Hello, I'm a newbie. I live in the high desert of southern California. I got introduced to Placer (gold) mining about 10 years ago, and did that for a few years until the local area got torn up by the off roaders. So, my little CRV could not handle the loose sand and kept getting stuck. I quit mining until a year or so ago, when I joined another gold mining club who had claims that are accessible by my car.
I did a couple of trips out to the claims. I stayed in a motel, which basically ate up whatever gold I found, plus more cash. Gold mining is fun, but you have to come out ahead somehow. So I quit again. I am not a person who like to camp outside or in a soft walled tent. There are scorpions, rattlesnakes, coyotes, mountain lions, an various other not so nice denizens of the desert that I don't want living with me at night in my sleeping bag. I knew I needed some kind of camper to be able to pursue the gold mining pastime. I'd thought of a used RV, but was told that you would be purchasing other peoples problems. I thought about building a teardrop camper, but right now my carpentry skills are atrocious. So I finally figured out that if I purchased a cargo trailer, I probably had the skills to do a little work inside to make it functional as a camper
And yesterday I purchased a very small cargo trailer. It is only 4x6 in size, and the reason for that is that my little car, a 2001 Honda CRV is just not up to hauling big trailers. And my carpentry skills are not good enough to attempt to build a teardrop camper at this time.
So, I plan to convert it. I figure I have room up front for a shelf and maybe some small cabinets up near the roof. I also will put in a bench/cabinet along one side, at the floor for a place to sit. I will also make a removable table that performs two duties; one being the table, and by flipping it over, use it as the other part of a bed platform. There's not a whole lot of room for stuff, but maybe I can somehow manage.
I would also like to power this with 12VDC so I can have some LED lighting, and possibly run a really small 12 volt TV, and a radio, and some kind of cooling system, probably a fan. I am hoping I can find a solar power system I can sit up on top of the camper trailer when I am parked to gather power. I would have to build some kind of box to fit on the towing assembly, so I can put batteries inside, and the charging control system. This is something I have absolutely no Idea about how to go about things.
So, as a "Newbie", I will definitely need help trying to figure out how to make things work. And most importantly, I need to keep the weight down. The trailer weighs 610 pounds, and I would like to keep it well under 1000 pounds, preferably below 900.
Anyway, I will start a thread on this conversion, and I hope I can get some help trying to figure out all of this, and just what steps I should take when building things. I hope to have part of the conversion done by May, so I can try the trailer out on a trip to the gold claim. CaleyAnn