Functional DIY Teardrop Camper Built in 1 Month For $3k

once we had everything all cut out it was time to cut the doors and you get one shot at it two months of weekend labor and three grand and you got yourself a party on Wheels I went real minimal on this I think my favorite feature of all is this and we kind of made it up as we went along my name is Philip Gershwin and my son and I built this teardrop from scratch in 26 days for a little under three grand why don't you come with me and we'll take a tour [Music] when my son and I decided to make this we had a lot of aspects to it that were going to make it unique we wanted it to be a 5x10 so we had the custom order the Birch Baltic plywood we wanted to make it a full curve instead of flat to make it a little bit more attractive make it a little bit more aerodynamic and to give us actually a little bit more room in front every inch matters and my son pressed for this circular door which everyone feels is the coolest thing about it once we had everything all cut out it was time to cut the doors and you get one shot at it we blow the doors we gotta throw it away and Order and special order and more plywood so we made like a giant Compass out of a two by four mounted the router pegged it in the center and just slowly went around lowered it went around lowered it until we got a perfect cut and I couldn't be happier with the way it came out and then we were able to put a circular window in here the custom forged hinges got a strapper ending it one thing is it was kind of tricky finding out how to lock it so I ended up using these locks which are from a standard cabinet but they work just fine now this is grade A Baltic Birch it's uh very expensive because it has zero voids it's one inch thick if you look at the edges sometimes when you see a piece of plywood you cut it in half there's these big gaps in it or these little triangular or oval stamps where they had to patch it this is absolutely clean end to end we wanted to leave it as natural as possible so we just put a little bit of natural stain just to get a little yellow tone to it and then we used uh Marine sealer on it what we didn't appreciate was that was something that would need to be redone every year or two being left out in the hot sun we started to weather down one day I might sand it all down and start over again more like I'll just drive it off into the sunset this way [Music] woodworking is one of my primary Hobbies going all the way back to growing up with my Dad we built an extension to our house back in Long Island I started building Kayaks with my son at some point and when I started doing these archery events and we were going to all these camping events as I got older I was getting more and more tired of sleeping in a tent on the ground and then there was this one event and it was pouring rain and my tent flooded and it was very sad and a friend of ours had built a teardrop a big ass one that they used for a trip to Alaska and they were not soaking wet sleeping in a puddle so when I came back from that trip I started talking about it and talking about it and thinking about it and thinking about it and Sam finally said why don't you just shut up and make it let's do it together as a project and we went for it we ordered the trailer it came in we built it and we were then what they referred to as pot committed we had to get it done and with every step it was more and more of a are we really going to be able to do this well we don't have a choice we have to do this now so come in and let's check this out for a bit although it can fit very comfortably a full-size mattress when two people are sleeping I am almost always in here alone so I just have a little single mattress that folds up gives me a little floor space makes it feel more like an apartment I've got my control panel over here that gives me my voltage it has my ceiling fan set up and we have strip lights going on to light the whole place up I've got USB here I have USB here I have USB there I have USB there I've got the basic cigarette lighter ones which I got to use for this inverter so that I can plug in AC which I almost never need to when I mentioned most people would have it a straight edge and I decided to make it bow out that gave me this perfect little storage in here where I can keep all my cheating and miscellaneous stuff including my solar panels that I add on to the battery so all across the top we were able to use this very thin eighth inch Baltic Birch that match the other wood so it looks like one continuous piece really loved the way that came out really into the hooks because it's a small little area so there's Hooks and there's Hooks and there's Hooks and there's Hooks and there's hooks I also had this left over from an old project that got retired so it becomes my little nightstand with some bungee in here so I can keep stuffing my laundry in it when when it's hot that when it's a hot day I built this little fill it with ice water and these fans that's DC voltage so it gives me an air conditioning and when it's cold this actually is very effective you just put in some boat of candles in here I put it up there makes a very nice light and definitely raises the overall interior three or four degrees which makes a big difference especially since we made this so perfectly sealed that when it's completely closed there's no ventilation this air thing uh the fan blowing if there's not room for the air to go it does nothing so we have to like crack the door a little bit but I am planning on adding a vent in here so that we can get some air without having to keep the door open we also have my entertainment center and my theft control system for burglars if it's too if it's late at night I don't want to get out I got to always one of these when we put down the base we had a layer of wood then we put in the insulation then with the next layer of wood then we sealed that all up and we put this vinyl flooring in I think we probably spent 40 bucks on that and basically other than the cost of the wood we were determined to make this as inexpensive as possible we and we also want to do it as quickly as possible because we started it on my birthday in December and I needed to have it ready in April for my first camping event and we only had weekends to do it in but 26 days was all we needed I think my favorite feature of all is this this little window here you have never seen that in another teardrop and it was just a fluke because this came here this came there and we had that Gap and it was like crap am I going to have to get a piece of wood and try and match it and it was like no let's get a piece of plexiglass and put it over it and make it like a little window and I love that and the only other thing I'm thinking of is maybe putting it on a hinge so I can actually open it up and that would be a great ventilation but there's always the balance between ventilation and allowing mosquitoes to get in when we started at my birthday in December and we needed to have it I wanted to have it ready for April because that was that was the event where I was trapped in the rain in the tent and I wanted to have it done by then I work full time Sam Works full-time we only had weekends and as we were building it everybody was asking you know how long is it going to take how much is it going to cost so I started a little Excel spreadsheet and we kept track of every hour and it was a total of 26 days with two people working the total cost was a a little under 3 000 and we kind