Cute and Simple DIY Teardrop Camper Tour

hello i'm benjamin and welcome to the magic school bus or as my wife likes to call it our first born child we made this teardrop sort of kind of trailer uh camper uh about three years ago when we were graduating from college we did it in our last semester of our senior year while finals were happening and all that stuff and right before we got married promptly after graduating we took this bad boy out on a on a ride uh all the way down to california from from st louis to california uh and plenty of national parks in between it was a fun time uh the what you should know before we begin this tour in earnest is that this isn't made to be the perfect camper it was made to get a couple things done it was made to be functional it was made to be cheap and it was made to be within our capabilities am i forgetting anything else there honey i believe that's it yeah so as long as it checked those three boxes as long as it worked and as long as it did what we needed it to do that's the way it is so if there's if there's anything that you see right off the bat that doesn't look normal well that's because we didn't need it to be perfect we just needed to be worked we were college students right this is the this is the ramen trailer equivalent but but boy does it really get the job done so the first thing you probably want to know is what's it what's it on and you see this all the time with diy teardrop camper trailer things it's on a 4x8 harbor freight trailer foldable doesn't fold now there's no storing this away nice and nice and easy but this worked just fine for for our needs uh had no problem towing it on the highways we repacked the bearings with grease with fresh grease and it's been holding up just fine um the frame itself is a wooden stud frame we used one by fours i think there's some insulation in there we used plywood skin to kind of hold it together probably quarter inch but and it's been three years but i think that's what it was um the door that you see here is a uh not your typical camper door it's got uh it comes from a rv this would be an rv storage thing and it's actually not supposed to open sideways but it opens up so we put a camper door in here because these things only actually have doors on or door handles on one side because you're not really expecting anybody to have to open a storage door from the inside but we we retrofitted it with this have a little bit of wood and some caulking in there does the trick for us we can lock it from the inside we can we can use it from the inside works perfectly come around this way and i'll show you oh we've got electrical hookups on the camper uh just simple oh i can't remember what it is the lowest one that you can plug into at a campsite okay so not the big kind of fancy adapter you need for it just plug it right in and it works and we've got a socket outside we've got a socket and sockets in the kitchenette and we've got sockets on the outside here you see in this window this window came off of an rv that i picked out of a scrap yard uh me and a buddy went out there and just took a couple windows off of an rv and bought them for probably like 20 bucks or something like that um they worked just fine went in there no problem coming around to this side you'll see the same thing we opted to not do a door on this side just because we're trying to save on costs window is fine we can hop over each other that works for us come around here and you will see this is this is the place where we will enter our kitchenette area um we've got these little latches to make sure that our our seal here that we used uh which is a uh i think it's something you get from the store uh like lowe's or home depot for like repairing your car door it can put a seal on there so we just put it put that on there put some silicone in to make sure the seal was nice and good and strap it down not too tight let's strap it down with these guys that we made and then this you might notice this shape it's the same same shape that's on our door we took the latch off of the storage door uh and used that for the latch of our uh that kitchenette because nobody needs to get out of the kitchen this is just a one-sided thing both of them lock so there is some security with that and that's great this up here is a piano hinge uh this is uh doesn't actually have any uh metal like mechanisms that you would expect for a regular hinge um it's actually one piece of plastic that's that is meant to go back and forth uh and it's waterproof so that was a real big big plus for us it's been working fine for the three years that we've had it uh up top you will see we've got a vent here we don't have a fantastic fan in there that was a little more out of our price range uh we've got a vent there but that works fine there's a fan up in there that we rigged to battery you'll see that inside and then also we've got this uh sunroof that was a bit of a trick because this is actually off of the back of an old truck pulled that out of the scrapyard too um it's not actually made for water being directly pooling on top of this we had some leaking issues but we resolved those with a little bit of extra silicone and just making sure that we dry it off after a hard rain yeah that's pretty much it for the outside honey unless you see anything else we've got this we've got this i didn't point this out uh the jack stand out here i can't remember where we got it but it it goes up and down and rolls sideways once you're on the campsite and when you're trying to tow it so yeah good leveling so all told this thing weighs about 800 pounds which is really nice because just about anything that has any kind of towing capacity you can do it can tow it we use my our parents well my parents mini van to tow it all the way across the country and had no problems the other cool thing about it being that light and it being this small is that when you get to a campsite i mean if you're not very good at backing in i mean i had no problems of course um but if you're not very good at backing it in you can just pop the the whole thing off the hitch and then just move it around yourself you can just lift up on it and it's pretty easy and it'll it'll roll no problem so yeah that was that was very beneficial uh when going to campsites and getting things just to the right place where they needed to go okay so the other thing that you might be wondering and maybe one of the most important things is how is this whole thing waterproof right