MORE Trailer, LESS Money (Bend Teardrop)

there's a lot of teardrops out there but you probably don't see too many six by twelves I have been Towing Atlas from Aero teardrops all across Oregon just to show you as many small camper trailers as I can today I stopped by Ben teardrop to show you their unique 6x12 model designed for families but I'll also show you their 5x10 that supports a bunk as well as usual I will be sharing the three things I like about these trailers and the three things I think can be improved hey uh Dave here with Ben teardrop and we're with Drew and he asked to come check out some of our teardrops out here in Bend Oregon uh there's a lot of teardrops out there but you probably don't see too many six by twelves most of the teardrops out there that you see are five by eight which is the standard size or a five by ten which can fit a bunk to fit a kid which is great I built this for my own selfish reasons my kids are older now they're eight and ten and we needed a deterior drop where we could still fit the whole family inside without having to set up a tent or something like that and we'll show you the inside in a minute but basically what it's got is it'll fit a California king and it has a full-size bunk so you can get two adults in there or you could throw two or three kids in there up to six feet tall and by the time they get that tall then you probably want to kick them out anyway to a tent you could even get two of your closest buddies in there if you don't mind sharing space with them the nice thing about it though it's still a teardrop so it's still light total weight on this is 1800 pounds I can lift it move it around by hand anywhere I want to go six foot wide so it's still about the profile of your vehicle lower profile so it's not going to kill your gas mileage going down the road and it's shiny shiny's good um because the bunk is so deep with the full-size bunk we had access storage underneath here because the bunk is so deep it's 54 inches we've got this full length pass through access storage and you can open it from either side and that'll fit a whole lot of stuff you could shove a canopy tent in here or fishing poles or whatever you want there's a ton of extra storage here and we've there's they make these little portable air conditioners now that are pretty cool and sometimes for this area we'll pop one of those in there we build all of our trailers on welded steel frames and these fenders are actually welded to the frame so you can get up and jump around and check out your solar panel or your roof vent or whatever you want to do up here we just use standard leaf springs for the trailer bases because a lot of that Overland stuff is honestly Overkill you're taking it out to a campsite you're going down a gravel road you're going down a Forest Road this can handle it because it's so light and the clearance is a big deal if you look at the clearance down there it's 13 inches which is higher than most trucks even if they're jacked up Drew asked why we do this LED lighting well it looks cool for one but the main reason is it's very low voltage so these lights don't suck your battery down like a normal you know standard RV light wood with a light bulb on it that gets hot these lights can go forever and not kill your battery which is nice the whole point of our trailers you'll probably notice they're a little more simple a little more basic design it's just so there's less stuff that can go wrong and the more bells and whistles you have the more things that can go wrong we put solar on pretty much all of them so the lights the fan the usb chargers the 12 volt Chargers they're all working continuously you don't have to worry about dipping into your battery life so between the two doors and the 10-speed roof vent you're moving all the air out of there since it's such a small area pretty quickly so this portal is not for ventilation at all it's just for the look some extra light in the camper and kids like to poke their little heads out of it on any camper you get you already know this Drew but Outlets regular 110 Outlets will only work if you're hooked up to inverter generator or Shore power so that's what that that is there's a plug on the side if you're at a campsite that's providing power you can plug right in and that's going to turn on these 110 outlets in the galley so you could run a toaster or something like that is this the standard configuration like what you're seeing here is what you get at the base price uh with our as far as Galley is concerned the whole trailer uh this this Trail is a little bit upgraded uh your standard Galley simple build is three partitions a water cubby and a sink what they've added is a whiskey wine rack sauce rack removable spice rack right here so you can take the spice rack over to the picnic table and do your cooking this one also has a partition Galley drawer because this storage is great for pots and pans and propane and things like that but it's nice to have the drawer for forks and knives and all the kind of things that you don't have to reach down to the Cubby to get they all come standard with usb chargers with the voltage meter 12 volt charger and then LED lighting back in the galley what they've added on is aluminum countertops whiskey wine rack removable spice rack partition Galley drawer outlets and then a soap dispenser and so this has the ability to upgrade to an inverter to for these Outlets yeah we can pop an inverter not necessarily for the outlets we typically just do a hardwired inverter to battery and then we can put that everywhere you want on the inside or the outside um these days though I would probably not try to upsell you to that I would say if you want your outlets in the cabin to work just go out and they make those little jackery things now I don't know if you've seen those things but they're just portable lithium batteries with an inverter in it and if you were to just take that and plug that into Shore power here you've inverted the whole camper just off that jackery and then it's not draining the internal battery in the camper so then the bat the jackery is done then you still have camper battery and then you could use the solar on your camper to recharge it because the solar conditioner is right here and you can plug into that if you wanted to so have you ever thought of a input for that