Now THIS is awesome, even if we do say so myself. When we put the tub on the 130, Jamie realised there was a fabulous amount of space under there, so thought it would be amazing for some storage boxes, including a slide out drawer.
You might notice in the picture above the J + K and the heart - Jamie does this on nearly everything he builds which is cute. It's kinda tradition. Do you see the water filler as well? More on that in a sec. The 60 litre tank is just behind it, behind the front seats and under the bench seat/bed, hidden out of sight.
He asked his mate, who does Landrover accessories, to get some aluminium boxes and a drawer and drawer slides, which he got at trade price.
The first step was to sika flex and rivet them together, then prepare the chassis by painting it and removing some unused brackets. Then he had to measure carefully and angle grind some holes in the side, which was quite nerve wracking!!
It took the better part of two days to get this done so don't let the photographs deceive you! After the drawers were tucked in place, a very tight fit (great as less possibility of movement!)
He put some pinch weld all around the inside of the long drawer, which stops the sharp edges of the aluminium accidentally cutting or scratching skin or equipment.
A slide across 'table' was also fabricated as this will make benchspace for the 'kitchen' or one of it's variations as we can also bring the spirit stove inside, or on the back door table. Sadly we didn't get to attach the pull down table as we didn't have time - that'll come and I'll write about it as it's quite the accessory.
When we made the slide out it was originally for storage rather than a kitchen, but we realised it's actually good to have the spirit stove on the slide out as well, especially when the awning is up. Obviously we'll have to park at the end of carparks or in an area where there's enough space to do it, but that's okay as we also have the option of cooking inside or from the rear door table.
The hardest thing was to do the drawer fronts, helping them vaccuum tight onto the side with the latches. That took a good couple of days thought and work, but it DID work in the end. It's all dust and water proof as well of course. In the photo below, the drawer 'locks' at half way mode as well, so makes a good short table if that's what we need. We think lots of options is the key to comfortable camping.
One query you may have (and we've had a lot of interest and queries via our Instagram account) is whether it gets too hot as the drawer slides just above the exhaust (the slide out one - the small one is just for tools and is rather short) but we did put some heat shield there and we're only storing things that don't care about getting warm, like chairs, fishing equipment and so on.
Part of the reason we did this was to keep the weight down low rather than put it all the roof which isn't good for offroading. We have had some pretty big names in the Landrover camper build industry comment on our Instagram with positive vibes so that made Jamie feel pretty good about what he'd done. There are always naysayers though - one guy just HAD to say he'd be worried about hurting his shins. It kinda annoyed me - did he really have to say something so negative? But I think he just didn't know how high it was - it comes to about mid thigh. As I said to him, unless he was freakishly tall, he'd never hit his shins, and honestly, if you're going to bump into a big table whilst you are camping, forgetting it's there, well, you deserve the bruises haha.
Now to me this is almost the MOST exciting bit. First of all, a shot of our water tank, a BOAB - obviously there's a ply lid on this and a mattress, but we're checking to see if it leaks as Jamie fills it with water!
He ran the water hose all under the chassis and it comes out by the spare wheel carrier, through the hole in the rear cross member, so the tap is protected and can't be knocked. We chose a brass tap as we think it looks good.
It's pretty exciting to be able to turn on a tap! Of course if we were going somewhere super remote for a longer time we'd be more conservative with water usage but we also have three litre bottles of soda water, 6 litres of water in water bottles, and a 4 litre sack with a tap in the wetsuit bucket we store in the back, so plenty of water to last us.
What do you think of our 4x4 DIY? What are your camper storage solutions?
With Love,
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