of made it up as we went along we had a plan and that plan lasted for the first I don't know 30 percent of the project and then it was like well this plan isn't going right we'll just see where it takes us which is my favorite way to work [Music] this is my entire electrical system one car battery and two little clamps that feed in to the main breaker and that distribution panel brings it to the back and the top and the fan couldn't be simpler than that other than that I keep in here my emergency Plies like a Jack if I have to level it off I always want to have a spare hitch in case that hitch gets damaged and I always want to have manual lights in case the electrical goes out nothing worse than getting pulled over by a cop because your tail lights aren't working a big thing was the trailer itself there were two choices there was the I they're both from Iron Tron one was actually steel and one was aluminum the aluminum was a little more expensive and it was recommended on the boards because it's a lot lighter and weight is important you need to keep this under two thousand pounds otherwise registering it goes becomes very difficult but because of this triangle here and you put one of these wheels down the whole thing torques so I put in these reinforcements it's still torqued I put in two by fours to reinforce it it's still torqued it was always a nightmare I finally just gave up and said why don't I just put two wheels down and I wish I had done that two years ago and I wouldn't have been fighting with it every time instead of just a standard hitch I ended up getting something like this because depending on the ground and where I was setting it up and I'm not driving a truck I'm driving a consumer vehicle I needed that type of flexibility if you've ever had a trailer or a boat or anything like that where you're connecting to the car getting it lined up so that you can hook this on luckily if you keep it nice and light like mine you only have to get in the ballpark and then you can kind of move the teardrop onto it if it was a something too heavy for me to move then it would be take quite a lot of time to line it up perfectly backing up going forward if I'm going on my own and I have no one to help me it could take maybe 20 minutes a half an hour to get it lined up because I have to keep stopping getting out and stopping and getting out if I have somebody here just to go like this and go like that I can have it set up in 10 minutes it's really just a matter of how many times I have to negotiate the backup to get me close enough to do the hips so as far as where I go with this it hasn't left Southern California yet but I have four trips a year every year I have the gene Foster shoot in Fresno I have the Chamberlain shoot in Los avilos we have the Jenks shoot outside of Big Bear and we have the canejo shoot in Simi Valley the word shoot is archery traditional archery my friends and I are all traditional archers we make our own bows we make our own arrows we nap our own points you know it's a whole primitive technology thing so building my own teardrop kind of just dovetailed into that whole experience and it's a lot of fun there have been some stressful moments found myself driven and driven down an alley and found myself at a dead end and backing this thing up that's not an easy thing to do when you're alone so now we get to the fun part The Galley because remember that's just a bet on Wheels inside this is where you hang out got my my table my chairs I went real minimal on this lots of people lots of times you'll see this they have a built-in stove they have a built-in sink and everything's cooking in here I don't actually want to cook here I don't want the bugs the animals people wanting to go around here if you have a sink the sink's just going to drain you're going to have muddy water here that's why I have that table in my cooking area this is just more like my pantry more like my galley I put this together all my fuels I've got my lights my power I got a light strip here a light strip here a light strip here I've got this old case that's been turned into all my spices and all my cooking equipment built these little shelves in here for my radio the first round of the galley was just this beautiful raw wood just sealed but using it the way we did it got destroyed very quickly so I got the peel and stick tiles which I put down here and here ended up doing a little bit of a backsplash in many ways the galley was the most challenging part because unlike the rest of it Not only was it this curved collection of wood but it had to be able to move believe it or not putting in these Pistons is probably the single most difficult part of the entire build because the math and the Angles and the geometry that they give you in the instructions is not anything I was capable of deciphering so we had to just eyeball it it took four or five tries and then we had a perfect we wanted the Pistons we wanted it to look cool that's part of the whole Joy of this all these little cute little details so since as I said I don't want to cook directly in here we I normally have either a propane fire pit or I'd like to just make a wood fire if I'm allowed to so I forged a little tripod and I have my Dutch oven over here so I can cook up stews and soups and stuff I have my kitchen table over there with the integrated sink and cutting board so that's where I bring over my stove and cook for the dinners I have a little pop-up tent where I put in my little five gallon porta potty filled with kitty litter and a few other Essentials we refer to that as our Francis McDermott it has been very very meaningful over the years this is my teardrop and I'm very proud of it and I enjoy it and I hope it lasts as long as I do as for what's next that is a very good question there is a big part of me that wants to sand it down take it to the next level all the things like uh that didn't work out perfectly I'd love to rework but there's also the idea of I'm just going to use it the way it is until the day it can't be used anymore I think the bottom line with this adventure was you don't need to go spend fifty thousand dollars get yourself a sprinter van remodel it and have this amazing home on Wheels if you want to just get out there and have adventures two months of weekend labor and three grand and you got yourself a party on Wheels well when it's all said and done this is the most impressive and the most successful thing I've ever built and forgive me for saying that saying quite a lot because I've built a lot of really awesome things and if you want to see what my other project looked like go to Gershwin Woodcraft on YouTube and hit that like button and subscribe maybe in about 10 or 15 years there'll be something new on there you'll get that Bing I'd really like to thank tiny home tours for giving me the opportunity to show off my workmanship and I hope to see you guys on the road one day foreign [Music]

Channel: Tiny Home Tours

Views: 26,359

Keywords: tiny house, tiny house on wheels, living big in a tiny house, tiny house movement, tiny home, small house, small spaces, small house design, alternative living, architecture, affordable home, off the grid, small space living, tiny house life, tiny home uk, diy tiny house, diy home, van life build, van life, travel trailer, van life camping, teardrop camper build, teardrop camper diy, teardrop camper tour, teardrop camper camping

Id: xq-DMYZEST4

Length: 17min 19sec (1039 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 28 2023