Very High Quality Molded Expedition Cabin
NEWER EDIT: The shell's gone to a local ExPo member. See the 8/06/09 post below.
EDIT 5/31/09: The shell's going to stay here, probably serving as a backyard guest cottage to get it out of storage. Thanks for the interest.
Mikey's Prepackaged Instant Overlanding Vehicle . . . Just add truck.
It's looking like the EarthRoamer Jeep is not going anywhere, so here's another offering to free me up some space.
I have a close-to-unique fiberglass expedition cabin that has been around for years waiting for me to do something with it. The shell is very thick, 1.50 inches for the bottom half and 1.25 for the top and molded of cored fiberglass the same way as yacht hulls. My guess (untested) is that this shell could stand up to being rolled. No one quite knows what it weights; the guess is 1500 pounds, but it could be as much as 500 pounds more or less.
Safari Vehicles Manufacturing, the former Richmond, BC expedition vehicle manufacturer, only molded three. This white one is the one the president of Safari Vehicle Manufacturing finished off for his own use and mounted on a U140L Unimog:
and the other two are in the Portland area, the green one I have and there's a raw white one I sold to a fellow Unimogger a couple years back. It cost SVM something better than $25K for the raw shells themselves--probably one reason why they only made three before switching to NidaCore--with the price of the finished shell on a U140L being something better than $200K almost ten years ago. So you can see why I thought it'd be a good idea to grab one to make into a rugged go-anywhere overlander.
The opportunity to get this one came up when SVM closed and the shell ended up at a BC Mog dealer. Unfortunately, they stripped the appliances and then, through carelessness, the door was left open and a year or two worth of winter weather got into the cabin, causing the wood parts to become stained and mildewed and ruining the less waterproof parts. After getting a lead from a Unimogger, I bought it and had it shipped to Portland. Now, after paying to move it around and store it for several years, it'd be nice if it got finished off, put on a truck and put to good use (and not coincidentally, out of my way).
As you can see, there are molded-in wheel wells at the midway point of the camper. If you mount this on a long-bed pickup (something with a cab-to-axle of 60-64"), the wheel wheels will pair up with the truck's. But if you wanted to mount the shell on a flatbed or bare frame, you could leave 'em be or else glass in the wheel wells--which isn't a bad idea, since you could turn them into tanks--and put it anywhere. (The wheel wells are mostly for looks; it'd be an unusual big truck that would use the space for articulation once the camper was mounted on a subframe.)
Not that ya'll need engineering help, but I've been screwing around with this for six years now, so I've thought of about every alternative. If you look at the photo gallery link below, there are photos/diagrams with very detailed measurements, as well as a number of quick-and-dirty side views of the shell mounted on a variety of chassis.
One nice feature is that it has a completed (undamaged) shower room with a Thetford cassette toilet, a vent fan and shower head and valves. There's also a fair amount (about 75% maybe) of the plumbing and wiring already done. And all of the wood parts are included, so if you wanted to replicate the Safari floorplan, the wood pieces can serve as templates and you could rebuild the cabinets that need redone very quickly. (Alternately, you could paint the wood pieces; they're not rotted or anything, just stained and mildewed.) Another nice thing is that I bought all-new Seitz double-pane windows with the blind-screen cassettes, so making the shell weatherproof wouldn't take but an afterrnoon and a couple tubes of Sikaflex.
Check here for some additional pictures and the measurements:
http://picasaweb.google.com/mhiscox01/FiberglassCampingShell
and if you read the captions, there's some useful information about the shell's current condition.
If you like the original layout, it'd be pretty easy to finish it off. But even if you gut it and do your own layout, you'll have a really fine piece without the extremely substantial effort of building a cabin this solid. It might even be something someone'd want to buy for resale; a decade ago Safari had a plan to get $140K for the finished shells mounted on F350s. (And, FWIW, the shell is almost exactly the same size as the body on a quarter-million dollar EarthRoamer XV-LT without the cabover extension.)
I've got a small fortune in this, much of it the result of renting it storage spaces and paying a rollback wrecker to move it around. Beyond that, though, I've got $7K in it. How about $3,000 even to someone from the Portal (and that includes $1,500 of new Seitz windows) assuming you can come and fetch it in the next few weeks. Interested persons anywhere near Portland should arrange to come and see it.
If you're interested--and I hope you are--let me know ASAP, by posting here or PM'ing me, what questions you have and whether you'd like some photos posted of some specific area(s) of the shell.
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Originally Posted by Terrainist
Someone grab this quick, it will be sweet on the back of any vehicle!
