One of the main reasons we sold our Super Van and switched to this 2001 Ford F-250 pickup was comfort: We camp at the track when we go racing, and the van just didn’t have the necessary creature comforts–or the roof height–that we wanted for a week-long camping trip.
How’s a standard-bed pickup truck going to solve that? Forum user Ian F asked just that question in the comments on our very first truck update:
Little did he know we had an ace up our sleeve. A plan that, assuming we could pull it off, would turn our pickup truck into the most comfortable track-side suite on the block.
Welcome to the world of slide-in campers. These are basically RVs without the running gear, and designed to drop right onto the back of a pickup truck. What’s the point? Here’s why we chose this route instead of a traditional RV or camping trailer:
As soon as we purchased our Ford F-250, we started shopping for a camper to accompany it. For months and months, we kept an eye on Facebook and Craigslist, waiting for the right deal to pop up. Why’d it take so long? Just like our truck search, we had a list of must-haves that eliminated most of the candidates. We didn’t have a long-bed truck, but we wanted a feature normally found on long-bed campers: the bathroom. And by “bathroom” we didn’t mean a porta potty in the corner. We wanted a real bathroom with tanks and a door and a shower. Call us picky or thin-skinned or whatever, but real luxury is reading the morning paper in the comfort of your own home and not in a dirty track-side bathroom stall.
We also had a slim budget–about $3000–eliminating the few standard-bed campers we found with bathrooms. Why not just buy a bigger camper? It’s important to match the camper to the truck, meaning size, center of gravity, and total weight all need to be correct. Add in our desire to tow a trailer, and we wanted something the correct size for our truck.
Finally, we found what we were looking for while skimming the dregs of Facebook Marketplace. This beautiful 2004 Travel Lite Mountain Star was for sale just a few hours from home, and seemed to tick all the boxes. This was back in the pre-coronavirus times, so we didn’t think twice about hopping in the truck to go buy something a stranger had recently pooped in.
Later that evening, we’d barely attached our newest portable home to our truck with four ratchet straps and parted with 3200 hard-earned dollars. We were Mountain Star owners, and it felt good. After a terrifying drive home on the highway with our improvised tie-downs, we went to sleep that evening with visions of luxury track-side accommodations and rugged backcountry travel with all the comforts of home. We’d basically bought our own track-side villa.
Then we woke up and realized the previous night’s mistake–maybe we shouldn’t have bought an RV in the dark, even if it was the only one we’d seen under budget in months. It wasn’t all bad news–we’d checked that the major systems worked fine and the interior was serviceable–but it soon dawned on us that we’d badly misinterpreted the previous owner’s repairs.
We should take a step back here and describe how the vast majority of campers–slide-in or otherwise–are built. Start with a wooden platform, build a box of our 2x2 boards, then cover with aluminum or fiberglass skin on the outside and thin plywood on the inside. Top it all off with some caulk and accessories, and the result is cheap to build, fairly lightweight, and flexible enough to go down the road without breaking apart.
Notice we didn’t say “waterproof.” Except for fancy one-piece fiberglass campers that were well out of our price range, there’s no such thing as a waterproof camper of any style. Keeping one from dissolving takes yearly cleaning and resealing, and even that regimen only slows down the water. Keeping a camper alive long-term means storing it inside, period. And unlike cars, these things don’t fit in a normal garage, so they sit outside. Once water gets in, the wood rots, which means things move more than they should, allowing more water in, etc. It’s a positive feedback loop that means you should never, ever buy a used RV.
But when have we ever listened to our own advice? We knew our camper had been renovated at some point, and the various colors of caulk outside, fresh interior paneling inside, and excess staples along the bottom of the exterior skin told the story of a well-meaning owner who’d realized they had some rotten wood and fixed it to the best of their ability, even if they didn't have the skills to finish it the way a professional would have. We weren’t that worried about appearances, as long as the underlying wood was sound–and who could possibly screw up replacing a few 2x2s?
Yeah, we judged that one wrong. As soon as we got the camper home, we pulled off all four jacks to get a real feel for what needed to be fixed. And the news wasn’t good. We’d assumed the previous owner had replaced rotten wood before installing fresh paneling, but the deeper we dove, the more we realized the real picture: This thing had been rotten beyond all belief, so they threw out the rotten interior paneling, shoved a few new boards in here and there, caulked it all back together, and sold it before it disintegrated.
After hundreds of deals, we’ve gotten used to gambling on unknowns. We’re still up overall, but this gamble was a bad hand by any definition.
We’d signed up to become camper restorers without even knowing it, but there was no turning back now. Until we fixed the Mountain Star (correctly) we couldn’t even put it back on our truck, never mind trying and camp in it.
But this isn’t a magazine or a website about camper restoration, so we’ll put the keyboard down and let these photos tell the story of the next few months of nights and weekends. It took a few hundred dollars in materials and hundreds of hours of time, but we ended up with a camper that’s stronger than it was when it left the factory, and probably more waterproof, too.
We’d fixed the camper, but that didn’t mean we were ready to use our track-side villa yet. Before we could leave the yard with it, we needed proper tie-down points, meaning steel brackets either mounted to our bed or our frame. We also needed a way to tow a trailer, even with our portable home hanging out over the rear bumper and blocking our stock hitch. We’ll find solutions to both–and take the Mountain Star for a test drive–in our next update.
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I looked at a few slide-in campers back when I had my Dodge Cummins. Especially since the truck had already been setup for one (brackets welded to the frame between the cab and bed). Unfortunately, I never found a camper that met my "must fit bicycles inside" requirement. So I ended back with vans.
I trust you were able to do a better job of connecting the camper to the truck wiring than the PO of my truck did - which was the "hack the berk out of the trailer wiring harness" method...
Will you keep it on a majority of the time or take it in and out of the truck?
Is it really that impossible, in 2020, to build a reasonably priced box that keeps the weather outside on a reasonably permanent basis?
In reply to Tom Suddard :
I found most slide in campers built as cheaply as possible in order to be price competitive. Cheaply made things aren't durable and the cost of replacing well everything to be much more expensive then just buying new.
( and I don't charge myself for labor I perform. )
In reply to frenchyd :
I assumed that would be the case, too, but a new one with this layout and options was about $25,000. That pays for a lot of my time replacing 2x4s.
In reply to grover :
With some practice, I've got the installation/removal process down to about 20 minutes, so it spends most of its time off the truck.
In reply to Tom Suddard :
Wow- that's not bad at all! I really would love to have a slide in. When we were in Maine, the slide in campers could stay overnight in some parks when others could not.
Yeah, this threads the needle pretty well. In areas where slide-ins aren't allowed it's just a white class C (What gap? I don't see it? What?), and in areas where RVs aren't allowed it's just a truck with a box on the back (Really? You'd sleep in my cargo in my pickup truck? Weird!).
This heightens my appreciation for my nice metal car hauler.
In the 70's had a F-250 and a rather long and heavy Travel Queen camper. Rather unnerving to drive as the bed/camper seem to have a rolling motion different from the cab. Back then they had some shock absorbers or damper that connected to the front overhang of camper to the truck cowl which helped a great deal. We used it a lot as young married couple with just one child at the time. Lots of weekends and vacations. Sometimes bit cramped but miles ahead of the tent we were used to.
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