we made it out of we made it out of wood and would expose the elements as one not waterproof and two can can rot because of the water the answer is we did a technique called poor man's fiberglass it has been used on making canoes and stuff and it's been used for even making waterproof aircraft like for wings and stuff uh way way back in the day and and what you do is you'll have some sort of medium some sort of fibrous thing for our case we use bed sheets you'll attach it to whatever you've got and then you'll paint over it many layers so what we did was we took bed sheets from a hotel that was nearby where we were working uh asked them if they had any old nasty bed sheets we washed them we then uh put them in the right size and put them in these places you can kind of see the seams where we overlapped them and we stuck them to the wood using a mixture of 50 50 water and tight bond heavy duty wood glue and we stuck them there and once they're stuck we paint them gallons and gallons of paint we used white then we used a a bunch of black until it was uh totally covered and until you can't really even tell the you can't even really see the the grain of the sheets it's just it's just paint um and then our final color we did we did this yellow to end it all up so let's let's open it up and check out what's going on inside shall we hey so inside the trailer pretty much the only thing we do in here is sleep um so this mattress is really quite comfortable we just got it from walmart uh our key things were it had to be foam so we could cut it down so actually this the length of this mattress is a full size full length the width is a little smaller than a full but bigger than a twin um and you can actually see with with the design of this trailer um with this like out shooting part we've actually like extended the the bed part so if you come on back in here um you can see if i if i pull away this um we just put this pillow in place to kind of like hide that that incline and then we can shove our pillows up here so we get even more length and you can see that it goes far um this will be underneath the kitchen um and so let me show you my height all right i am what am i i'm like five four okay and so usually i have another pillow right here and i've got plenty of room down here and there's also plenty of room for like two people right because my husband and i took this out on our honeymoon all right let's see oh so this is our moon roof also known as the sunroof but we only use it at night because we don't spend much time in here otherwise um i fitted everything with uh reflective covering so we also have these coverings for the windows and then all of this fabric matches um so that we have curtains so all of our curtains are here that we can we can open up and they are tied in or hooked in at the top and the bottom so that nothing's really moving uh um while we're moving while we're traveling and let's see we can get these windows to open and stuff like that so that's kind of nice at night we can get across breeze and the same thing is happening over here let's see we've got some led lights here which uh are not very bright right now but at night is it's just the perfect amount of light that we need to um just like get ready for bed i don't know we could like read in here change do what we need to okay so this is the vent that we have at the top which my husband showed you from the outside and it's just a just a twist up and then we um we put a little usb run fan in here and uh so we can have air either blowing in or out depending which way we face it and then this is just hooked up to a usb so when we don't have power when we're not plugged in then we can just put a usb battery pack on here and then run the fan and it would run all night without any problems let's see and then up here we've got some storage we would mostly put our clothes up here right now you can see the reflective gear from the windows we've got this nice little almost like a a nightstand kind of desk area um this is where i would put our like my glasses or our water bottles phones and everything um which was really nice because we've got this outlet over here in case we need to charge anything at night and then this this here is probably one of our favorite parts but you will not see this on any uh commercially available trailer but this is this is our little pass-through window um or pass-through cabinet yes for um we put snacks in here and so this is accessible from both sides so um at dinner the night before anything that we want we'll like if we know we want it later we can just stick it right in there and that way when we're in here and ready for bed and like closed up for the night we don't have to go all the way around open up the kitchenette and grab some food we can just we can just grab it right from here so now let's check out the kitchenette we've got these clips holding holding the door down and then this usually takes two people to open up it is fairly light though see if i can do it myself um we thought oh no not there if we were to spend any more money on this we would get um what are they called gas struts yeah gas struts so you just open it up and it holds it up but for us this worked just fine and whenever we're traveling these um two supports just fit on top of the bed do you want to do the tour back here no go ahead okay should i just record anywhere keep going you didn't stop it no okay so all of these cabinets we designed ourselves and they are pretty particular in the way that they are set so you'll notice that this one is um kind of off-center and this is so that when you open it up you have room for like a full-size um cooler under here and this this um cabinet is a lot thicker than any of our other ones because it was our intention to put our camp stove right on here um so that when we open it up the camp stove would be right there but we didn't get around to that but we do have some heavy duty hinges over here and then usually our water container would go under here but we all we have a spare wheel um let's see and then up in here we usually just put like our our kitchen supplies it's not really stocked right now because we haven't been out much but we've got like our salt and pepper and dishes and we've got some pots and pans and then over here we've got some cutlery and dishes right now um that's also the pass-through cabinet yeah right this is also the passenger cabinet underneath um let's see we also put a lot of storage up in here um but