Introducing my aluminum work canopy for truck camping

If you follow me on Instagram you've already seen this. In this video we're going to talk about what I've done here and why and just a little bit of adventure thrown in. I'm up in the lush lovely forest of the Oregon coast range. To explain why I'm out here in particular let's let's back up to yesterday. The new canopy has just been installed on the truck and I'm eager to give it a try. It's unseasonably hot in the valley so a quick run over to the coast is sounding pretty nice. I'm ready to head to camp but have stopped to let these people use my shovel to dig out. They didn't dare down and they have no recovery gear of any sort. Okay they're going to need more than the shovel so I'm going to see if I can get them out with my traction boards. And yeah it helps to get extra weight out of the vehicle. I'm glad to see my $80 knockoff traction boards work perfectly to free the Xterra. So far I've never actually had to use them for anything other than leveling vehicles. Well that's the first time those traction boards have been used for traction. It's pretty late now but fortunately my campsite reservation service has come through for me. Some of my YouTube colleagues Primal Outdoors and CJ Adventures Oregon have secured a spot for the night. I've barely finished telling them about the recovery on the beach when we hear some commotion out on the bayfront beach where camped along. Looks like the traction boards might get another opportunity to save the day. And yes it is the same people I just recovered over on the ocean beach. They've again buried themselves to the frame. With some digging and the X-Bowl traction boards we've soon got them back on their way and we settle in for an evening of chatting around the campfire. There's nothing quite like the calm peaceful serenity of the... Okay calm is restored and Megan sees an opportunity to gather food for dinner. Low tide here on the bay has revealed the mud flat teeming with clams and soon both Megan and Jason are successfully harvesting some absolute monsters. We've all got other plans for today so camp is soon packed up and we head our separate ways. So after Jason and Megan took off I headed back up the coast and inland towards town to meet up with another friend of mine who said he was going to be out camping along this road tonight and I don't have an exact location and they weren't sure that they were going to get the campsite they wanted so I'm just cruising along here and seeing if by chance I find them. Of course I've got no service tucked down into this little valley so I've got no way to message him and he was pretty sure he wouldn't have service either. So I'm half expecting not to find them but I'm gonna try. This is a really lovely little road. So basically yeah I never managed to find Andy and his friends out here. I drove a number of different roads, peeked down at all of the campsites. I didn't see his car. I didn't see anyone that I recognized. So maybe they're out here someplace. Maybe they had to move to a different area. They don't have service. I don't have service but that's okay. It's the way it goes. I was certainly half expecting it but it's lovely out here. It's a beautiful day. The river is just right down there. Let's go ahead and take a closer look at the canopy. This is an aluminum contractor's canopy custom built by Lear. Now when you think of aluminum commercial canopies I think what most people visualize is those white contractor canopies that you see on work trucks all the time. They're all over the place. In fact they had caught my eye because they looked very very practical in many ways for camping and overlanding. And I did completely 100% purchase this. It wasn't sponsored in any way. I have zero relationship with Lear. I will eventually do a video specifically reviewing the process and the canopy itself. There are a few things that are not perfect here and there's a few little details that I think could have been done better. So I will talk about all of that in a dedicated video about ordering an aluminum commercial canopy. Also obviously this is black it's not white like the commercial canopies you always see. For the most part if you order a custom aluminum canopy like this you can get white like you often see but you can also get gray and you can also get black because those are just the colors that the aluminum stock comes in. They buy it already black like this and so they just put it together that way. You can also get a custom paint match to your vehicle on one of these canopies as well. To me that wasn't worth the expense. I think the black looks really good on the truck and there was no need to spend extra money on custom paint here. After the Forester was wrecked and I decided that I wanted to look at pickup trucks I pretty early on had a vision for what I wanted to do with the back. Now next week we're going to take a look at a bunch of different ways you can camp using a pickup truck as your platform. I've been thinking about this for a long long time and I felt that some sort of canopy shell on the back of the truck that I could build out and to camp in in my own way made the most sense for my uses. Now I fully 100% intended to build the canopy myself. That was part of why I learned to weld. I was inspired by what PNW Explore did with his