Revealing The Shocking Cost of Our DIY Teardrop Camper

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[Music] hey guys welcome back to another wood Brew video my name is Dylan and my wife Molly and I have been building a teardrop camper from scratch over the last several months and it's actually a little bit of a Bittersweet moment today because it's being handed off to its new owners and that means that it's finally time to go over a cost breakdown and reveal the final weight of this camper all of that right after a short message from today's sponsor better help is there something interfering with your happiness or preventing you from achieving your goals for me I struggle with anxiety and I always have but as of recently with all of the additional responsibilities of getting older thinking about the future and the future of my family that anxiety has gotten to a point where I think it's a bit of an issue I started meeting with a therapist a couple of months ago using better helps app and I must say within just a couple of sessions I started seeing real world improvements if you are 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receive 10 off your first month of therapy and I promise you guys you will not regret trying this out all right guys it's time to break down the full cost of the teardrop camper build but before we do I want to let you guys know that at the end of this video we're going to be revealing the final weight of this camper and I think many of y'all are going to be shocked based on some of the comments I've seen so if you will leave a comment down below and take a guess on what you think the final weight of this camper is and it'll be sort of a fun game for you at the end to see how close you were so the Harbor Freight trailer comes in at about 400 to 450 dollars and then we added a lot of upgrades to it that significantly increase the price the first thing we did was add in a brand new 3 500 pound axle as well as new rims and tires we also added new leaf springs which are rated for much more weight and then we went around and we welded the entire frame as well as added a piece of 2x2 square tubing down the center of the trailer to significantly increase its strength along with all of that we went ahead and added a tongue jack as well as a tongue box on the front now all of that came to a whopping fifteen hundred and fifty dollars their give or take we also added bed liner as an additional cost in there now the main construction of the camper is made up of four different layers it is a half inch outer layer of bcx exterior rated plywood this is a sanded decent quality plywood it's not quite as good as a Cabinet gray plywood but it is much better than your typical construction plywood the interior layer is another layer of ACX which is slightly better slightly higher grade exterior grade plywood and that is a three-quarter inch material that stuff was real expensive in fact all the plywood because of the covid price hike all of it during the time that we were building this was really expensive almost double what I used to pay for it and then the interior insulation was a three-quarter inch poly ISO material and then the final interior finished layer was a quarter inch birch plywood now all of the plywood added up to around twelve hundred dollars and then we had a miscellaneous amount of about a hundred and fifty dollars of extra solid wood and other wood type products that we needed to finish the camper in addition to the plywood we had that insulation in there and that only cost about fifty dollars that was a huge bang for our buck to go ahead and add an insulation in the floor and the walls and in the ceiling because the majority of campers out there only have a single sheet of three quarter inch plywood for the side walls and zero insulation the fact that we were able to make this really thick construction super durable I mean you rarely ever see a half inch exterior plywood on a teardrop it's usually like I said just one single piece of three quarters so the fact that we have an inch and a half thick wall it means that we have a super strong wall and it was worth upgrading and worth the extra work in my opinion now the doors were a bit of a shocker for me because when we looked at buying doors they were about twelve hundred dollars and all the reviews I saw were pretty bad they were small they were leaky they didn't have many choices and you were sort of left it I don't know on a whim of whether or not you were going to get a quality door many of the doors that arrived to people had issues so I was pretty leery about using those doors not to mention the fact that like 99 99 of teardrop manufacturers use those doors I wanted to do something different so we decided to make our own doors and I thought we'd save a lot of money but we really didn't save nearly as much as I thought the doors ended up costing us 450 dollars give or take to make you know some of that's plywood insulation and then the windows were a huge cost of it to add in there as well as the door locks the door locks alone were eighty dollars which was really surprising now obviously that means that we still saved about what like eight hundred dollars or so which is still a lot of money in a budget that is as tight as this one that we had we were shooting for a five thousand dollar uh Budget on this so any sort of money that we could save was useful and these doors were actually much larger than the ones you could buy so I still think that it was a really good purchase however they took a really long time to make they were hard to figure out and there was a whole lot of r d behind the scenes trying to figure out how exactly to make them because there's very few resources out there showcasing any of that some of the benefits of our doors I think are again some of the oversized nature of them they're a lot bigger they're also insulated which is really nice and they're just thicker in general and they're made of wood so they're going to transfer the heat a little bit less than just basically a solid metal door now electrical was another thing that was a bit of a shocker for me after looking at the numbers I thought it was going to be relatively inexpensive but we ended up spending about 430 dollars on all of the electrical that did however include all of the trailer light which we installed these really nice aluminum trailer lights that I thought were a huge upgrade you know one of the biggest things that I've had issues with the trailers is the trailer lights themselves and I wanted to make sure that we had a bomber system because I didn't want anyone to have to be constantly figuring out what was wrong with the trailer lights that's super frustrating when you're on a trip so I went ahead and made a pretty bomb proof trailer light system and then I also added a bunch of Lights more than that was necessary but I thought it would be nice to have as many lights as you could you know in the first place so we had lights on the cabin interior that were bedside lights that were articulating they also had a USB charger in them