My father in law is in the process of selling his farm to retire, and one of the items on the farm he had to get rid of was an old nissan xterra that used to be my sister in law's. She ran it into a ditch one day and then got another car. It was driven around the farm occasionally until one day it stopped running and then sat rotting in the sun for about 5 years. It’s an everything must go situation so I was asked if I wanted a non-running SUV that had been sitting for years. Naturally, I said yes.
My brother and I have a YouTube channel now and we put car-related stuff on there so we figured it could be a project for our channel. We just had to figure out what to do with it. After some debating we settled on making it into a mini-RV. This won’t be just any car camper conversion though. The core of the build is going to be gutting the xterra from the drivers seat back and making slide outs that come out the rear hatch. The first slide out will extend the cargo area so there’s enough room to sleep, and out of that will slide a kitchen. Then we have plenty of other unnecessary things planned like a roof deck and winches that operate the slide outs and some other things. Here’s a video where we brainstorm our ideas for the camper:
We’ve done a lot of work already to get the xterra running and ready to be made into a camper, but I figured now would be a good time to start a build thread because we just made it to the building part. But to get you up to speed here’s what we’ve done so far:
Rescue the xterra from the farm:
Next we had to get it running. It turned out the fuel line inside the fuel tank had disintegrated and no fuel was getting to the engine. A new fuel pump and fuel line and we were good to go. Mostly.
Got a bunch of parts from the junk yard to start fixing other problems like the abs module, a fender, washer reservoir, tail light, etc. let’s just say my sister in law was not so kind to this car.
Changed the timing belt because we were pretty sure it had never been done. The xterra has 140k on it and its timing belt is supposed to be changed around 100k. Properly maintained these engines can last a long time.
Started building! We’re going to use some atv winches instead of a single car winch because my brother thought it would be fun to try. We also made a new custom bumper with the build’s name in it! Sara is my sister in laws name, so SaraTerra it was.
And here’s the video for making that:
That’s where we are right now. Next up we have to finish some work on the bumper, change the rear main seal, a ball joint, and lift it. After that I think we’ll be on to gutting the back and starting the slide outs.
If you’re interested in seeing everything from the start here’s the SaraTerra playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... ftzBWsol06
More to come soon!