truck. Now I didn't have any intention to build a pop-up like he did but the fact that he was able to learn to weld and build that framework and build that shell and it looks so good that I was like well maybe I can do that too. One of the reasons I really like the idea of completely DIY building my own shell was that I had some ideas for how to accommodate the short bed. This truck has a five foot bed. It's not long enough to sleep in in either direction. That was a huge motivating factor for me to build my own canopy because I was going to build it in a way that would accommodate a six foot bed. Now there were a couple of factors at play that led to me deciding to have the canopy built instead of building it myself. One was that I realized it was almost certainly going to take me many many months to put together. I still have a day job. I still have to work. I still have to spend time each week editing videos for the channel and I already lost so much time this year not traveling between the time the Forester was totaled and the time I was able to get back into another vehicle. Being able to get a canopy on the truck within a matter of weeks instead of many many months was definitely appealing in order to get back into some adventures out across Oregon and beyond. Another factor was simply that I did not have the space to do it. The garage that you occasionally see me working in is not my garage. Now I can use it sometimes for a couple of days at a time to work on a project but it was not possible for me to occupy that garage for six months which is I suspect how long it would have taken me to truly get the canopy built and all of the details done. On top of that the truck simply no longer fits in the in that garage so I found myself looking at like little shops or garages that I could rent so that I would have the space to set up and build my canopy. Then I started doing the math on paying rent on a garage for six months, eight months. I suspect that really what would have happened once I settled into a garage is I bet I would have been there for a year. Multiply that times 200-300 a month and suddenly that's a lot of money that's out the door just to have the space to work in and I would still have all the materials to buy. On top of that I knew that there was going to be a pretty significant learning curve. Now I've started getting comfortable with welding but at my fabrication skill level there were still a lot of big question marks. I figured I could do it but I knew that it was going to realistically take me a lot of time because I was going to run into roadblocks. I was going to figure stuff out. Plus on top of that after I finally have my shell built I would still have the entire inside to figure out also. And on top of that what would inevitably happen is some weekends I would have to stop and go and travel, get out on adventures, film some content, maybe even be gone for a week at some point without this even being done. There ended up being a lot of compelling reasons for me to just have this done professionally and ultimately this is not more expensive than putting a rack and a rooftop tent on a pickup truck. In fact compared to putting a rack and the type of rooftop tent that I would have chosen that actually would have been more expensive than what I've done here. Okay enough talking about why I did this let's just take a look at it. Before I get any further here this is just a quick temporary build I threw together so that I would have some place to sleep and have some place to stow some gear. As you can see I did make a sort of diagonal bed that's going to be the necessity of sleeping in this five foot bed. I've got one night down in it so far and I slept fantastically. I'll tell you more about that later. And this is built largely out of scraps of material from the forester build which I dismantled last week. One of the things I really liked about the commercial aluminum canopies versus the fiber glass versions you can find is that they are entirely built to order. So you can specify obviously what type of truck it's going on to, how tall you want it to be, and what type of doors and windows openings or whatever you want on it, and other features that can be built into it as well. There are a number of options that are possible with the doors. You can preserve your tailgate and have a standard flip up like you see on most standard fiberglass canopies. There are these barn doors like this. There's also a large solid door that opens like the hatch of like an SUV. And I did consider that pretty strongly because with that flipped up it creates a little sort of a little shelter. But ultimately I felt that this kind of door was going to work better for my setup and I'll have to come up with something else to create some shelter out here. This one door is really the only door that I truly truly need to get in and out of the canopy. I do like that I can open this up and I get everything in and out very easily. The idea on the final camping build is that it's going to be very modular, very removable, so that I can use the truck for other sort of day-to-day hauling if I need to. Now I suspect that the camping build is going to stay in it pretty much permanently and will just come out if I absolutely need more space in there to haul something. On a mid-sized truck like the Frontier, Lear