From eBay to the Autobahn

This is the story of how a badly neglected twenty-eight year old pop-up truck camper on German eBay becomes a fully-restored stainless steel wonder. ... ... ...












Last month, German Joerg Walzenbach sent us an amazing story about a pop-up truck camper his friend Birk Sander purchased on eBay.  The twenty-eight year old camper had been badly neglected and could have been the poster child for what happens to a truck camper when you don’t maintain your seals (Seal Maintenance article here). 

Birk was undaunted and solicited his friend Joerg to help him transform this camper into what may be the world-first stainless steel pop-up.  The end result is something you really have to see to believe.

Thank you Joerg for sending in this fantastic story and pictures.  Somewhere down the Autobahn, we’ll have to catch up on your European truck camping adventures and the further stories of the stainless steel truck camper.

From eBay to the Autobahn
by Joerg Walzenbach
photography: Birk Sander, Simone Gruenewald, Joerg Walzenbach

Here goes the story about my friend Birk's 1982 truck camper and all the hard work that went into turning it into a showpiece and probably the world's first and only stainless steel pop-up truck camper.

Birk was looking for a used, lightweight, inexpensive pop-up camper to go on his Dodge truck.  Birk runs his own event management business and is a professional stunt man.  You know, "jump from a tall building" and all that.  His even management and stuntman jobs keep him very busy during the warmer months of the year, but leave him with more time during the winter months.  So he didn't mind a fixer-up project as long as it fit his budget.

Birk had owned a truck camper before and wanted another one because it’s just about the best solution when you travel all over the place, frequently to remote places with limited accessibility, and typically with a trailer in tow.

Birk had been looking for a truck camper for a while.  Truck campers are very exotic in Germany and pop-up truck campers are even more rare.  Eventually, Birk ran across a very used 1982 truck camper on eBay.  The camper was fairly inexpensive but had not been maintained.  The camper seals had been allowed to deteriorate and the wood frame had rotted.  I had warned him about the inherent problems of used and unmaintained campers, but apparently he was looking for a challenge.

One hot summer day in 2009, I got a phone call from Birk, “Come over and look at what I got...”.  Somehow he had managed to haul this thing home on the back of his truck in one piece.  It’s just amazing how far gone they can be before the structure actually gives in.

Now that the money was spent and the camper was in Birk’s yard, there really was no turning back.  And so he started dismantling it, piece by piece.  The cabover was more or less held together by good faith.  The camper door didn't close very well and you could see that the roof lift mechanism didn't quite sit the way it was intended.  The LPG compartment floor was falling apart.  All in all, the whole thing looked much like its best days were behind it.

On the plus side, all of the appliances seemed to be in working order, the lift mechanism worked fine, and the poor overall state of the camper merited a total rebuild without compromise.

The project goal was to get the camper into a useable state as quickly as possible, then take care of the rest.  He started by gutting the interior and replacing all rotted parts of the structure with fresh wood.  He went on to cover the interior floor, walls, and camper overhang with resin coated plywood.  While this stuff is not exactly lightweight, it’s very water resistant and often used to build up truck and trailer beds without any additional weatherproofing.  It also lends the camper interior a nice and warm maroon color.

The original aluminum siding had some bad corrosion holes and was generally not in a very good shape.  Birk shopped around for solutions and ran into a neighbor who works with laser cut stainless steel plate.  Now, stainless steel is about as weather-resistant as you can get and Birk decided it was just the right material for the job.  So a decision was made to cover the camper in stainless steel plate.

The camper sides were measured, converted into a computer model, and the steel plate was laser-cut to fit.  The steel skin was glued in place with Sikaflex.

With the structure fixed, the interior rebuilt, and the outside re-covered, Birk had reached his first goal.  He was almost ready to take his now-new camper on its first trip. All that was missing were some appliances and some cushions, curtains, and odds and ends.  Not much compared to what had to be done so far.  From there it became a rolling restoration.  Virtually every single part of the camper has been rebuilt or replaced.

A major step was the construction of a new pop-up roof.  The original roof was sagging badly, had endured several half-hearted fixes, and was rotted through.  Birk located a company that had experience building large fiberglass structures and convinced them to laminate him a new single-piece roof.  Birk had to provide the mold in which the roof was to be laminated so he built the mold from scratch and trailered it over to the fiberglass company.

It was now winter and Birk was working inside and in front of his garage.  He finally had the new roof liner, vent, and electric wiring installed.  The roof was on sawhorses in his garage and needed to be turned 180 degrees.  That gave us a good chance to gauge the new roof's weight at about 200 pounds.

The following Saturday was to be "the big day".  A bunch of us came over to his place to switch the old camper roof for the new one.  It was a freezing cold day in January with snow on the ground.  Nobody knew if everything would go as planned.  Nobody knew if the lift mechanism would hold the weight.  Neither did we know what would happen once the lift mechanism was unbolted.  Nothing happened as it turns out.  When the roof is in the all-up position, the springs are not loaded.

So we unbolted the old roof and lifted it off, trying not to damage the already restored camper in the process.  Birk built a makeshift scaffolding which enabled us to lift the old roof with deliberate use of tension belts.  Any doubts that the new roof might be too heavy were moot.  The old roof seemed to be even heavier, probably saturated with water after years of neglect.

The now roofless convertible pop-up camper was an interesting sight, much like a model kit that has not yet been completed.  Inch by inch we lifted the new roof up and positioned the camper underneath.  Would the new one-piece roof really fit?  We lowered it... and... it fit like a glove.  Now we just needed to put the lift mechanism back in place.  That went fairly well, and eventually Birk did some final re-adjustments and we called it a day.

In the following months, Birk has done a number of further improvements.  He had a new soft-wall siding made from black canvas.  A new water boiler was installed.  The lighting system was improved.  And a number of little odds and ends have been replaced.  New jacks were bought and installed, scissor steps were added to the entrance, and so on.  Right now the camper is getting some catchy graphics on the sides.  And new windows are planned for this winter. 

So if you ever travel the German Autobahn, keep your eyes open for this black Dodge Ram with a shiny silver truck camper in the back.  It is a real special.


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