SCAMP MAKEOVER (finally) // 8 Major Upgrades

[Applause] [Music] [Music] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] me we are working with a strange lighting situation it's always hard to film inside the scamp we need just a whole sunroof on top and then we'd have better lighting welcome back to the scamp it's been a minute we've been busy doing a lot of awesome huge renovation projects on the scamp what awesome youtubers well they're very exciting i know they are very exciting before we jump in we do want to give a disclaimer to say that this is not supposed to be a tutorial of any kind we haven't yet done any of this work because we are living in this full time and we don't have the room to store all the tools but we did have an opportunity to do all this at my parents house so we took advantage and tackled the biggest projects that are the hardest to do on the road to the best of our ability so again this may not be the best way to tackle everything and we're totally aware of that but it's working great the biggest thing and probably the most luxurious thing is our brand new bed it's an eight-inch memory foam mattress that we picked up at walmart to cut the mattress i made a template of a bunch of pieces of paper that i taped together i put the old cushions on top of those pieces of paper and cut it out brought it into the stamp to make sure that it fit perfect then i brought that back into the house and took off all the covers of the mattress and traced the template onto the mattress directly then i used an electric turkey cutter is that what it did what's it called i think so like a carving knife and cut the foam we've done this before with a three-inch piece of memory foam i think we used a saw what did we do uh maybe even scissors it was miserable it looked terrible this tool i think might be better advertised as a mattress cutter a foam mattress cutter than a turkey carver it made really quick work of this project this is the zip on mattress cover that came with the mattress what i did was i put it back on i made sure to keep the start and end of the zipper on the curved side because this is the part of the cover that we're going to cut i kind of made it a little tight and i traced the edge here where the curve is i did that on both sides and on one side i cut it and that is this side so it's currently inside out and i'm going to sew this long flap to the cut side to make a really terrible looking but functional mattress cover that you can zip on and off i'm doing it inside out so that the seams stay on the inside [Music] the runner stitch is done i just created pleats here to get that extra corner fabric up and it turned out okay now i'm going to cut off all this excess here and i started from the middle and went out just to make sure it was a little bit more even don't than and now i'm doing this stitch poke in and then i go through my hole and then it grabs it like that and it looks kind of like a baseball i don't know a whole lot about sewing but i feel like two layers of hand sewn stitches will be enough to keep this mattress cover on i just made sure to take it off very carefully before putting it back on and it worked out really well and i was very proud of the end result i think you did beautiful work to go with this new bed we chose to buy some dry deck it's like what you would put on a in a locker room floor it lifts the bed up about a quarter of an inch and that was recommended to us by our friend lindsey and it breathes really well there's channels all the way through it so that air can pass underneath it and dry it out we did a number of other little things inside the scamp but the majority of the big stuff was outside so let's talk about that we replaced the axle this was a long time coming the torsion axle was sort of like a tube with rubber a rubber gasket of sorts in it and after 30 years of use that rubber gasket was all oxidized and corroded so it didn't really actuate very much so we decided to go ahead and replace our old axle with a new torsion axle directly from scamp and then we had a shop in kansas city install it for us and they did a great job and with the torsion axle we also had them add a two inch receiver on the back of the scamp in case we want to put a bike rack or gear storage or something of that sort on the back in our experience the clearance on this camp has been plenty we have a little bit more clearance on this camp than we do on the subaru even so we didn't go with the taller axle but if we do want to increase the clearance in the future we can get slightly larger tires we did not replace the tires we did replace the wheels with five lug wheels to go on the new five lug hub because those are a lot easier to find if you guys have suggestions on good tires for off-road campers let us know because i would like to be able to gas them down a little bit so that they can absorb more shock but the air in the tire is what holds the weight so if you gas them down then they they're able to carry less payload because the air is cushioning the weight so i don't really know what the best solution for that would be so if you have suggestions there let us know moving on to the frame unresting the frame is a pain in the axle i think it's perfect we used steel brushes steel wool sandpaper to try to scrape off as much of the rust on the frame as we could but the scamp was only lifted up about a foot and a half on these little step things that we had so we did the best that we could given the tools that we had most of the rest was just surface rust the actual frame seemed like it was in really good shape which was surprising given the hell that we put it through we painted over it using a high rust rust-oleum primer and on top of that used a black rust-oleum paint and it looks so good now and hopefully that'll protect it for quite a while yeah we'll see of course could have been done better by professionals but if we could have lifted the scamp up off of the frame but i'm not even sure and use power tools like grinding tools to get the surface rust off that would have been better like whatever this tool is called that's one we would have used we'll keep you updated on how that's looking