Cheers from Mid-Maryland!

[iconicflux]

I've been in the group for years but I've been a lurker until just recently.

I've tried for years to get my wife to let me build a camper of some type without any success until recently something changed. She decided that she wants to do some RV traveling and so I went about doing a search for *every* type of RV that I could get that can sleep 5 in the US and still be reasonably towed behind a SUV while fully loaded and came up empty.

Amazingly, there wasn't anything. Everything had one problem or another. Most were near gvwr for the Highlander Hybrid (max tow capacity 3500 lbs) even before adding water and baggage. From experience, you really want the car to have about 500-800 lbs to spare even when loaded or it struggles on some steep inclines.

So here I am... with my wife's buy-in, funding for a sweeeet build, and big plans.

I'm a hacker / reverse engineer by trade. Which is to say that I get paid to break things and/or figure out how they work. I normally work against mobile and embedded devices but I can break about anything that someone points me at including physical security/card access systems, websites/ecommerce, and more. Part of knowing how to break things is knowing how to build them too so I'm a DIY guy. Kind of to an extreme. I love reverse engineering things that companies charge big money for and have done it from everything to electronics, to medicine/vitamins, food, tea, and way more.

So now I'm trying to apply those skills towards figuring out the mechanics of slide-outs and popups with an eye towards how to do them ourselves while coming up with something cheaper and more reliable.

My wife has set a pretty fast schedule for me to get to building with an eye towards off-grid living for 5 for a week at a time so I'll be posting updates pretty regularly beginning the end of February. I'm thinking I might record the progress and turn it into a vlog or podcast once a week.

[pchast]

Welcome!

I'll be following what you come up with
after that stirring introduction.