Dodgy II: The Truckening

Dialing in the ultimate overlanding truck

2015 Ram 3500

After a year on the road in a van, we learn a lot of things. Top of the list: #vanlife isn’t for us. We want a truck. A big truck that can take a camper into the middle of the desert or the peaks of mountains. What we get, is Dodgy II: The Truckening.

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Upgrading to a DIY Truck Camper

After a year of narrowing down our wants, we find Dodgy II. It is the distillation of all we want: a long bed, quad cab, and 4-wheel drive. Did I mention the 7 cup holders? That’s important to me too. With a 1-ton rating, Dodgy II may seem a little overpowered for the simple truck bed shell and mattress that we stick in the back. That’s because we have much bigger plans for Big Blue here.

Dodgy II
The Truckening
DIY Truck Bed Camper
Building a bed & storage
Packing
Our Life in a Truck

The Long Haul

May 12, 2016
We have always had greater ambitions for Dodgy than just a bed under a truck shell. You don’t need a 3500 Dodge Ram truck to go camping in the redwoods. It’s impressive. Maybe it might make some guys with the chromed out 1500s feel a little inadequate but that is their business, not ours.
Read more: The Long Haul

Packing

April 18, 2016
Packing the truck cab is still a work in progress. We are packed and ready to go, but how things are packed will be subject to change over the trip. After a year of frustration whenever we took a tight corner and a loose plastic set of drawers would fall over and spew its contents across the van floor, we have a better, though imperfect solution.
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DIY Truck Bed Camper

April 16, 2016
Rolling back the months to when we first moved out of our San Francisco apartment and into Dodgy, we had ambitions, very custom ambitions. We intended to strip Dodgy and turn it into a travel home tailored to our needs. While Dodgy was amazing, with more space than we could have hoped for, we quickly discovered that finding replacement parts and people who would work on Dodgy was an onerous task. So we shifted gears: instead of making Dodgy the end-all-be-all road chalet, Dodgy would be our prototype.
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Dodgy II: The Truckening

April 9, 2016
As has been alluded to earlier, dear Dodgy has not been at top form. Aside from her preexisting maladies—broken air conditioning, speedometer, temperamental gas gauge, and such—the passenger side window had stopped working. Of course, there is little that duck tape can’t “fix,” but we didn’t want the window fixed in place. Rolling down the window was the only was we could manage the heat. With summer around the corner, we needed a more permanent solution.
Read more: Dodgy II: The Truckening