over time i'm sure it's gonna be great well given that we hadn't done anything to it for as long as we had it and it was still fine that i think after treating it well it'll do great for the next five ten years this is our new tongue box our old tongue box was made for the battery that came with the scamp and the lid had at some point blown off and he didn't have it so i cut off the old tongue box we went with this plastic tool box over a dedicated tongue box because the metal tongue boxes are generally super heavy and i want to keep the tongue weight as light as possible this is a project that i started in the morning thinking that i could knock it out in an hour or so but it ended up being quite the bear to tackle if i would have had any of the right tools i don't think it would have been that much of a problem like an angle grinder or something i used every tool available in our arsenal to tackle this and eventually got it done but it took way longer than i anticipated yeah great job cool good lord okay the easy project for the day's done okay should we do the insulation underneath now [Music] for the underbelly insulation we went with a one inch closed cell foam and we chose this because the bottom of the scamp is actually pretty flat so we could adhere different panels underneath of it and this is a pretty simple solution and if it doesn't end up working or if we need to clean something up it's pretty easy to take each panel off and then get to the underside of the scan this was one of the only options we really had available given that we didn't have a lift or proper tools but even so i think this is one of the best solutions that i've seen we decided not to put the insulation on the inside floor of the scamp because it's already too short for me the ceiling height is so eliminating an extra inch or two would be miserable but under all of the storage bins in the scamp we do have a layer of reflectix that helps a little bit but not nearly as much as the new installation that we have now we bought this foam board at home depot we measured it with a tape measure 23 and a quarter cut its size we realized that our screws that we bought for this project were too long we didn't know how thick the subfloor was so we compensated by using a bunch of washers with the screws and it worked out fine we realized that this isn't the ideal solution but we really didn't want to go back to home depot that day however we did the next day and we finished the project with the right size screws we would still like to go in with some sort of foam and seal around the edges so far we just used gorilla tape to seal it all in but we wanted to make sure that this was going to work and that it made a real difference before we really made it permanent and it has yeah whoa it's made a huge difference yeah it's incredible it's probably one of the biggest aside from the bed one of the biggest improvements that we made eventually we would like to spray some sort of underbelly liner on it to really seal it in but we would have to jack the scamp up to do that and i would really like to replace the subfloor with a composite material before we seal all that in so we get all the potential for rot out of the way i found this stuff online that i've been looking for since we got the scamp it's called starboard yeah it's called starboard which is a clever play on words because it's used for boats like the starboard side it's a composite or plastic plywood replacement and you can do all sorts of things with it super useful so eventually i would like to pull out the subfloor on the scamp and replace it with this composite material because then it would never ever rot and the scamp would be permanently future proof that's cool stay tuned yeah for another one a lot of people often suggest that we get a skirt to put around the base of the scamp in the winter and while that would be hugely effective we just don't have the space to be storing that type of material as we travel or in the off season when it's not winter when there is snow on the ground though we do pack that up around the scamp and it helps the biggest most obvious and most controversial maintenance that we did is the fiberglass outer shell of the skin [Music] we researched this a lot and the most common solution is just to polish and wax the exterior but we didn't do that because our gel coat was so oxidized that it would just keep powdering off as you rubbed it so we decided to use zep floor polish to seal it in and it's effectively like a clear coat but it's super easy to apply and you apply it in a number of super thin coats this is not what this stuff is made for but a lot of people have used it on their campers and it's worked well and it's the simplest way that we could effectively apply a clear coat but we have not seen how it lasts in the conditions that we put our scamp in so we will keep you posted on this it's likely that it will come off there's no uv protection so it's likely that it will yellow but you can strip it off pretty easily so if anything does go wrong with it we can strip it off maybe give it a little while before you do this to your camper to see if it works over time with ours sorry scamp enthusiasts they're going to be pissed i had looked for led replacements for the scamps running and taillights for a while and i couldn't find an exact replacement for them i went ahead and ordered the closest thing that i could find and we made a little bit of modifications to them to make them work the tail lights themselves are a sort of circular housing with a rubber grommet around the outside and they're made to be inserted into a body panel or like for jeep headlights so we could have cut a big circle in the back of the scamp to insert the headlights into with the rubber housing but i didn't want to make a big cut into the scan so instead we took the original tail lights and with the help of elsa's dad terry who is the man he cut perfect circles to fit the new tail light housing into the old tail light unit so now we can use the old tail light to mount the new fixture inside i plasti dipped the old tail lights black so that they would match really well with the new fixtures i think they look