Turning my Chevy Spark into a stealth car camper!

hello and welcome to the first episode of spark freedom on today's episode I'm going to be converting my 2016 Chevy spark into the ultimate car stealth camping setup for those of you who don't know me personally my name is Dominic travaglino when I was 7 years old my family decided to give everything up and move into an RV we did that for about 10 years I got to see all the amazing places that people only ever get to dream of or see on videos or in books and stuff like that since then I've moved into a normal house in rural North Carolina I work a 40 hour a week job and I really don't often leave town all that much but there had always been this underlying dissatisfaction because I knew that there was more to explore and more to see out in the rest of the country and I was so young that I when I did it that a lot of it has been blurred for me and I've wanted to go back and do it ever since so I decided that I was going to leave North Carolina leave my home here and my job and my family and not work 40 hours a week at least for not right now decide to use some of my young lives while I still have it and without further Ado let's start converting this car okay that's the back seats taken out of the car in preparation for the big wood board that's going to take all of that up next we're going to take out that right front passenger seat so there it is that is the seats pulled from the car so now I have all of this space for the piece of wood that is going to go over it and the extra storage that's going to go under that wood y all right so here is the completed wood frame it's all screwed together with mounting brackets and there's some hinges over there I wasn't able to get all the footage of assembling the cars like putting all these last couple panels in just because it did end up getting dark on us while we were we're building this there's some under storage the under storage extends back to about there before the car kind of Curves up like that and then across so I have a lot of storage underneath this like wood frame right here to put all sorts of stuff and store things back here I've got this hinged so I can still get to the spare tire and supplies for the spare tire and then I have some completed blind out panels right here that I'm going to Showcase a little bit later when I have everything else in the car but other than that I'm super excited this thing's finally coming together I got an next step is to put furnishings and build a foam or not like memory foam to put all right here I'm going to put my cooler over here and some storage here haven't exactly figured out where everything is going to go yet I've also got a top bag that I'm going to put up here and put some of the supplies that I'm going to need for my trip in there and once I've completed all of that and got everything in the car we'll take it on a test run one thing that makes perfect sense now but I never thought about when I was building it is there's a lot of wood creaking noise now when I move my seat I can feel all the wood platform creaking and turning behind me but even though I have so much more planned for this car that I'm going to be doing as far as installing stuff and planning trips even just seeing this wood platform installed and taking this drive fills me with a lot of excitement because I'm finally working in a direction towards this trip which I've been planning for a very long time now I can't help but realize driving this road how incredibly blessed I am to not only have the ability and time to make a trip like this but also have the support of family that I do that's helping me to build this car the way I want to build it and encouraging me even in some points more than I'm encouraging myself or just getting me to go on this trip even when it's sometimes difficult to leave all the things that I'm going to be leaving I'm incredibly grateful and happy that I have the parents and the family that I do keeping me in check and keeping me on this road figuratively and literally all right so there's a lot of places I could start with getting everything ready and putting things in here I could start just throwing in like organizers or the electric cooler that I've bought but I think I'm going to start with measuring out and then putting a memory foam block here I'm not sure how well the memory foam is going to work because it will probably just get hard the second it gets cold in here and then I'm just sleeping on the wood anyway so I'll have to see and if that doesn't work maybe I'll get an egg crate or something like that but then let's go and measure out this piece of wood or remeasure it I should say cuz I already measured it uh and then start cutting a piece of foam okay so I just measured out the space on this board it's about 20 in wide and then I'm going to cut out the foam piece to about 8T and just kind of start cutting it down as I decide how long I actually want it to be I'd like it to go as close to the back as possible but I'm not 100% sure how that'll end up sitting with this bar right here that sticks out on the side so I'm going to see how that is and then we'll see how it fits all right now I got this thing all measured out it's incredibly difficult to move this stuff cuz it's super heavy foam but I've got it measured 20 in across 20 20 and A2 uh and then this is about 6' 6 in long so hopefully that'll be I think it'll be long enough to fill that space fine uh I'm not going to be able to film cutting this because it's incredibly difficult to move but I will catch up with you when I'm putting it in the