep across here once you lay the cushions flat and it has i just bought these ratcheting like a lawn chair and you can make six positions so where'd you source most of the materials from did you just go to a local home center and most of the materials like the wood and local home center but a lot of these crazy things like all these latches and ratcheting hinges amazon you know you just go on there and you just start putting it in and it's amazing what you can find i find the hardest part about sourcing some of these things you might need to build something is figuring out what it's called you know you know what you want in your head but you just don't know how to search for it did you run into that type of trouble yeah a little bit of it and i just tried describing what i wanted to do and it brought me closer and closer to what i was looking for on the search and eventually you know it would i'd see something and i'd be like oh that's what it's called so yeah you just you have to be in a ballpark and it'll help you to find what you're looking for do you have any advice for our viewers in regards to if they wanted to order one for themselves you went through the process and you know the company was located other side of the country how did you make your decision on getting something like this versus some of the other ones on the market well we um uh we were uh using a lot of reviews uh listening to people who actually owned different there are there are more than just one type of pop-up camper and again most of them are located on the west coast um over landing seems to be a um a trend so we started just watching youtube channels and just listening to people and then we started looking at the reviews and then my husband has a very good knowledge of mechanics and carpentry so you know he was applying that knowledge to okay i want a seamless roof i know why i know why i want aluminum as opposed to fiberglass i know why i want you know certain things so just a lot of looking at reviews make sure make sure you don't make a hasty decision um because it's not really something that you could um you know just be like oh i'll return it on amazon you know it's uh it's it's something you should be careful with also um uh you know one of the things um that we were we were looking at too was the company's history um uh four-wheel campers have a very good reputation um a very high rating um and um we did find out that they do have because you know we're we're in new jersey um there is a dealer uh overland uh midline overland in pennsylvania they also have a location in new hampshire and they just opened up another location in north carolina so they do have them i guess the um the company is seeing that there's um there's a need for it on the on the east coast as well so if you had any warranty issues you could bring it to one of those places because on the east coast this is not very popular but we wanted something because i have a half ton truck and getting a truck camper that was solid was not an option i would have needed to upgrade to either a uh three-quarter ton or or a full-time truck two-ton one-ton truck so this was perfect for if you have a half-ton truck the other thing too was the for us it was a big issue with the height issue and that was why we went to this company in california because nothing available this way even lance campers is not going to reduce your height we had a travel trailer that was almost 11 feet tall and it limited us onto certain highways but even the lance camper would do the same and so we found it with this company we could do that so we were very pleased with dealing with them and if you have any problems you can go to one of these local places and they'll service any issues and they were super great too dealing with them um couldn't have been couldn't have been nicer uh so available if you had any questions or concerns and that was important to us too we want to be able to contact them if we needed to now i see the benefits of having a pop top type truck camper a lot of people there's lots of pros and cons about hard side soft side some parks might not let you be there because the bears because of the soft side but the biggest benefit is if you live in a community that has association a lot of them don't like your parking on your property and some of them might not have availability at a storage facility so would something like this fit in the garage yes actually we we do live in an association and there is a restriction about even what you could park in your driveway so well though we when it's popped down and it's on our truck we leave it on the truck sometimes for most of the summer and we've never had an issue because it really looks not much different than a cap on your truck like maybe a heavy duty cap so they won't give you prob we've never had a problem in our community but to drive the whole vehicle into the garage you need to have maybe a little bit of a higher it's about a seven foot height clearance when this is down so i think your average garage door opening is about seven feet so to drive in with it it may be a problem unless you have an eight foot door but then it takes the whole process to take this thing off and drop it down on the dolly and push it into my garage and put my tailgate back on and my backflip tailgate cover takes just about an hour so it's really um we found it to be good for us and because this doesn't have wheels and you don't tow it there's no sales tax on it if you buy it out of state it's an accessory to your vehicle so you do not pay sales tax if that state doesn't