then uh we found out that when we were on the road a lot of things would just come falling down so halfway through we just got this curtain rod and stuck it up there and then everything that was up there pretty much just stayed that was enough um an on-the-road fix and so usually we have food food all up in there and then let's see one last thing to point out in here is that coming closer is that we have um outlets back here so if we were plugged in then we could put any appliances that we needed what do you want me to show here just the door look at these beautiful door handles this is actually my idea but my husband executed it very nicely this is so we don't we didn't have any extra parts or anything like that oh i will point out one of my husband's favorite things and that is that each of these hinges we got these from a resell at shop or what is that restore restore salvation have that for humanity really store and all of these hinges each one is different so that's that's kind of fun oh i also point out that we have one light up here it does absolutely nothing it's not enough it's terrible all right guys hope you enjoyed so uh you guys are probably wondering uh well what what possessed us to build this camper in the first place i mean that seems like a crazy thing to do i mean we we built this thing that during well this the last semester of our of our college career we started in january and it took us all the way up till finals week we were even completing it we got married we got married right after our finals and we were completing the trailer oh i think it wasn't the night before but it was definitely the night before the night before the night before the night before our wedding right um well i mean there's a couple things that we're kind of eclectic hobbying people we don't just do the normal thing that that everybody else does so so a kind of cookie cutter honeymoon wasn't really appealing to us because it's where you you go and you spend thousands of dollars and you get a good experience and you have a lot of fun but you don't have anything to show for it right you come away with nothing maybe souvenirs and you had a good time but memories pictures but that's it the idea behind this was we'd build it uh and and we'd do a good job where we could but we wouldn't like spend a whole lot of money it would be comparable to a honeymoon so we initially targeted our price around what 1500 and twelve twelve hundred something dollars uh this ended up being actually two thousand uh not too sad about that we stopped keeping track after 1500 yeah wedding planning and finishing up college and just kind of fell by the wayside right but our rationale was that if we uh if we built this then we'd have it we'd get to keep it and we could use it for camping from from then on exactly and so i feel like a traditional honeymoon you go out for a week or so right and so the thought was here once we have the the housing pretty much taken care of um what it cost like six dollars to stay at a campsite so we were able to go out and it was um it was the summer after we graduated so we had a few months of months of vacation before um we started grad school and so we actually spent 19 days in it because we could we had the time yeah um we did oh you want to go we did a lot of planning on the road so um as you can tell we don't have any like air conditioning or heat or anything like that we took this out in late may early june and we pretty much just followed the weather i remember we wanted to stop at the grand canyon and um we couldn't it was going to get too cold so um you want to talk about where we went sure we we first went to uh colorado to rocky mountain national park stayed there for a while um that was beautiful spent a couple days there and and the way that we would do this is it was early enough in the season that it was first come first served campsites so we would roll into town and then park overnight somewhere because we usually spend a long day driving park overnight somewhere and uh usually it'd be like a walmart parking lot or a costco or some some kind of grocery store right or all-purpose store and then we would get into the campsite early that morning and grab one of those first come first serve campsites that was being emptied that worked almost without fail i don't think we ever had we're turned away from a campsite we were always able to a good spot too because we were rolling in the morning get somewhere yep um so that's how it worked after rocky mountain national park we went to arches arches well we drove through arches it was raining so we didn't stay and then we went to stop through death valley and made it as far as sequoia national park in california um really cool place check that out we really liked it there so we just we would have in our mind okay we'll stay here two days and it's a coil we're like we should stay another oh let's let's stay another and we just we just stayed as long as we wanted and we would when we would get tired of a place we'd be like all right it's time to move on and then we'd see where the weather would take us go fishing do whatever then we came back down went to the grand canyon area stayed there hiked all the way down into the grand canyon and back up that was fun and tiring um and then stopped by branson and came back so yeah we've been all over in this thing and this thing has stood the test i think we haven't had any real big issues in it that that we've at least nothing that's been insurmountable yeah there were a few fixes we made on the road like that um curtain rod um actually that might have been it i hope you enjoyed our this build video we really had a good time building it we had probably had as much fun building it as we did taking it out oh yeah um many many memories were made in this place the build was uh we call that marriage counseling right building it since we built that we knew we could do anything so that's right if you're thinking about doing something like this give it a try find some friends that are willing to help right right you can do it right that's another thing we didn't have too much building experience before we started but we we found some friends we did a lot of research and we made it work yep all right guys take care uh thanks for watching hope you liked it

Channel: Hayter Hobbies

Views: 227,556

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Id: nkbM6L7-GJ8

Length: 21min 31sec (1291 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2020