Centercar to Camper start





So a decision had to be made, do I turn the centercar into scrap metal and sell it to a scrap yard, or do something else? Having moved to the Philippines from Hong Kong and creating a work of art so to speak lol, I decided this journey was full of unique events that were one of a kind and so I felt I could not destroy such an original creation. Standing back and looking at the centercar, I decided to turn it into a camper instead so it would still be useful. Note: As of the beginning of the build, there are no camp sites on this Island we live on, I decided to make a camper so we could park it 100klms from here to use as a motel where we are working on building my wife's house.

These pictures give you some idea how I had to really deconstruct the Center-car and start to construct the Camper. When I built the centercar, there was no blueprint, no schematic, nothing to go by, so it was a figment of my imagination and now, so is the camper as I moved forward renovating the frame. The centercar was approximately 54" wide and 8' long. And the camper would go through several renovations as I went because I would see opportunities in the design to expand and convert it's frame.  There were a few times when I stood back, looked at how I could maximize the frame for sleeping space and chopped apart previous welds and changed design. The camper is now still 54" wide for the body, but 74" wide axle end to axle end. 

The length of the camper is now 10.5 feet. And as of the first weighing in, it weighed 940klgs and the tongue weight before the axle renovation was 240klgs. Now, as of 09-18-2022 I finally took the camper to the weight station and because of re-balancing, moving the axle forward etc. adding the surge braking hitch, I took the porta potty out of it and having removed one of the front wheel posts, the hitch weight went down to 70kgs which is a big difference from 240kgs. However, the weight of the camper rose a bit from 940kgs to 1020kgs. 

I added a wheel to the front to be able to easily move the project around the yard. When it was just a centercar, I had made 2 drop down posts that would lock with a pin with castors on them to have the same capability while building the centercar. And as is typical of a centercar, you can remove the motorcycle out of it, and so the castors were ideal for moving the body minus the bike around.

The top left picture shows the galvanized sheet metal covering before it was painted. And the right picture shows the 2 tongue wheels I started out with that eventually got removed. One removed, the other moved to the center of the tongue after I lengthened it to accommodate a brake actuating tongue. 

Unfortunately, as I have mentioned on another page, I recently had an operating system Linix give me a bad update to which I had a hard time recovering from.  I was getting a device error which I found out was my hard drive. So I lost quite a number of other pictures of the construction phase of the camper. Also the construction phases of the center-car that you may have seen in the second page of this site.

In the above picture is the combo pull out laundry rack for hanging clothes and if needed framing for a canopy. But since installing this, I have purchased a beautiful umbrella type awning you will see on another page.