for your phone and then I had an overhead light in the cabin that allowed you to have plenty of light when you're loading and unloading the camper as well as the overhead vent fan which is super super important to be comfortable in there that was pretty expensive and I'm including that in the electrical bill and then in the back we had two more overhead lights and a lot of uh 120 volt power outlets and different things so there was a lot going on in the electrical system so it was quite expensive and more than I thought it was going to be but I think it was well worth it now we had a bunch of miscellaneous hardware about 170 dollars worth throughout the build of just random nuts and screws and bolts and different little things that were being added onto the camper such as little clamps and hinges and all sorts of different things that were happening on the camper so that was an expense that added up more than again than I thought would just because when you initially think about it you don't think about all the random little bits and pieces that you'll need so yeah all the random stuff was about 170 dollars now lastly this is gonna be a big shocker and some of y'all will have expected this but I certainly didn't expect this when we went into this sort of project so you know ultimately we chose to use bed liner as the finish of the teardrop but the more and more I read into it it I figured out that you have to do really good prep work and if you don't properly prep before bed liner you're going to have issues if you check out forums online and stuff that you'll see people having issues with bed liner but then you'll also notice that there are a lot of commercially available campers with bed liner that seemingly have no issues and due to my research one of the things that was the biggest factor in this was first of all what material did the person use under the bed liner and second how was it sealed so I wanted to make sure we got that right so starting off with that exterior grade plywood this has waterproof glue it has a really thick layer on the outside so a lot of these Birch plywoods have very thin layers that if there's any void whatsoever at all that's a place for moisture to collect and for that tiny veneer to easily peel up see with a bigger larger exterior grade plywood you don't have to worry about that as much because there isn't a tiny surface layer of veneer here they can that basically you're relying on for your full adhesion of the entire product so that was the first thing that we decided to do and the second thing we decided to do was epoxy every single seam and add fiberglass tape because the next thing that really matters with bed liner is movement now big misconception is that wood moves too much for bed liner that's completely inaccurate if you look at metal on say a truck bed or anything like that metal moves far more than wood does as it's exposed to heat so it's not really as big of an issue as people think however the thing that wood does that metal doesn't is that at the seams of wood they can warp and that movement is quite a lot so you can run into issues there so we wanted to make sure that all of our seams were really well sealed as well as fiberglass tape to hopefully help prevent any sort of warping into the future and then finally the last thing we did before applying bed liner was we applied an epoxy based primer something that on its own was going to be good enough and that was just going to provide a really good solid underlayment per se for this bed liner that we ended up using now all of that including all of the clear finishes all this stuff was more or less a total total boat products with the exception of the bed liner we used total boats high performance epoxy they're penetrating epoxy as well as Halcyon and lust and those are the two clear finishes we use all of their products throughout the camper that came out to be around twelve hundred dollars which is a lot but honestly it's a lot for the most important part of the camper see one of the biggest issues I've found with teardrops doing my research is that people don't Camp very often right so teardrops just sit outside not being used and they're also not being checked up on like a house if something leaks in your house you notice it pretty quickly because you're in there all the time something like a teardrop if it has a small leak it's going to lead to big issues because it's not going to be found for potentially months or even sometimes years and then by then it's far too late so I wanted to make sure this thing was bomb proof with the waterproofness so it was an expense that I think was well worth it and honestly I think it's still comparable to basically any other option out there like an aluminum skin or anything like that except for I think that it's far more waterproof and more durable being is that there is no real penetrations in it if you look at an aluminum Skin trailer the reason I don't like that is because you have to use a ton of trim and thousands of screws and all those screws are just opportunities for water to infiltrate it not saying that that system doesn't work it's just the system that I didn't really want to go with on this camper now our goal is to stay under five thousand dollars and we didn't quite make it it was about fifty two hundred dollars now that is what the total cost of this camper would cost you if you were to build it the same way we did however I will say that we spent more than that in some r d up front because there was a lot of materials and Hardware that we tried out that didn't quite work out and either wasn't returnable or was used to a point that we couldn't return it so we did spend more than this throughout this build process but this is what our final like everything that we used on this camper would cost so I'd be interested to know what you guys think about how much this camper ended up costing do you think that that is a lot of money for what this is do you think it that it's a lot of money for a teardrop in general I see a lot of videos floating around online of teardrop campers being built for just a couple thousand dollars or even less I find it hard to believe but a lot of those people aren't really using off the shelf products they're using like a used trailer and not having to add any additions onto that and used materials and different things like that I think that we built a pretty bomb proof camper at least you know that's my hope I wanted to build something that was really high quality so I'm curious to know what you guys think about how much this camper costs and if it's something that you might think about building all right guys it's finally time to reveal the final weight of this camper which is something that I was super excited to find out it was a little bit nervous about because I did a lot of calculating up front to figure out what I thought it might end up being and I was pretty close I'm not gonna lie SketchUp and using price per square foot of material estimates and things I was able to get relatively close so this is your last chance though to come