have sales tax and there's no annual registration fee and in some states they require rvs and travel trailers to get a yearly inspection and you wouldn't have to get this inspected so i could see the benefits of some and there's three of us are sitting in here there's plenty of room yeah if it was pouring rain outside we'd still be comfortable we wouldn't be miserable that's that was a big thing for me um they do have they do have many um and i think more readily available um uh attachments that would be on the back of a pickup truck but were strictly a tent when it opened up it was it really was so there were two things that i did i i really wanted i wanted to be off the ground for various reasons you know little critters visiting you in the middle of night um and i also didn't want uh rain to be a problem i and we were in this with a with a heavy rain and it just lulled me to sleep i didn't not one drop in here and it was it was great it was great and uh we we do want to do some some off-roading we want to boondock we're looking to go into state parks and go off the beaten path a little bit so yeah i wanted something hard i didn't want to bear lake visiting me either but one of the other advantages financially um patrick was talking about uh is first of all the tolls when we pull a travel trailer i know especially in new jersey they really hit you hard it's like four times the normal toll when you're pulling a travel trailer but with this the toll is exactly as just a passenger vehicle so you save a lot of money on tolls and also on fuel economy um i was getting 12 miles per gallon with my travel trailer and i'm getting 17 with with this maybe just a little wind drag in the front i'm still looking into maybe putting some kind of a spoiler to cut that down and try to bump up maybe to 18 but my truck normally gets about 20 so it's not really that bad i like that they have the option that you could just buy the shell essentially and build it up yourself because there's a lot of people that do homemade type rvs and there really is no financing available if they need the funds to come up with to do to build out or a resale value when you think about it you build your own when you go to sell it there's no way for someone to look it up in a book or someone to get a loan on it being that this is a production model that you just finished inside it has a value that someone could look up and value it towards other ones that are a market plus someone could get a loan on it because it is an rv and it it has an rva you know seal on it and um potentially insurance too now because this is on your vehicle i guess you just got a rider on your existing policy to make sure it's covered yeah yeah very much like a cap or a or like the backflip or something so i know this is a 2019 and cost might have changed since then what would someone expect to at least start out price for one as a shell with a couple accessories versus a complete build now okay so this shell model in 2019 was uh just under 11 000. um and then you could add on to there if you like the shell and you just want to add the heater and the propane and the cooktop you could do that or if you wanted to get the whole pork model that's already fitted out with pretty much everything you need that one was closer to 19 000. um then you can add on from there too if you want to add solar panels to the roof or you know there are a bunch of other things that you can start to add to it so it can go up from there so but i would say that you know it's good like we went with the shell because i bought it for 11 000 and then for 2 000 i brought it to where it is now and so i think we're ahead of the game in that sense and it's six and a half foot living space by seven foot wide possibly um yeah like six and a half and then you get the cab overhang which adds another there's a pretty generous amount of space for the sort of amount of money you know it's uh if you think about a travel trailer in this size range with to get this living accommodation you're spending at least 20 grand to get something good quality 30 to 40 000 to get something better quality i see a lot of value in this one of the things too that really struck us when we were looking into it was how it holds its value um there was a used uh hawk model that we actually looked at you know we were deciding do we want to do a build out or if first of all to find a used one was almost impossible people don't get rid of them but if you were able to find one this one was several years old and it was actually only maybe a couple hundred dollars less than a brand new build so and the man's gonna the man got it he got he didn't get it from us but he got it you got a really good deal here i'm very happy that you took some time aside from your uh type that you're you're doing to give us a tour for new jersey outdoor adventures uh this is patrick thanks for watching the video today please comment if you have any questions about it we'll make sure that we you know get there and try to answer them for you and we'll see you soon thanks thanks for taking the time

Channel: New Jersey Outdoor Adventures

Views: 263,140

Rating: 4.8751812 out of 5

Keywords: homemade, diy, custom, full tour, camper tour, four wheel camper, hawk, slide in camper, truck camper, camper shell, camping, rv, trailer, 1/2 ton, half ton, pickup, truck, overland, overlanding, drive, beach, living, full time, rv tours, pop-up, pop up, pop top, canned ham, teardrop, nobo, off road

Id: 78na-3iWc38

Length: 29min 49sec (1789 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020