car okay I have got the cut piece of memory foam that I need that was utterly exhausting this stuff weighs like 10 15 pounds but it's all flopping all over the place let's put this in the car all right see look I can't even like push it because it just sits there at the end and flops all over itself all [Music] right going to pull it all the way to the end and there we go it looks like it just barely goes to here that's nice all right Next Step I'm going to furnish the rest of this get my sleeping bag can set it up on this all right here's the sleeping bag I'm going to set it out I ended up putting a um sheet on this foam I think this is a queen sheet if I remember correctly I don't have any that's going to specifically fit this so it's kind of loose but it'll do its job at protecting it going to set out this sleeping bag and then we will move on to putting in the cooler and then some storage organizers okay here is the wait for the truck to pass here is the um set Power cooler that I bought on Amazon this one seemed to be the best deal I don't have any sponsors for this video but I haven't really done all too much testing on this just ran it for a couple hours and it seemed to cool pretty well so this is what I'm going to be using it's going to sit right in here I'm going to have to figure out how I'm doing all the wiring and stuff I have an electrical box like a battery box that I'm going to put in here in a little bit but I'm just try to figure out still where I'm going to end up putting that all right there's the cooler I think I'm going to end up putting the battery box underneath if it fits down there and running all the wires kind of away from the back towards the front and under where the like passenger seat was um and that way I can just keep it out of the way have all the space and still have things running at the same time next thing I need to install is organizers there I need to kind of keep things not um mounted or not that I can't remove things so I can't really screw things down like the organizers um because there's that hinge there and I still want to be able to get to the spare tire and stuff if I need to so that's the next step it's coming together pretty well I've still got a lot to do to this and I'm taking my first test trip on this tomorrow so this is going to be a long day but without further Ado I guess I'll get on to the next step so I think what I'm going to do at least for now since this is so loose is I'm just going to put the heavier stuff which is going to be my kitchen stuff in the bottom of it and then just lighter stuff up as I go and then I'll test it out and see if that actually keeps it stationary and if not then I'll have to figure something else out all right I'm installing the battery box that's going to power all the electronic things in the car you can already tell this is going to be an extremely tight fit so let me get my orientation it's sit like that yeah all right that actually fit in there very well so here's the battery box I'm going to running wires to the things like the uh like tiny travel blender that I have or the uh cooler that's over there anything that I would need to power also all my filming equipment it's going to sit right under there it's actually perfect little spot for it uh the beams that are holding up this Frame line up perfectly all around this so This is actually great for that that worked out 10 times better than I expected it to so how move on to the next step all right so it's coming together nicely I've got clothes in this chop drawer here got toiletries soaps toothpaste stuff like that all in here and then this bottom one I've got all my kitchen supplies this one's a little harder to get to because of the foam but all I really needed to do is kind of move it out of the way to open it I've got a electric uh stove top in there Pam and then all the forks and knives and stuff that I need for that the next thing that I'm going to be doing is filling all the things that are going to go on the roof of the car in this suitcase so that it has a bit more rigidity because it is only a roof bag that I'm going to be putting up here um this is all going to be stuff that I don't necessarily need instantaneously like if I'm going to go to a spot and just camp in a parking lot or something like that this is going to be stuff that I don't really need to get to but if I'm out in the wilderness and camping and just want to get to some more Leisure stuff then I'll have this except ible on the roof so let's get that installed all right so I ended up giving up on that car carrier bag it just really wasn't holding its shape and it was being incredibly difficult and I spent like a good hour hour and a half working on it at least but I found that I was able to keep most of the stuff underneath uh this area where the feet Wells used to be by the back seats just across there and keep most of the camping gear under there but yeah this is pretty much the completed car so far I can't think of much more than that I need to add to this I need to do a little bit more shopping just to fill out some other things that I'll be needing but this is what it looks like thank you all for watching the first episode of spark Freedom keep an eye out for my next episode where I'm going to be testing out the car camper see what works see what I need and see what I don't need uh for now just like And subscribe thank you for watching

Channel: SparkFreedom

Views: 4,908

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Id: yLY-SAF2ZrI

Length: 16min 23sec (983 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 05 2024