Truck Camper Turnbuckles

Common missteps, key features, and safety tips to secure a slide-in camper to a truck using spring-loaded truck camper tie-down turnbuckles.
Common missteps, key features, and safety tips to secure a slide-in camper to a truck using spring-loaded truck camper tie-down turnbuckles.
Turnbuckles are a common tie-down method to secure a truck camper to the truck bed. However, our old turnbuckles were too long for our new tiedown system. Fortunately, it's relatively easy to trim the turnbuckles so that they are short enough for our new system. In this article, we'll be discussing what turnbuckles are, why we trimmed them, how to do it yourself, and some tips on using turnbuckles safely and effectively.
You may have heard that we just installed a custom truck bed on our 2015 Ram 3500. It's a beaut! With it, we have greatly increased our storage potential while traveling with our 1970 Avion C11 truck camper. But it has also dramatically changes how we travel with our truck camper. You see, we have a completely new tie-down system for our camper.
It's been designed and fabricated. Now it's time to install our Bowen Customs truck bed with modular storage boxes and remount our Avion truck camper.
We upgrade our truck camper security with this DIY install of the HappiJac Frame Mount Camper Tiedown System in our 2015 Ram 3500 Tradesman truck.
When we first pick up our 1970 Avion truck camper we have no special equipment aside from our basic 2015 Ram 3500 to cary it. We set the camper on wooden 4x4s and secure it with cables wrapped around factory loops in our truck bed. In hindsight, if we actually came to a stress point where the only thing keeping the camper in the truck bed is the cables, I'm pretty sure something would fail. Fortunately, we are already suitably cautious about the whole affair and avoid steep, bumpy, or fast roads. Instead, we keep the ride smooth and slow from our pickup point in Florida to our workshop in Tennessee.