offers three possible height options. You can go cab high, you can go 30 inches high, or you can go 36 inches high. And I went to the tallest height. While that would look a little odd on this truck, especially with the very short bed, having the roof rack and stuff on the roof sort of creates a natural line that ultimately I think turned out looking really good. I really wanted to maximize my headroom in here. This is obviously not as tall as my gazelle tent was. In here, I definitely have to stoop to move around. It's tall enough that even with the bed this high, I can sit completely upright in here. And this space like this is ultimately not much different from being in a van. I've got about 54 inches of vertical space. Here's how that compares to some other vehicles numerous people suggested to me as replacements for my Forester. While there's not a huge amount of floor space in the back of the Frontier, the headroom is better than pretty much anything other than a full-size van. Now, I obviously haven't built out any storage under here. I just slid the bins that I was already using. Eventually, what will happen here is a pullout for the stove and some sort of work surface for food prep. The other spaces, I'm thinking some other kinds of drawers or pullouts or something for storing other gear and clothing, stuff like that. The height I built this at right now was basically determined by the Utila track that was already present in the bed of the Frontier. It gave me a really nice sturdy mounting point for the front of the platform. And that Utila track works pretty much just like Unistrut. I was able to basically use Unistrut components to attach the platform to that track up there. When you have an aluminum commercial canopy custom built, you can configure every single detail of it. So the doors, like I talked about, the windows, or solid door hatches, or even nothing at all. You don't have to have... this could be just a solid panel. There's really a wide range of options and you can mix and match, pick and choose what you want. I knew I wanted windows all around this thing. I want it to be able to see out in all directions when I'm in there. So what I've done on this side is I had a basic slider window put in. So this window can open from the inside and there is screen on this side to keep the bugs out. So that allows some ventilation from this side and allows seeing out. But this is a less expensive option than what I have on the other side. On the driver's side, I had them put in what they call a wind door. And so this is a window you can see out of it, but it also opens up like a door to allow access to the interior of the canopy. You often see commercial canopies with some sort of hatch on the side and then they very often have toolboxes or compartments built into the space right here. And that really also looks attractive to have access to all of this stuff right here like this. But those things take up a lot of space and for a truck that you're actually spending time inside of and camping in, to me it didn't make sense to have those built in. One of the reasons I like this is that it's a much bigger space for air to pass through. If I need extra ventilation, obviously there's no screen here. So coming up with some sort of a bug screen for summer camping will be one of the things that I need to do sooner than later here as the season approaches. I'm visualizing putting the electrical panel with my inverter and all of my chargers that used to be in the back seat of my Forester right up in here someplace so that when I'm out on the trail during the day, I can quickly pop this open, grab a fresh battery, put a dead battery on a charger, and I'm ready to go. I don't have to crawl in anywhere to get at it. But at night when I'm inside, I still have access to all those chargers and I can continue managing the recharging of my devices even once I'm inside for the night. The wind door option is more expensive than having a solid hatch door here. It's also more expensive than the normal sliding window I have on the other side. Likewise on the doors, you can get the barn doors solid as well as with windows. And same thing with the hatch doors, those can be made solid or with a window in it. You can also opt for them to line the interior of the sides and roof with headliner, sort of a soft carpety material I think. I did consider that but it was a pretty expensive upgrade. I thought it was a lot of money for what it was. And I like the possibility of possibly inserting some insulation in here that may turn out to be something that I want to do as I get into winter camping. Obviously a problem with sleeping inside a bare metal shell, when it's cold outside especially, is getting condensation inside. Now last night, my first night in the canopy, it wasn't super cold but it was cold and we were on the coast. It was very humid. I had a little bit of condensation inside but not nearly as bad as I expected. I did leave the window partially open for a little bit of ventilation but ultimately I was pleasantly surprised by how little condensation I had inside. Now I suspect on a colder night when it's below freezing outside, especially if I was using the propane heater more, which also produces moisture, I could end up with more condensation in here. For now I've got some time to think about it. It's summer. I