6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Converting Cargo Trailers into TTTs

Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby m.colley » Fri Jul 28, 2017 4:42 pm

Mark959,
Here's a easy to follow way to check tongue weight using a bathroom scale. I've verified the results on a CAT scale and they were real close. Check out this link https://www.etrailer.com/faq-how-to-det ... eight.aspx.


Martin

BTW,
I use figure B to check mine.
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby McDave » Fri Jul 28, 2017 5:54 pm

Again, very similar method. The reason I used the longer legs was so I wouldn't have to get the "foot" onto the horiz. and could weigh at the ball cup and still have the foot close to the ground, just in case. I knew I should be close to 400lbs TW so 200 on scale. Scale limit 300.

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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Tue Aug 01, 2017 11:06 pm

Roof rack is solid, now I just need to attach the cross members and solar panels up there... No pics yet. Been in a rush to get done before my camping trip :shock:

Mocked it up though, plenty of room for the panels. Might throw a couple pipes up for fishing poles, etc
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Sun Aug 06, 2017 4:32 pm

Finished roof rack and power systems thursday night, tried to go camping friday. Got about 3 hours out when the throttle cable started sticking on the truck...

200 tongue weight isn't enough for lighter tow vehicles, it gets squirrely. The truck is heavy enough it didn't mind, but it rode a lot better when I put it back to the original setup (i had the bbq and propane tanks in the back, 100lbs in weights, and all my water). I want an affordable, comfortable tow vehicle that can handle it, looks like class 2 hitch is the bare minimum.


Solar panels seem to be keeping up with the fridge so far though. Been off-grid since Friday morning and it doesn't seem to have tripped off!
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby McDave » Mon Aug 14, 2017 2:39 am

Alright. That's what I like to hear. I can see that solar charging is definitely in my future. I like to have the battery fully charged before I leave the camp for the day, cause you never know for sure how long you will be gone. But I wont run the gen before 9am or after dark. I can charge with the truck but at a slower rate.
Hey I feel your pain with the throttle cable. That could be real dangerous. I had a little excitement of my own late Thurs nite/Fri am. We were supposed to leave for Sturgis approx. 9-9:30pm but didn't hit the 2 laner till after midnight. About 10 miles out I reached over and turned on the AC on med fan, and almost immediately thick white smoke came out of every vent in the dash. Visibility became zero within 5 seconds. I turned everything off and started emergency landing procedures. When I got her stopped I opened the hood with fire extinguisher in hand and....nothing. No smoke, no smell, no noise. Nothing. When I opened the cabin door the entire van was filled with smoke. The smoke wasn't electrical or rubber or oil/gas, it smelled just like prairie fire. We didn't go past any fires so WTF? We opened all doors and aired it out, tested all systems everything seems fine. Got back on the road turned on the AC to med and no smoke, OK. A few minutes later I realized that the fan wasn't working on low/med/med high, only on high fan. I knew what had happened. The resistor board for the fan speed control had burned up. When I took it out I found leaves, cotton, and bug skeletons had built up on the evaporator right in front of the resistor board. When it finally got close enough to the resistors it ignited, and the fan just stoked it real good. Luckily, that board is thermal fuse protected, so it cut the power to the fan quickly. Easy fix, but who thinks to clean the evap on your truck?

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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby tylerjd » Mon Aug 14, 2017 1:06 pm

Mark959 wrote:Finished roof rack and power systems thursday night, tried to go camping friday. Got about 3 hours out when the throttle cable started sticking on the truck...


I'm about to tackle the roof rack for solar on my CT and it's got me scratching my head a bit, partly due to the curved roof same as yours I believe. I'll be very interested to see pics of your roof rack!

Great thread and build, keep up the great work. :thumbsup:
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Thu Aug 17, 2017 6:24 pm

I made it on a 700 mile round trip, truck and trailer did great getting there....