Jack rear Power Station inside to keep it out of the rain could do that too yeah it just hasn't been a thing that really has come up too often most of our most of our customers are kind of more Spartan simple Backpacker rafter kind of people so we don't do a tell-out of 110 power we pretty much build them primarily just to function dry without plugging into Power without inverting to 110 just running off USB 12 volt just DC power in a solar panel because I don't know about you but I'm pretty lazy and I don't want to like set anything up when I get to Camp I want to park it pop the hatch crack a beer and just be just be done with it my first question for you or maybe my only question for you so far is why the open shelving well we like to keep it pretty simple and then once you get into hinges and uh cabinets then you're it's time consuming it's costly that'll go into your price but the main thing is it's functionality if you want to grab some cup of noodle I see it right there if you want to grab a bottle of whiskey it's right here you don't have to open up a cabinet and dig through stuff to figure out what's there this is a three and a half inch lip that'll hold in your gear so you can stack this up with stuff cruise down the road without having to open up doors um our whole philosophy is keep it simple keep it affordable this is a six by twelve and it's the starting price is 14 Grand which is a lot less than the competition and a lot of the reason we can do it for that price is building it simply and and you're building a lot of these I heard you're yeah you're selling about 12 trailers a month yeah we're gonna do about 144 this year and it's about three four a week and the reason we can do it that way we've got five employees all working and we build them simply um we have a modular design we do offer about 25 30 different options for people but we try to just keep it to the options that we can do relatively quickly and and less costly are people asking for articulating hitches for this and different styles or are you finding your uh it's rare the occasional person will ask about that but honestly our trailer isn't really designed to be like driving on the moon you know a lot of that Overland stuff is is overkill this will handle Forest roads it'll handle rutted roads it'll handle gravel roads and that there's really very rare instances where you're going to put the trailer completely sideways but if you want to do that that's great and it looks cool but most of our customers are young families people getting their first campers they're going to go to a campsite they're going to take it down a couple Forest roads but they're not going to be jumping it or chugging Mountain Dew going down the road or whatever those guys do so like I said it can be added but it's going to cost you more and our whole philosophy is to get people into teardropping without breaking the bank can I see in this tongue box this thing is Big this might yeah so hold a lot of spaghetti the largest in the industry right here look at the size of this yeah you could put your kid in there if they're acting up or um yeah because it's a six by twelve you know you don't see the six foot wide too often we can get the bigger box in there and that's great for me like I got kids so we've got we got our little piece of fake grass that we always bring to all of our camp trips our stove goes in there uh you know we've got little kids so we've got butterfly Nets and BB guns and all that kind of fun stuff that they like to mess around with do any of your configurations do a stealth window uh yeah we can do um we don't like to put it up front like that just because most the time when you're pulling into a camp spot if you're leaving the trailer you're backing in and everyone walking by is staring into your trailer so we can do a skylight but we typically face it up um so you can look at the stars it's called the Stargazer Skylight this one doesn't have it but I can show you one that does um it's cool um I honestly don't I'm not a big fan of windows on the roof if you're going to do cold weather camping like we do a lot of like little Snow Camp trips and I have a Skyline on mine and it's kind of annoying you can get a little bit of condensation on the Windows because it's warm in here and it's cold out there and the air turns to moisture and uh with the Skylight you can get a little tiny condensation drip which is really annoying so as long as you're Fair where they're camping it's pretty cool and you're not putting racks up there but uh if you're gonna put racks up or a roof tent or you're going to camp in the snow I'd probably bag any kind of a window on the roof line welcome to the interior so that is a full-size platform bunk that'll fit two or three kids as long as they're under six feet tall it's seven and a half inches down on the floor that will actually fit a California king if you want it to I prefer to put a queen in here because with the queen then you have a good four inches of space on either side and it just makes it easier changing sheets or you can throw your clothes on the side and things like that and then we leave it simple so you can customize it any way you want this is three-quarter marine grade plywood so you can mount anything you want to these side walls as long as you're not going over three quarters of an inch so on mine I've got coat hooks I've got a guitar holder I've got nylon netting and that's kind of how we like to keep our clothes organized we just attach the nylon netting to the walls and shove it all in there that way you can see your stuff and then pull it out instead of opening up the cabinet we do have a little bit of cubby Cabinetry down below for gear and then in the back there beyond the cubby is that big long outside access storage compartment that I was talking about and then up above we've got a shelf here which comes in handy putting your phone or putting a book or something like that we've got a USB charger with voltage meter right here we've got a 12 volt charger right here for charging stuff with a little bit more amperage and then independent switches for your lights you've got interior lights you got the porch light on the passenger side you got a port side in the driver's side and then the interior lights and then we do a 10-speed two-way Max fan and that's really key on any