The first trip with my Bison Camper and some ramblings about what to build

Over six months I chipped away at getting parts for my camper build-out. I bought two battery backup systems during holiday sales, a used 12V fridge on Facebook Marketplace, and an assortment of electrical and build-out supplies from my favorite lumberyard, Mr. Plywood in Portland, Oregon. From my cumulative years spent in various campers, I knew I wanted it to be super simple with an emphasis on modularity. Ultimately, I wanted a comfortable place to sleep, store my gear, and be respite from the elements that would allow me to truly camp in all four seasons.

I had a rough idea in my head of a build I wanted to do with the interior space, most notably a slide-out bed with enough height underneath it to allow me to fit a 110 L cooler for bringing meat during hunting season, all while maximizing headroom in my non-pop-top camper. Unlike my electrical setups in the past that were custom Lipo systems that cost thousands of dollars and charged off the vehicle's alternator, I wanted to go simple and cheap with an integrated battery system and a healthy amount of solar panels. Instead of a complicated, expensive, and time-consuming storage system that looked like an engineer's wet dream, I wanted to use existing storage solutions like Pelican cases, Yeti coolers, and bins that are all secured with a grid of T-slots.

Lloyd Kahn once told me that he thinks people should camp out at their property for a few months before they pick a site to build, let alone design a house. I feel a similar way about campers. We live in an age of clickbait YouTube designs that mesmerize when we are tired and dissociating but are overkill for actually using. Camper buildout companies make money by selling people more shit than they need and allow boomer husbands to rationalize their purchases to their boomer wives that will likely never set foot in it. These forces combine to make most off-the-shelf options far too expensive for most people to own or DIY options that are far too ambitious in their DIY skills and miss the mark. I wanted my camper to fall somewhere between these schools of thought, and I decided to take the camper on a trip before I did anything permanent.

Foam composite campers require different attachment methods to metal- or wood-framed campers than I'm used to. Turns out these campers are built with glues and tapes like modern airplanes. Using 3/4-inch Baltic birch ply in compression, I decided to try using double-sided tape to hold up the slide-out bed platform together, most notably attaching the vertical struts to the side of the camper. If I didn't like the orientation of the bed or wanted a shorter pullout, I could strip the double-sided tape from the walls and try another design. To support the weight, I decided to use a 3/4-inch sheet of Baltic to span the 70 inches from side to side and reinforced it with a 3-inch strip of the same plywood glued and screwed to the outside edge. I bought a full-size, 5-inch foam mattress off Amazon and some LL Bean flannel sheets. After a few hours on the table saw and sanding with an orbital sander, the pullout bed was done and felt far more sturdy than something that was stuck together with tape.

My electrical system in the camper is set up around a few hundred watts of solar up top and a standalone power backup from an EcoFlow Delta 2 wired into a simple 12V marine fuse panel with a 12V socket. The heater, fridge, interior light, and fan are wired into the fuse box like a normal system. As better options for standalone systems come out, I can upgrade and simply plug in my solar panels and connect the battery to my 12V fuse panel. I bought the EcoFlow on sale for $400. It has a built-in charge controller, inverter, and USB chargers, all for less than the cost of a 12V Lipo battery. The old fridge I bought for $375 works great, although it is a bit loud. I like the simple controls, just a knob with mods from 0 to 5 for a deep freeze. The size was great for sustaining myself for a week and bringing back half a blacktail deer from Sonoma. I won't change it.

On advice from Drew, the owner of Bison Overland, I used a commercial adhesive and self-tapping screws to attach the tracks of the T-slot to the floor of the camper. For the floor I used some ABS garage flooring that I rolled out and cut around the tracks of the T-slot. I haven't glued it down yet and have had zero problems so far. The locking T slots are the perfect way to keep stuff attached and locked down.

After a week and a half straight in the camper, there's little I'll change. The bed and storage system worked well; the solar provided more than enough juice to keep my fridge frozen and bring the deer quarters back from Sonoma. The double sided 3m tape and glue worked great and I’m planning on adding a few small storage bins attached by tape to the walls for holding small objects like headlamps and socks. The camper is hands down my favorite camper I've had since buying my Syncro back in 2011, and my attachment to that camper was more of an emotional one than a rational one. All in, my camper cost around 23k and a few days of building in my shop. It's perfect for how I plan on using it and can't wait to take it into the mountains this summer to escape the heat and to chase deer and elk this fall around the west.