awesome they look amazing it's so cool what a simple project that seemed for you i had no idea you had any experience with electrical anything it seemed like that was i mean it's pretty simple well there's only three wires and i just winged it and it worked dealing with wiring and electricity is a little scary but in this situation it was so simple that i could just kind of guess my way through it and it worked great after i tested to make sure that the wiring was working we peeled up the old wrapper and the reflectix to get to the body panels and we wired in everything permanently and then we went ahead and cocked them in so that they wouldn't leak through the holes and they're working great so far they're super bright wow they're so bright awesome as i said i have become a plasti dipper plasti dippest plasti dippy i didn't know what plasti plasti-dip was before this plasti-dip is a rubberized spray paint often used on cars when we bought the subaru it actually had plasti dip on the wheels and looked really cool but since it's all worn off i washed the wheels of the subaru and the scamp really well with soap and water then i took some rubbing alcohol and went over that then i did about four to six coats of plasti-dip on everything letting it dry for a half an hour in between a perk of plasti-dip is if for some reason we didn't like it or if we messed up didn't get it clean enough you can just peel the plasti dip off so it wasn't like we're working with a spray paint that's permanent and if you over spray you can just take a rag and wipe it off which we ended up having to do i went a little plasty crazy i plasti dipped a few panels on the car and then i decided to also plasti dip the belly band of the scamp i had never seen this done before and i don't know how long it'll last but it's an aluminum belly band and this paint is made to go on aluminum rims and if it messes up or just gets scratched or something all we have to do is touch it up i think it looks pretty cool i think all of our things will be perpetually way cooler now that elsa knows what plastic is well shoot everything's going to turn black before we know it so that's the scamp it's been a long time coming but we finally got a roof box for the subaru i am so excited the one that we went with is a thule force xt and a size large so there are different sizes available but this was the best one that we could find for the subie it actually fits both of our snowboards and a kayak our archery kit yeah and it's got a plenty of vertical space it's incredible i don't know how we lived without this and we couldn't have our snowboarding gear with us if we didn't have this when we bought the subaru it had been in a rear end collision of some sort so the back tail light and bumper were messed up so we got a slightly better deal we finally replaced that tail light and surge line tuning in portland actually popped out the back bumper a little bit for us we bought some touch-up paint to apply to it but then we came out to colorado and it's too cold to apply it so we'll apply it one day i got a rear wiper delete for the subi it's just a little aluminum disc that plugs up the old rear wiper hole because our wiper motor had burned out from having the bikes on the back of the car subie is looking good she is [Music] back in the scamp we did some work on the door our door has been super drafty ever since we got it because the scamp is sort of curved and over time the door relaxes and becomes more and more flat so we've tried a few different ways to seal it up with different foams and stuff and this is our latest attempt i took these i can't even like crank screws i can't remember what they're called and put a piece of paracord on here to pull the corners of the door in and then we use this expandable foam to seal up the rest of the cracks and now there's no draft coming through and this will expand a little bit more over time and seal it up better our roof vent is an odd size because it's actually an escape hatch so that you can climb out of there in the event of being locked in i guess they don't make the plastic cover for them anymore in this size so i had to duct tape this one again and we could have fiberglassed it or something but this is what i did and i did it like two years ago and it held up fine so i just replaced the duct tape one more time and we'll see how this goes when we were traveling a while back our vent crank fell off and vanished and we were never able to find it so i sent the measurements to our friend trevor and he found a replacement at a hardware store thanks trev you're the best what are you crying for we've done a number of tours of the scamp throughout our various different seasons and years that we've been living in this camp i'm curious if you guys would be interested in a new and updated tour or if you're solid on all the rest of the tours that we had let us know in the comments below and how much detail would you want us to go into like how long should a tour be do you want to see what we have in each drawer right do we geek out on all the tools that we actually have with us like how deep into it do we go what do you want to know yeah but until then we're out here we're finally back in colorado when it just feels like a major exhale and release to be back out in nature we're in a really really beautiful spot and we are reconnecting and finding our rhythm again it's great feels good nature is alive and well and rocking out here and we are loving it camp two he's been doing great there's plenty of snow so he's been feeling good and rolling around in it well we hope you enjoyed this video and we will see you in the next one bye

Channel: Elsa Rhae & Barron

Views: 407,730

Keywords: elsa, rhea, rhae, elsa rhae, scamp, scamp trailer, camp, camping, travel, nomad, off grid, cacao, trailer, camper, rv, van, van life, full time, living, life, casita, boler, winter camping, nomadic, fiberglass, 13ft, 16ft, 15ft, 17ft, barron, barron link, cubic mini wood stove, oru kayak, outdoor, bushcraft, travel trailer, traveling, bus, schoolie, insulation, roof box, Subaru

Id: ZRQ9K5kJhKw

Length: 19min 52sec (1192 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 25 2020