Getting Started

Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, to make your very own vintage-style camper without spending a lot of money? Starting from scratch, a new trailer frame would cost at least $400. And that would be just the beginning.

I noticed that old pop-up campers were often selling for less than the price of their frames. People get tired of jockeying around them in the driveway or having them just rot away in the backyard. I figured that if I bought a pop up in need of repair, I could throw out everything I didnt need and keep the things I could repurpose.

Things like a refrigerator, a stove, a cooktop, a voltage converter, and hopefully a furnace (you know, Wisconsin and all). It took a while but the perfect one came along. The previous owner had put new wheels and tires on it and was selling it for $100. Sold.
It only took 2 days with a sawsall and a prybar to turn it into a cleaned off metal frame. Inside I had an ivory sink and gas cooktop that looked like they had never been used. No furnace but I salvaged the roof vent and all the marker lights. In addition I had things to sell on craigslist: A full set of cushions in great shape (and not very stinky considering the mold factor inside the camper) as well as a complete set of lift components to make the pop up , well, pop.

Luckily for me the garbage collectors took every single scrap of the camper demolition. No snotty notes or whiny attitudes like Waste Management leaves for people.
The next step was to clean all the glue and bit of schmutz off the frame, grind away any surface rust and then a good coating of Rustoleum Rusty Metal Primer and a basecoat of paint.
I was originally planning on replacing the trailer jack as it was a little grungy and replacements are quite inexpensive. I found out that the frame hole diameters for A-frame jacks, as they are called, is smaller now than it was when this baby was built in 1998. They used to be 1 7/8" and nowadays (that's camper talk) they are 2" or 2 1/4".

After the frame was primed and painted and allowed to harden up for a few days, I got new plywood for the subfloor. Originally the pop-up had 5/8" chipboard, but that seamed a little too fluffy for me so I got 3/4" CDX plywood.  Although statistics show that OSB (which is a little lighter) has equal strength characteristics, I still felt more secure with the CDX. First of all pop-up frames are not solid square tubing like "real" trailers, they are just bent steel. I figured that the CDX would give me a little extra torsion strength as this new camper bounces along.

I was able to re-purpose the galvanized wheel wells and attach them to the new plywood floor. Then the ply got glued and screwed to the frame. I found really cool wood-to-metal screws that have a small drill bit on the tip and little wings to ream out the wood on their way down. These are very slick and worked great on the soft camper frame. I don't know if they would have worked on stronger steel. 

The next step was to fabricate a wooden frame around the galvanized metal wheel wells to protect them as well as to adapt the old metal edge to the new camper. Now it's time to flip the whole thing over and do the undercoating.