Ultimate Transformation: Military Truck to Luxury Apartment Tour [Adventure Ready 007]

all right folks we are here the final day of Overland Expo we're about talked out but I got one more conversation to have and that is with Mike ladden of Drive the globe now there are three sure things in life death taxes and Mike laddin and a big orange truck that's right so this is your well this is technically the fourth big orange truck believe it or not second uh stor and Stevenson in a row so gotta gotcha so what are we what are we looking at here we are looking at uh my newest build which is a uh 2002 storan Stevenson it's an old army truck that I essentially turn into what I call my home but it's a uh it's a a motor home I guess this one would be six-wheel drive though wow what kind of rubber we rolling on those are 48 in tires is that all uh yeah is that all okay 48 in tires uh what do you air down to so what's nice about this truck is it has Central tire inflation I saw that so it's push button uh and it has modes for mud for sand for Highway wow uh so it has preset and you just do it from the cab on the Fly it's nice cuz you're you can come down you know a road and you cut off into a you know a nice Sandy Sandy off back Country Road or something and you just hit the button and you're good to go no no stopping no airing up no airing down nice it's nice that is cool well the uh wrap turned out fantastic it looks really really good yeah so I kind of like to keep uh everybody kind of knows me obviously by the orange truck so each truck each iteration if you will I kind of like to keep the Heritage going and make little changes so this truck I decided to name I've never named a truck before so I named it beob Baba after the big uh African Tri of life okay and I went with the tree theme so I wanted to put some trees on the side and as we go inside you'll see I even have a little a little mini Tree in my kitchen so nice awesome before we get in there you've got some fun activities back here motivation really between uh the last truck and this one the reason I guess uh if you will why I built the new rig is that I wanted to get my motorcycles and my bicycle inside okay so essentially it's very similar to the last truck with the addition of this 4ft garage and if you remember my old truck at all um the length is actually not much longer cuz everything was hanging off the back right okay so this motorcycle uh I'll call it Contraption actually runs on a cordless drill believe it or not okay and uh it's really easy to operate so we can go if we want to come up and up comes the [Music] motorcycle shft [Music] gear and that's it really and then it pulls in it just it just slides in on the track wow so it takes me about 4 minutes to load or unload the bike which is nice because as you know and for my years on the road you find out if it's too much work and it takes too long you're not doing it that's true right that's so true so I really wanted to make it super fast so that makes it super fast and then the same thing you'll go back out we go down yeah that so super easy to load you just put the bike in the wheel Tru pull it up and that's it that is nuts dude how much does that bike weigh so my bike is fairly light it weighs about uh probably about 425 lbs with with the equipment on it but this thing is rated to lift I think 1,850 lbs you could put a Harley on wow yeah that is nuts so the other Advantage about the garage is that all of my sort of equipment is in here solar controllers uh inverter converter my AC stuff my DC stuff U my battery bank is back here the water tank is back here so if anything goes wrong it's easy access it's all in one location and it gets it out of the habitat yeah and it freed up probably 50 60% more cabin uh cabinet space that's that's the ticket right there cuz there's nothing worse than having to pull stuff out of cabinets or pull panels off the wall and try to find oh where where's the where's the breaker where's the problem right I'm trying to find it um how how many amp hours are you running so on this truck uh I was able to improve my off-grid capabilities if you will right so I went with 1,000 amp hours of lithium for the battery bank there's 2,000 uh watts of solar on the roof my tank my water tank went from 85 gallons I think on the last truck this is 170 Gall of water you got a bathtub in there well no I wish I did but I do have enough I figured out to take a shower every single day I use about four gallons a shower so I think I can go almost two months off grid even taking a shower every wow so the capacities are a lot bigger so that's you know as you know it's it's electric it's water and food are sort of the limiting factors of how long you can stay you know off CRI that's awesome man yeah let's see what you got going on inside of course you obviously we kind of walked on it this truck also has a rear deck so it's going to be nice I cannot wait to be able to back up to a river or something and just sit up here on my chair right oh that's going to be so cool oh my gosh this is nuts man this is gorgeous so I like to call this you know this is my kitchen right I've got pretty much everything since I live full t on the road it's been 3 and years now okay um I've got my stove I've got an oven down below here right uh up above I've got a microwave and then obviously I got coffee machine and toaster the goal here really was that I could roll into camp and not have to do anything my setup and takeown time is pretty much zero everything is fastened down so I don't I mean even the plant the the you know the computer everything is its app so there's really nothing to set up and take down on this build that was kind of a and here's my tree yeah I love it um he just folds up it's a little table so if I need extra space to work on got um one of the changes that I found and I wanted to make sure for the future if I need to modify anything I created a Chase on this truck so these panels come off and so does this one in the middle so I can bring things in from the garage okay um in the future and I'm decided to go all tou screen so I have Garin power switches they control like lighting and all the rest of the stuff it's all just being done on an iPad here wow and you know Amazon Echo Show or whatever so she does all my music so everything is sort of like you know the ability Now with uh starlink I have high-speed internet on board all the time right right so I don't have to worry about that stuff all my controls my solar and my battery and whatnot are you know mounted on that wall I like this ceiling too that's really yeah ceiling is uh you know it's actually Amazon so you know I tried not use wood because you know traveling around all the time you're always switching climates and whatnot so you know it's plastic really ceiling uh vinyl wood floor these are actually IKEA cabinets I take fck online about that sometimes but people say aren't they're not going to hold up well I've been beating around for three years now they hold up nice so it's all Ikea uh the fridge is under here the the the pull out I've got