0.3 Just a few tent trailer”must haves”

Where to start on this tent trailer thing?

After Rod dropped that PVC form on my desk, I really started thinking about this project. Over a week or two I’d roughed out some sketches of the camper I wanted to build and had some tentative dimensions in mind but nothing concrete. This was going to be a learn-as-you-go project. Fine with me.

While I didn’t have blueprints and exact specifications, I did have a vision. Based on my experience selling other motorcycle campers for over a decade I knew there were some ideas I wanted to carry over and there were some things I felt could be improved upon.

You avoid a lot of design decisions if you don’t care too much about size or weight. But it’s a rule of thumb that to be classified as a “motorcycle camper,” the camper shouldn’t exceed the width of the bike from the tip of one mirror to the other. The thinking here is that you want something slim enough so that if you bike fits through a gap, the camper will, too. But it also has to be big enough, unfolded, to give you a useable bed area. That give you a working limit of around 40 to 45 inches of width when the camper is folded into towing form.

Another rule of thumb is that you want to keep the loaded weight of whatever you tow to something under half the bike’s wet weight. For a big dresser, that’s a generous limit, somewhere around 400-450 lbs. But I’ve towed heavy campers before and I wanted something lighter. Much lighter, if possible. I wanted to shoot for a loaded camper that wouldn’t exceed 250 lbs. That would be really cool.

Some other “must haves” included the ability to store a reasonable amount of camping gear and the ability to get to that gear at any time. Inside standing room to get dressed and to get in and out of bed was a must. Lastly, I wanted an easy-as-possible setup experience–something that didn’t involved lifting heavy panels. Oh, yeah, and something that would stand up to a lot of road miles, wouldn’t leak and wouldn’t decay.

That’s a short list. No problem.

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