The return trip I heard a belt squeal, thought it was the power steering and pushed on. Welp it was the alternator belt. Blew the alternator, but I upgraded long ago to group 31 batteries so I was able to make it home. Got a new alternator already, will dig in to this one to see if its the regulator or what.. I will rebuild it if so, good to have a spare. If its the coils I will probably just toss it in the scrap minus the regulator

Roof rack did well, I will post pics asap. Basically I took angle and square tubing - welded the square to the angle and sat it in the drip channel. Lost a solar panel on the return trip since I didn't lash it down properly enough for the wind force of 70mph plus the extreme winds of the gorge (50+ gusts, together would be around at least 120mph against the panels... not counting the cars and semis passing me when I was going 70 - which is the speed limit) Got a new panel, its my fault for rushing the process, I just needed to anchor that side and it would have prevented that issue.

tylerjd wrote:I'm about to tackle the roof rack for solar on my CT and it's got me scratching my head a bit, partly due to the curved roof same as yours I believe. I'll be very interested to see pics of your roof rack!

Great thread and build, keep up the great work. :thumbsup:


Thank you! If you like my roof rack design and need a hand with it let me know...


Hopefully my bad luck (and stupidity) will come to an end soon. It happens in 3's right? I tightened the power steering and thought it was still the squealer before we had left. Lesson learned :cry:



roof rack bracket.jpg
roof rack bracket.jpg (138.14 KiB) Viewed 4039 times

Pics of the roof rack bracket, I had to measure it by myself and came up an inch short when I changed my plans... If I redo this all I will get 1 1/4" perforated square tubing and cut and reweld the brackets better. But as it is now its solid and strong. I need to take it back down and paint it, again I was in a rush and didn't expect rain in the desert during summer
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby hankaye » Thu Aug 17, 2017 9:59 pm

Mark959, Howdy;

Might consider welding some gussets to the area where the down tube attaches to the L bracket
that holds everything to the CT.
I'm kind of a belt-n-suspenders type when it comes to puttin' stuff together.

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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby tylerjd » Thu Aug 17, 2017 10:10 pm

Mark959 wrote:Pics of the roof rack bracket, I had to measure it by myself and came up an inch short when I changed my plans... If I redo this all I will get 1 1/4" perforated square tubing and cut and reweld the brackets better. But as it is now its solid and strong. I need to take it back down and paint it, again I was in a rush and didn't expect rain in the desert during summer


Heh, yeah in many deserts that's just about the only time it does rain. Thanks for the pics, really cool to see how you did that. I have neither a welder, nor the skills to use one, nor the time (at the moment) to learn, so I'll have to go a less creative route. ><
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Mon Aug 21, 2017 1:05 pm

tylerjd wrote:Heh, yeah in many deserts that's just about the only time it does rain. Thanks for the pics, really cool to see how you did that. I have neither a welder, nor the skills to use one, nor the time (at the moment) to learn, so I'll have to go a less creative route. ><


You could do similar with bolts, and angle iron gusseting like Hankaye suggested

hankaye wrote:Mark959, Howdy;

Might consider welding some gussets to the area where the down tube attaches to the L bracket
that holds everything to the CT.
I'm kind of a belt-n-suspenders type when it comes to puttin' stuff together.

hank

I was thinking the same, they are pretty solid but I will cut some angle iron and weld it in, thanks! That or maybe cut some plate into triangles... We'll see. It was a good test run!
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Mon Jan 08, 2018 2:27 pm

Well I got some 12v electrical wired in finally! I put a 4-switch panel by the door:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007H ... UTF8&psc=1

I used a drill bit to drill 4 holes in the shape of that panel, then used a thin jigsaw blade with vicegrips to hand cut the space. Doing this will help keep you from punching through the skin if you set the depth.

I got a milwaukee m12 soldering iron for Christmas, it works fantastically! I used it to help fish the wires, I have some of those glow in the dark rods, one has a hole on the end so I stripped about an inch of wire on each of a 2-14 ga wire, then ran one through the hole, twisted them together and soldered them. This let me easily pull them through and kept it from popping loose in the wall, then just cut off the end and was good to go. Maybe took an hour, I use each wire for the positive since I grounded the chassis, i can just tap into the frame.

I need to run another 2-14 for the 12v not-a-cigarette-lighter plug ins, I can run everything but the fridge off 12v now, I got a 12v plugin for my laptop, cellphone car chargers, 12v crock pot... Now I just need to ditch the fridge for a true 12v compressor model, I like the idea of the chest models but I will probably opt for an upright conventional fridge.

