It was primarily a commo truck/place for the higher ranking officers to have some AC while everyone else was working. Mobile donut shop for MP units.
As for expanding the van solo no its a PITA. Once you crank out the sides you have to manually lift the over head section of the roof WHILE swinging the braces into place. So your holding a 17 foot long 3 foot wide section of ceiling up with one hand while trying to swing out a brace and lock it in place. If your in good shape or like taking risks go for it.
Bad back, shoulder legs for that matter make it likely your gonna get a nose full of diamond plate if you cant get it done quickly.
Given what I have already read, what I pretty much thought I figured out based on the pictures in that thread and what your telling me here, I can see this use. Sounds like this is probably not the box for me since I'll mostly either be alone or with a woman who may or may not be into constructing the living quarters.
I am having some fabricators look at ways to turn those fold outs into slide outs, it is not gonna be cheap. I had thought about doing the sliding rack on tracks method. The down side being you would then have to do the maneuvers AROUND the frame up and tracks it was on and in cold weather or snow/rain your gonna have your box open to the elements for a while as your climbing in and out of the truck.
If a "conventional" RV type slide out could be designed that would be very cool and I wold be all over that, as I bet a lot of others would be as well. As described above, with the inside still exposed to the elements during set up/tear down, no so much....
I have looked for somebody that has a set of plans (and preferably a parts list with suppliers names) on how to take a box (like a military shelter/commo box or a U-Haul type box) and build a RV type slide out into it. So far I have had no luck finding anything at all. I would even be willing to build the entire box from scratch if I had some plans for the slide out part. My biggest concern is weather sealing it. The big RV guys have spent tons of money and lots of time designing reliable seal systems and even they leak sometimes. I don't have the resources they do, I know my slide would leak...lol..
I bet that if one of the current commercial box makers (for delivery trucks and so forth, like Kidron or Morgan) were to offer a selection of insulated boxes with a RV type slide out people would buy it. That would be an ideal way to get a big head start on a home built truck RV. Probably not enough people to make it really worth while for a mass production company but, I know I wold seriously look at one, depending on the price.
As a rough camper however just a place inside to fold out your cot out of the weather it makes a heck of a bunk house. I am the very proud owner of GoldenEagles truck now and another M820 that I have the lift gate assembly in order to make it into an M820A2. I am doing a RV conversion on one and a hunting truck/bunk house set up for the other.
I can see the rough camper idea. As long as your not trying to install shower/toilet and a "real" kitchen it would work. You could even keep a lightweight bunk bed in the box and once the sides were deployed it is easy enough to just push the bed to the sidewall, deploy folding table to two so your stuff is not on the floor, a couple folding chairs and your good to go with a lot more space that you would have had in a non-expanding box. I really need/want a "real" shower and toilet though and I just don't see that working in this particular platform... Unless maybe you have some ideas/suggestions...
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