trailer you get make sure you get a nice high quality fan because Little Campers need they can create moisture you can get condensation because your bodies create moisture campers can can retain the moisture with the fan you're pushing all that out so it's key never buy a camper without a good fan you'll regret it so this here is our most popular trailer it's a 5x10 just a little bit bigger than your traditional Teardrop trailer this is a 5x10 as opposed to a five by eight and with the 5x10 it allows us to put a bunk in for kids um that's probably the biggest selling feature for that but if you don't have kids we can do partition shelving and it opens up the space quite a bit so here's your standard galley five feet wide as opposed to six feet wide and this is your standard Galley build three even partitions two and a half gallon water jug draining down to the sink the things that they've added on is a Shore faucet hookup so if you're camping at a campsite that's providing water there's a hook up here on the side so you can plug into their water but for most intents and purposes this little two and a half gallon works great uh you can pick it up it's portable fill it at the campsite because most campsites provide water this is on this is off and then you just use this to regulate the flow this one starts at 12 000. and most people add on about a thousand dollars worth of upgrades spare tires on the fence I have never popped a tire on a teardrop because they're pretty light um I guess it would be nice to have if that were to happen worst case scenario if it didn't have a spare you could it's a it's a trailer you could park it on the side of the road go get a spare and come back and then I would like to talk real quick about the floor that we build on all of our trailers are built on an insulated subfloor and I know a lot of Builders just build on a piece of treated plywood which is cool I guess but what we do is we actually insulate the floor so that's what you're looking at here if we use the foam core insulation it's uh the thick stuff the inch and a half stuff I think it's like r value 14. but this essentially a plywood an insulated sandwich and we build on top of that and having an insulated subfloor in my opinion is is a game changer keeps the warm air in keeps the cold air out for the side walls we use uh marine grade Plywood And that's really key when we first started we were just kind of using treated plywood and you can get issues with mold which you don't want in any kind of living situation if a wheat if a leak was to arise you know leaks are possible every now and again it's pretty rare having marine grade is going to keep the moisture out and mold won't accumulate and then because campers Little Campers like this all of them you can get condensation if you're doing cold weather stuff that also helps not to retain any moisture so for the three things I would do differently if I was designing this trailer number one I would change out those leaf spring axles I find them a bit dated I think at a base level trailer you should be getting at least a torsion axle this is going to give you a bit more independent movement on both sides of the trailer a much more comfortable Towing experience and it's not going to cost the Builder a lot of money to upgrade this number two it's those drawer slides now this is nitpicking here the next one I'm going to talk about is a big deal but the drawer slides I see why they're doing it they're keeping it simple so you don't have to replace them they're designed to be beat on but it's a bit rough I would like to add a drawer pull that felt more like my home drawer it just makes the experience better and I don't mind replacing it 10 years down the road number three and I said this is a big one this trailer has a three-quarter Galley Hatch so a typical hatch that closes off your kitchen runs a full length down to the subfloor of your trailer and what this does is if you have a sunny day or a rainy day it gives you protection from the elements it allows you to back up and have room in the cooking space when you get a three-quarter hatch it typically stops at the middle of your head or maybe a little bit back of it and that means you have to cook really tight up against the galley and you're not going to have room to move around and you will not get that protection I get why they do it it looks cleaner it allows you to have more space in there to store batteries but it's not something I prefer the three things I like about Ben teardrop number one it's that full insulation insulating from the floor makes a ton of sense and you're not seeing it in a lot of teardrop builds number two it's the Simplicity of the build now typically I'm saying the Simplicity is why this build costs more but the beauty of Bend teardrops is they keep it simple to also keep your costs down so you have the open shelving to get to things easier inside the cabin you don't have cabinets and what this does is makes the space feel bigger but allows you to make it your own I think the Simplicity of the build for those of us who actually camp and understand it will find Value in this number three I love that these trailers are built tough but not over built so you can still stand on the fender you still have the ability to put a tent on the roof it has 13 inches of clearance you can get to BLM land National Forest go everywhere we camp but not more than you need that causes extra price and extra weight and drag on the road if you'd like to see all our trailer walkthroughs click on this playlist here this is videos we made for the community and I know there is a trailer there for you if you do own a trailer stay safe on the road and we'll see you in the next episode

Channel: Playing with Sticks

Views: 240,363

Keywords: small camper, trailer, off road trailer, teardrop camper tour, teardrop trailer, teardrop, teardrop camper, travel trailer, bend teardrops, playing with sticks, teardrop campers under $10 000, bend teardrop 6x12, alaska, micro camper, teardrop trailer walkthrough, small camper trailer tour, teardrop trailer tour, teardrop trailer review, camper review, camper, teardrop trailer 2022, teardrop trailer reviews, teardrop camper for family of 4, teardrop trailer with bunks

Id: Iv9iTA-Tvk8

Length: 18min 24sec (1104 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 27 2022