don't think I'm going to be dealing with too much condensation issues until we get into the next fall and winter camping. Another potential modification I foresee here may be some kind of a roof vent. Part of me really doesn't like the idea of cutting any holes in the top of this and creating a weak spot for water incursion but when this black thing gets in the sun, it's true that it can heat up in here pretty quickly. Now I generally don't foresee spending time in here when the sun is out outside. I generally am outside anyway. The only time I go inside is when it's time to sleep. It's dark. It stops being hot in here and if I was in here during the day, it would be on a cold wet day when you would actually want all the heat that you could possibly bring you anyway. So one point I really want to stress is that I'm not trying to build a camper here. There's not going to be running water. There's not going to be cooking facilities. This is basically just a place to sleep instead of sleeping in the tent. Well, it's a place to sleep and a place to carry all of my stuff and it's a place to sleep that's already ready to go as soon as I roll into camp. Bed is made. There's no setting up tents. There's no moving stuff into the tent, setting everything up. There's no breaking everything back down the next day, moving everything back into the vehicle the next day. It is a much much more streamlined approach for the type of travel that I do which is more overland style if you want to call it that. Setting up camp someplace new every night, breaking camp every morning and hitting the trail and going and finding new places. Now I know a lot of people really enjoy the process of setting up camp. It's part of the pleasure of camping and that's fine. Not everyone needs to have a super super speedy setup. People often say to me, what's your hurry? Well, my hurry is that when I roll into camp late in the day, the sun is going down. I'm trying to make videos for you guys and I need to be capturing the place that we've got to, the camp we're setting up. I need to be doing that stuff at those moments right when I roll into camp and not spending time getting everything set up, getting stuff schlepped into the tent. Same thing in the morning. The morning hours are some of the most beautiful times to film. I want to be able to focus my time on capturing these places in their best light and not rush around trying to set up camp in the evening or break down camp in the morning. And also, as I've frequently mentioned in a number of videos over the past several months, simply getting away from dealing with a wet, muddy, icy tent when I'm camping in the winter was definitely a motivating factor as well. Eliminating fabric from the equation is nice because there's no dealing with packing up a wet tent and there's no getting home after a trip and having to take the tent back out and take up space in the garage, letting it sit there for a few days while it dries back out, then packing it back up again and putting it away. An additional advantage to eliminating fabric is that you eliminate the noise that fabric makes in any amount of wind. Now last night was my first night sleeping in the canopy on this temporary bed and I was fully, fully anticipating having a rough night in a new space and a slightly oddly configured bed. It was one of the best nights of sleep camping I have ever had, period. I slept so, so well. It was so peaceful and quiet and I could hear that there was wind last night. We were at the coast and it's pretty much always windy at the coast. It was just peaceful. There was not the sound of the rainfly flapping. There was not the sound of the little door ties tapping against the side of the tent. Couldn't hear any animals screeching around the outside of the tent like you often do when you're sleeping in a tent. It was just a very, very peaceful night and I slept so deeply and so soundly. With the bed set up diagonally I have plenty of room to stretch out. For the most part I don't sleep stretched out. I usually sleep on one side or another somewhat curled up and the triangular space here gives me plenty of room to curl up and not spill over the side of the bed at all. Now I'm really, really happy with how this solution for camping in a five-foot truck bed turned out. I mean I am ecstatic. I'm thrilled. It is still a challenging space to use. This would probably be uncomfortable for anyone who is really any taller than me and it would be simply impossible for a couple. There's no way to put two people in here like this. I definitely have some figuring out to do in terms of how I'm going to use this space efficiently because I got a lot of stuff that's got to get in here and I mean I don't even have the half of it in here right now. I think there's definitely going to be some challenges ahead for me figuring all of this out. So I don't think this is necessarily a solution for everybody. If you have a short bed mid-sized truck like I do and you've been trying to figure out a way to camp in it, this is a possible solution. Now next week, as I said earlier, we're going to look at a bunch of other possible solutions for camping in a truck. So stay tuned for that next week. If there's some detail that I didn't cover that you're wondering about, just write your question in the comments below. Thanks for watching.