Camping is a soul-satisfying experience, but it's even better when you roll into camp and bed down at night in a tent trailer you crafted with your own two hands. I started building my own a few years ago and I've learned a lot in the process. I decided to share it here, hoping that others might be inspired to do the same.
There were a lot of things I liked this tent camper prototype, but it STILL did not meet my vision for a super light, fully functional camper. Among the pros: It hit all the marks for set up speed, cargo access and bed storage. The cons: The 82 x 48 footprint just took up too […]
Sometime around mid October 2020 I finished the K2 and it was time for the first tent trailer field test for this design. There was a lot I liked about this camper. To begin with, setup was super fast and easy. After removing the soft top, all I had to do was flip up the […]
The places I like to camp are better suited to an offroad camper than a pavement-only trailer. It’s gotta be remote, it’s gotta be quiet, it’s gotta be the hell away from leaf blowers, air conditioning units, pool heaters, pool pumps, trucks with train horns, bikes with straight pipes, cars with no pipes, construction, air […]
The K2 tent camper offered me many new learning opportunities. Many, many. First, I knew the idea of this popup camper was going to be too long to go without some kind of support under the base of the cargo box. The footprint of the camper would equal the sleeping area and the sleeping area […]
This is a short video showing the first Kampereen K3 tent camper road test. It’s always an anxious moment when I take a new design out for the first time to see if it will behave well at speed. The first tow is done with an empty camper. Weight seems to hide some handling problems […]
One of the biggest unknowns to me in designing a camper was the suspension. In particular, I’ve never been quite sure how tall to build the camper wheel wells. Since they occupy room inside the camper, I wanted to keep them as short as possible. Usually I followed a conservative path by making the wells […]
When developing this folding teardrop camper prototype, I shot a quick phone video to show a friend how the fold/unfold action worked. I was handling this carefully because the plastic was held to the sides with thumbtacks and it wasn’t hard to pull through the material or pop a tack. Self-opening pop up teardrop camper […]
The idea for my next camper design came while I was sitting in camp, enjoying an afternoon with K1. I was intent on finding a way to overcome some of the limitations of the first prototype but the inability to do my own sewing was proving to be a big stumbling block. Every design I […]
Many of my first building projects were cabinet-type constructions that required square corners. I struggled with this for a long time until I finally invested in some specialized braces and clamps. Not only did this improve the quality of my work, it also cut my setup time by more than half; not to mention the […]
Okay, let’s review the stated original goals for the camper and how this current tent camper design measured up: Light weight. Check. Safe towing dimensions. Check. Decent cargo capacity. Yes. Roadworthy. Yes. Fast, easy setup. Eh. Standing area for easy ingress/dressing. No. Easy access to cargo. No. I had a decent, working pop up camper […]