comment down below you can pause the video right now and comment and let us know what you think it actually weighed so to be clear we took this to a real actual truck scale and got a very accurate weight with both the truck and the trailer and then we got just one of the trailer just to see what the difference would be okay so without further Ado the final weight of the camper is 1020 pounds which is absolutely insane now what this includes is the mattress the power station the tongue box and any of the other accessories that we added on if you remove those types of accessories you can easily subtract a hundred plus pounds from that weight putting the dry weight of this camper under a thousand pounds which is absolutely crazy considering the construction methods that we used now it's really crazy considering the majority of commercially available campers out there weigh hundreds of pounds more and they use a simple three-quarter inch thick sidewall I was really surprised by this I'm not quite sure where we saved the majority of our weight but I know a lot of it has to come down to what we did with the actual wall construction how we put all that together and then the Simplicity of our build we didn't add a lot of fancy extra features we didn't add a ton of extra cabinets anywhere that we did add things I used the absolute minimal amount that we could use to keep it as strong as it needed to be and not over build it I wanted to make something that was plenty strong enough for its application but not so over built that it weighed an excessive amount also one of the things that a lot of people were concerned about was whether or not this camper was going to be way too tail heavy now when a trailer has too much weight over the back of the axle you get horrible trailer Sway and it's really dangerous to drive now this is one of the things that I was keeping in mind throughout the entire build it's actually something that I pre-calculated up front you know just based on estimates and was hoping that I would get right and I'm happy to say that the trailer tongue weight is only 107 pounds which is well within the percentages needed for this thousand pound trailer it's actually almost perfect now basically if you add anything into the tongue box you're going to get a tongue heavy trailer which is really what you want but what's really good about that 107 pound tongue weight means that you can pretty much tow this thing with just about anything because although many of these teardrop campers are very lightweight their tongue weight can oftentimes be far too much for small Vehicles if you look at something like a smaller car that maybe only has a 1500 to 2 000 pound tow capacity which would pull a normal teardrop oftentimes they have a Max tongue weight of only 100 pounds which is really quite limiting so with this trailer having that lower tongue weight I think that it's going to be really nice and comfortable to pull down the road with basically any car you have so after spending literally hundreds of hours on this camper from the design to the Finish I must say that I'm very pleasantly surprised and happy with the results of this camper there was a lot of trials and tribulations throughout the build lots of things changed I learned a tremendous amount throughout this project and it was a very good design challenge for me and I enjoyed it thoroughly now if you guys are interested in building one of these yourself we do have a SketchUp file which includes all of the design aspects and measurements and things of this camper and there'll be a link in the description below if you're interested in checking it out this could help you design your own camper and or give you all the cut lists and types of things that you might need to build this one yourself now would we do it again absolutely and it's the reason why I don't have a full full scale set of plans available yet Molly and I want to build something that is more future and full proof once we see how this camper actually performs on the road I didn't want to just put something out after only having camped in it for a couple times because this is a large investment for people this isn't just a simple piece of furniture that they're building this is something that needs to be safe and needs to be good for years to come when we hand this off to the Future owners I'm going to be keeping in touch with them and I hope to do some follow-up videos to find out where the weak points are in this camper and ultimately design something around how the camper performs in the real world to make an even better version of this that will have a full set of plans and will be super simple to build I want to give a big shout out to all of you guys that have supported this series it has meant a lot it's been gosh like 20 episodes of videos in this series and it's taken like five months to build it's been one of our really most ambitious projects and one that took a lot longer than expected admittedly but I really appreciate all you guys comments and support throughout this series because doing these larger projects like this that take months at a time is really difficult to be able to actually do and sustain so having you guys support it in all the ways that you do it really helps us a lot be able to do more of these type projects in the future and I also wanted to give a brief shout out to all the sponsors that helped us throughout this series including better help on this video but also iFixit who helped us out a lot on this series and really helped push this project forward so thank you guys all of y'all every single one of you for helping us make this project possible and I really hope you enjoyed this series if you are just watching this and you'd like to be able to see the full series and I'm talking about there'll be a playlist that you can check out in the link in the description below that'll take you through all 20 episodes you might uh you might need to get yourself a cold beverage and you know a good comfortable spot because it's a lot of footage but anyway thank you guys so much for watching I'd be super interested to see what your comments are about this camper the final weight the cost all of that so don't forget to comment down below I really want to check out y'all's feedback and with all that said we'll see in the next one peace
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Channel: Woodbrew
Views: 58,309
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: woodbrew, woodworking, diy, how to, teardrop camper, teardrop camper build, squaredrop, teardrop trailer, squaredrop camper, squaredrop trailer, diy teardrop camper, teardrop camper trailer, squaredrop camper build, teardrop trailer build, off road trailer camper, overland trailer build, camper trailer, diy camper, teardrop trailer design, squaredrop trailer build, teardrop, harbor freight trailer, teardrop camper design, diy teardrop trailer cost, teardrop trailer weight
Id: lW6zxIT33zM
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)
Published: Sun Jul 30 2023
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