Goodbye Demountable

It was a fantasy: with this combination I would be able to travel to the real “outback”, the places that can’t be reached in an “ordinary” vehicle. I would take it to Iceland and treck through the inhospitable interior where 2 wheel drive vehicles are banned. It would take me to the most inaccessible places where I could photograph the most elusive birds and revel in the solitude.

A fatal combination of factors lured me in. The young man selling it had a naïve enthusiasm for his creation. He reminded me of myself when young. We shared a fascination with the technicalities of living a relatively comfortable life off-grid. He had recently been to Iceland (not as it turned out with the camper) and inspired me to undertake a great “bucket list” adventure – a trip through Belgium and Germany to Denmark, thence by sea to the Faroe Islands and then to Iceland where I would spend 3 weeks exploring the wildlife and wilderness.

The price he was asking was comparable with other demountable campers. I knew nothing about pick-up trucks but could see it was clean and well looked after. How then did I manage to ignore the general shabbiness of the camper? It had one big thing going for it – it was not white. I hated white campers. It was not  even silver, but a kind of battleship grey which suited its tough looking profile - the “don’t mess with me” tyres, the beefed up suspension and the big black snorkel. It would make a perfect bird hide. I drove it slowly round the field in four wheel drive – nice and smooth, no swaying from side to side. The young man lived only 15 miles away. We had friends in common. After several visits I was still quite tempted but the price was far too high. In the end I decided to make what I thought was a very low offer and see what happened. The offer was immediately accepted! Wow! I went through all the procedure of getting a large chunk of cash together, met up with the man’s sister, handed it over, got the keys, the documents and a receipt and drove off.

Immediately I got onto the road I knew something was wrong. It simply bounced up and down at every little bump. I drove home in the dark, battered all the way, convinced I had made a very expensive mistake.

At first it seemed so, but then I got some advice from the man who sold us our previous demountable ten years ago. The truck had air-bag suspension which can be raised and lowered, and for this much weight it should be at a pressure which was much higher than the vendor had suggested. I now know he had little understanding of the air-bag technology which he had installed. Intuitively you would think that harder suspension and stiffer tyres would make for a rougher ride. Not so: with both tyres and air bags at 40psi the whole thing was much smoother. I was back in business.

During the next few weeks, as autumn gave way to winter, I worked on the camper. The biggest job was re-siting the batteries, a job for which I had been quoted £700. I bought all the necessary wire and connectors from a specialist in motor electrics, bought a crimper, photographed and labelled everything and carefully began to dismantle and reassemble the two heavy 80 amp/hour sealed batteries. The space they were in was a small cube at the front end of the floor-space where, in the original spec, a toilet had been sited. I needed a toilet – even if it was the smallest one still made by Thetford.

That done and working, I did a thorough clean of all the plastic surfaces in and out, installed a less battered sink, made space at floor level and covered it with carpet tiles, made a new leg for the table from copper pipe, and finally, after many attempts to repair the cracked window, I bought and installed a new one for £300; ouch!

The trip to Iceland was booked and I was trawling through all sorts of websites about Iceland. One showed that my truck might be worth 4 times its UK value in Iceland, so the plan then was to sell the whole rig at the end of my trip for a substantial profit and fly home in triumph.

Then an Icelandic friend pointed out that it would be very difficult to sell a right-hand drive vehicle there. Hm.

Christmas came and went and I was still not comfortable with the rig. It was much better but still rather bleak inside and uncomfortable to drive, and the fuel consumption was at least as bad as I feared – 22mpg average.

The deciding factor was my test run up onto the mountain which I wrote about here:

In the end I decided that I’s spent enough time and money compromising – buying, selling and altering campers. I’d learnt enough about how they worked, and I knew what I wanted and what Thelma would tolerate. Despite the fact that we now had two campers – this one and the Movano, I decided to sell both and start again from scratch. The Movano sold quickly and for the asking price. At one point I thought the demountable had done the same but that was too good to be true and in the end I had to take a hefty loss. They buyer had come all the way from Doncaster to view. He’d left a small deposit and I had offered to take it to Shrewsbury from where I could get back by train. We would meet at an out-of-town shopping centre and he would give me a lift to the station.

And that’s what happened yesterday. I’m relieved, pleased and disappointed, but can now press ahead with the conversion without distraction.