I also started installing the pine ceiling, I used some 1x2 wood I cut about 8" iirc mounted to the ceiling ribs, to "decouple" the screws that go into the ceiling material. I've heard directly mounting to the ribs can cause condensation and what not. I still need to finish installing the sound deadening panels and sound/thermal insulation... Also was thinking about using expanding foam in the ceiling ribs to help with insulation - anyone have thoughts or suggestions on that?
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby tylerjd » Fri Jan 12, 2018 6:40 pm

Mark959 wrote:Also was thinking about using expanding foam in the ceiling ribs to help with insulation - anyone have thoughts or suggestions on that?


If you mean drilling small holes in the ceiling ribs (it looks from your pictures that they are ~1" square tubing style like mine) and injecting expanding foam in there, in my opinion, that has almost no positive effect in terms of thermal insulation.

The reason is that the tubing acts as a heat fin and will conduct heat around the insulation stuff in the middle, very similar to how it would conduct electricity around the insulation. (the industry term for this is "thermal bridging"). Also, the air inside that tubing will function as an insulator anyways since there isn't enough space for convective air currents. So replacing that air "insulation" with foam insulation will have little effect on the insulation value of the inside of your tube - which doesn't really matter anyways, because heat is going to ignore the inside of the tube and just go around it.

Anything you can do to introduce insulation material *in between* the ceiling ribs and your inner surface will help - your wood blocks will help somewhat, for example.

Now, using expanding foam *around* the ribs should help, particularly if there are any little gaps and crevices between your foam board insulation and the ribs. However I have no experience with using foam that way and can't advise specifics. I am just using foam board and tape to seal everything up as I chose not to fuss with expanding foam products.

Note: I have no data or personal experience with injecting foam into 1" metal tubing. My opinion on it is based on all my courses in heat transfer in mechanical engineering school where I did a lot of analysis on thermal bridging in walls, and my work in the building industry where we help architects design envelope detailing to reduce thermal bridging. Most people severely underestimate the impact that thermal bridging makes on the thermal performance of walls - until you run the numbers and collect the data, your intuition is almost certainly going to be wrong. Mine certainly was!

PS If your ribs are not 1" rectangular tubing, but rather sort of U-shaped, then injecting foam up in there might have a small positive insulation effect.
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Wed Jan 17, 2018 1:01 pm

Thank you for your input, makes sense to me. They are u-channel ribs that i was going to pour the foam over into them, and i have some insulation strips about 3 inches wide i was going to lide between the roof and ribs. Guess ill skip the foam!

Wiring and insulation are going well, i will add pictures when i can.

For some reason i cant login on my pc, but my phone is still logged in at least :thumbsup:
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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby McDave » Tue Feb 20, 2018 1:54 am

Hey Mark,
Here is a set of steps that may be closer to what you need. I think that if mounted to bottom side of floor you would have a 6"ish drop to first stair, 6"ish to second stair, and another 6"ish to ground. So 18"ish ground to threshold should be pretty close, within an inch or two. Here is the link and a couple dimensional drawings.

https://truck-hardware.orrorr.com/item/ ... tep/m-1670
https://truck-hardware.orrorr.com/Asset/M1670B.pdf
https://truck-hardware.orrorr.com/Asset/M1670C.pdf

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Re: 6x10 Oregon Cargo Camper Conversion

Postby Mark959 » Thu Mar 08, 2018 1:54 am

Finally got my account back, the password reset email was being sent to spam :frightened:

@McDave thanks for those links, I made the steps I have adjustable - my temporary fix was to just slap some 1.5" blocks of wood under there where the step would rest on itself, lines everything up perfectly to equal step heights! I will probably make something more elegant in the future but it works for now...

Ceiling is halfway done, ceiling lights are all done and wired. Mounting the water tanks soon, fabbing up a gray tank for the sink. Also bought some cabinets for better storage... My goal is to finish the ceiling this weekend, maybe the cabinets too. I might hide a 24" tv behind the cabinets in the dead space created by the curved front end. I installed sound deadening sheets with metal backing material on the whole metal roof, its a lot less tin-canny now between the sheets, and also shoving ribbed sill seal between the roof and roof-ribs. I figure that should help insulate more plus the roof would pop and reverberate because the fit was loose, now its nice and firm! I used rock wool insulation in the roof as well, harder to install than the eps/white foam boards but I've heard those can magnify sounds, rock wool absorbs sound. With the clearance I should be around R-8 insulation with the wool batting, the insulated ceiling feels much "Warmer" than the bare unfinished portion, plus the sound sheets insulate some.

I know, pictures would be better. Soon!
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