Hi All,
Actually from Lara but more people will understand where Geelong is.
My partner and I like nothing more than to get away - any way we can. We are keen photographers and love camping, fishing 4x4ing and just traveling.
We have plenty to choose from -
a swag (yes the real variety) and tent
a Sturt Camper Trailer from Outback campers (soon to be up for sale once I can get it out of the garage)
a F250 motorhome (another one to go on ebay soon)
a semi offroad caravan
a Toyota 4x4 tray to pull said caravan and
a steel slide on canopy to use in places where we want to ditch the caravan.
It's a lot of stuff, but has been collected along the way whilst working out how we are going to tackle the big lap (or laps) once we finally tear ourselves away from working.
The steel canopy will go soon - it's great, but doesn't really suit our needs. A replacement slide on is on the drawing boards and hopefully will be under way soon.
I have been reading various construction threads on here with great interest, and am still tossing up between using composite panel or metal tubing frame with an ally skin of some sort.
I love the idea of the composite panels for their lightness and ease of construction, but the tube and ally skin should be a great deal cheaper and importantly should give better strength as I intend it to be a pop top with bed out over the cab. If I go down the tube track I am thinking that Stainless steel tubing may be the way to go - it can be easily tig welded I understand and isn't that much heavier than aluminium tube. I have done some arc welding before but being self taught it looked a bit ugly. If I could find someone to show me how to tig weld stainless I reckon that would be the way to go, or I might just pay someone to do it if the price isn't too prohibitive.
I looked into the idea of using square aluminium tubing and joiners from flexliner (they are the ones with a steel core) but I'm just a little concerned about strength for the peak area which would be canterleavered.
Anyway, once I have a couple more design ideas sorted out I'll start a construction thread in case anyone is interested.
Cheers,
Neil