um it's going on here I got a a dual zone uh fridge here in the habitat and then I have another Dual Zone fridge actually in the cab oh really W so I have uh this is a 75 and that's a 65 okay plenty of space plent of space yeah so once again that increases my time I can stay off road right AB absolutely and then um going down this way we've got one of my requirements was a real shower so you know I got a real shower with a glass door uh and it's you know a decent size and it's not a wet bass so it's a separate you know toilet and uh and sink room in there holy cow and a little throwback to all my past you know trucks there's actually orange number one and orange number two wow so there yeah so you can take a whiz and think back remember there's the Artic Circle on the dster highway way and we got Egypt up here the pyramids this is me going across on my Land Rover oh wow so and then the bed back here and once again keeping with the tree theme I kind of decided to decorate with some some Birch Aspen trees or whatnot on the wall That's gorgeous man the other thing I did was put a a port hole in on the back here so when I open the garage doors which I typically do a lot yeah I have a view out another side of the truck that I didn't have before so that's kind of cool okay and AC right above your head there uh it's rooftop doedic uh AC 12vt okay so y y what size bed uh this is a fullsize bed so it's but it's a real bed like you know I got a 13in mattress or something so it's a real mattress so it's you know comfortable and I travel around so much that people always inviting me you know hey I got a spare bedroom or whatever I'm like no I'm going to S my own bed it's nice I'm good you poor thing you know even been living outside come in right exactly exactly U nice wardrobe here yeah wardrobe you know they you know all the doors open up you got you got hanging and you got uh shelves and whatnot um that's the one thing I gained from the last truck is I've been able to once again moving everything to the garage okay I've got more wardrobe the bump out on my prior truck um for this space it was the was the angled bump out in the back right where the bed was now it's wider so I've been able to add more cabinets in the bedroom so even though it's the same square footage as my last truck it's like much bigger that's awesome so I haven't seen this I had no preview to what we were walking into and I'm I'm legitimately amazed now how long I I heard rumors but how long did it take you to build this that's the bad that's the that's the tough part here okay so living fulltime with no actual home anywhere right I have to do it fairly quickly so I sold the last uh rig at Overland Expo West right in fact I had like 20 people pack it up for me and I drove a U-Haul picked this truck up in St Louis and then drove it to the east coast I built this in three months holy crap dude 18 hours a day no days off yeah that's awesome you couldn't hire a shop to do it that fast no not no no and and granted I did have a bunch of buddies sure uh and Friends helping out on various things and various projects but it was uh it was a it was a tough go fantastic unbelievable well I guess the last thing is the cab can we see what this looks like look at it yeah dude I'm serious it's so I I came in Expo feet tired I bet I I finished you know I finished building this on Sunday last Sunday a week from today holy cow this door's open that other door open so if you want I don't know if you want go in there or all right so what are we what am I looking at here so this is the cab um these things come from the military pretty Spartan you know they're loud they're metal they don't have any insulation so I basically insulated it carpeted it um put in the shilon seats so they're super comfortable and uh the ice co uh refrigerator the second dual zone is behind in between the two seats and uh just kind of you know made it look a little bit more um what I would call less military I guess that's the best way you could describe it that's pretty comfy yeah those seats are nice they got dual armrest actually there another armrest that comes down on this side wow they're heated so it's heated seats uh air conditioning features that you would not expect necessarily in an old army truck it's nice I mean if you think about it people ask how does this thing ride it's on it's on air suspension on the cab it's p you know it's power steering it's air brakes it's touch you know it's Touch button uh automatic transmission okay yeah so it drives great and the windshield is huge so your view is amazing yeah it's I mean this is like widecreen HD yeah wow got a rear backup up cameras uh so I could see if you know I navigate with the uh with the new Garin tread so the big question a lot of people have on something this size is you know do you feel do you feel confined sometimes with how big it is so I tell people there is no perfect Overland vehicle right uh there's always something wrong they're either big or they're too small or too something uh uh this has its limitations just cuz it's big it's like a tractor it will go Offroad through amazing stuff okay much more suited to out Western United States where it's less trees um I personally since it's my home I take it pretty far off grid and do more than most people probably would expect but I got the motorcycle so I am much more inclined to go out and sometimes I'll even pre- Scout I'll take the motorcycle out and I can judge whether or not it's it's a great place to take the truck really that's that's such a good combo I mean I I actually started doing that with a mountain bike that we that we run with now and it's yeah it's a great combo I I'm legitimately just wow this is incredible I'm jealous I'm officially jealous don't show this to Sarah please I'm going to have to hide this footage from her she's going to be like can we let's talk to Mike about what what can we build here stle overland's next setup look like oh man and I saw you got automatic awnings up here to yeah so I mostly use the awnings to um keep the Sun out of the windows and I put awnings on both sides for that reason that's perfect that's perfect and because the truck's so high of course they're they're powered awnings cuz you can't get up there to reach them to yeah very cool well Mike again always a pleasure fun thanks coming out Kevin it's been awesome thank you for giving me this tour I'm uh again I'm just it's an incredible footprint incredible build and you've done an amazing job in an unbelievable short amount of time so good job let's go camping let's do it man let's do it let's take this thing out to the hot springs somewhere absolutely all right guys we'll see you on the next [Music] one

Channel: Lifestyle Overland

Views: 150,078

Keywords: overland, overlanding, camping, outdoors, adventure, adventures with purpose, adventure time, stewart stevenson military truck, stewart stevenson camper, 6x6, adventure build, walkthrough, overland rig, overland full time

Id: 9DxaE96JgXI

Length: 16min 3sec (963 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 31 2023