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  1. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    Ever since phoenix rebuilt the tire rack with all the reinforcements we've had zero issues with it. I've checked it over and over finally stopped thinking about it. It's rock solid. We've driven a lot of dirt roads and done a little bit of off roading since the rack was rebuilt. The tire rack...
  2. cph05a

    MPT-81 tire siping

    The tool I have holds multiple razor blades at the same time and heats up to make it easier to cut. They're just straight blades, not loops. It's adjustable so I can change the spacing and the depth of the blades. I'm not quite sure what to set it to. The last time I sipped the tires I did it...
  3. cph05a

    MPT-81 tire siping

    Do you guys sipe your own tires for winter? I'm recently bought a tire siper and trying to figure out how many sipes to do, how close together, what depth, etc. I'm curious what you guys think about it.
  4. cph05a

    Pop-ups with inside showers?

    I have a Phoenix Pop Up Camper with a pop up shower that is a countertop when not a shower. Ours is a recirculating shower so we can take long showers. All the Phoenix Pop Up builds are custom so they can do whatever size you want.
  5. cph05a

    F550 gear change -- which one?

    Are you doing the 335/80r20s? That's the most common size and they're more like 41inches tall (the DBL design website is wrong). FWIW I have the 335/80r20 MPT 81s on ours and we're still on the stock 4.30 gears and it works surprisingly well. We're weighing in at about 12,500lbs fully loaded...
  6. cph05a

    Over-family-landing composite F-550 build

    Nice truck! How are you going to attach the camper to the truck?
  7. cph05a

    School Me on my custom camper idea

    Crawling through a window is going to be a tight fit. You probably won't do it as much as you might think. I had a passthrough built on our custom camper and it uses an accordion material which works pretty well, but it's much taller than the back window originally was. Our was made by removing...
  8. cph05a

    F550 DBL Design Suspension Components

    Our build has DBL design wheels, but we did not use their suspension since IMO it was overpriced compared to piecing the suspension together from other OTC part, so I can't speak to their suspension. I have an older F450 so your experience may differ from mine a little bit. When your parts...
  9. cph05a

    Leveling a camper for a propane fridge

    My old truck camper's Dometic fridge was really sensitive to being level and as a result I hardly ever made use of it opting to just put frozen water bottles in it instead. Sometimes you just can't get level. I have an Isotherm Cruise marine fridge now (running on 12V dc) and it still works no...
  10. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    It's been a little over 8 months and I can confidently say that we've used the camper in all seasons and weather conditions at this point so it's time for another update, mostly on our our summer experiences. Off-grid air conditioner: The most interesting new thing that we've been using is the...
  11. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    I haven't found any DC ones either. Mine is on 120v ac plugged into a little mini inverter.
  12. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    My UVC sterilizer finally arrived and I installed it into my camper. It's a little different than some others I've seen. Rather than do an inline UVC sterilizer in the filter system, I opted for a submersible sterilizer for the water tank. My reasoning was that the water coming out of a 0.5...
  13. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    1/4 was a wild ass guess. It seemed like a reasonable assumption given that I'm intentionally putting really dirty water through it. Over time I might adjust the schedule. I did order a 13W aquarium UVC sterilizer but it hasn't arrived yet and it's looking like I won't get it for a while...
  14. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    Shower updates ... with a some science and numbers this time. So at this point there have been more than 15 showers on the same water (sorta lost count after 15). We've been really trying to put it to the test so we've been taking longer showers and using a ton of soap. More soap than we...
  15. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    It's a 24x30 inches and it's definitely adequate.
  16. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    We upgraded our shower filtration system! On a recent post I had talked about how our original shower water recycler was using a pre-filter and an under-the-sink 4 stage filter, but it wasn't handling the dirty water too well before it got blocked. We upgraded this to a well water system and...
  17. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    My rear axle weight is about 7250lbs with all my gear in it and with the water tanks full. Keep in mind that the scale weighs the tires too which are extremely heavy by themselves, so the actual weight on the axle is less that this by probably 500lbs or so. The pricing with Phoenix has a very...
  18. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    Interesting. The soap thing makes perfect sense. My go-to body soap is a charcoal based bar soap that seems pretty good but my shampoo has a lot of chemicals for sure. I wonder what I could use before the first filter. Maybe a mesh filter on one of the hose attachments?
  19. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    Updates on our crazy build! We added some cabover struts, a coolant heater, did some testing on the A/C unit and our water recycler. The coolant heater took forever to arrive, but it's finally installed and working. It'll be really nice next winter. This replaces our electric block heater...
  20. cph05a

    SRW 450 Mountain Build

    Still waiting on parts to arrive so I can get my coolant heater installed... maybe it'll come in handy next season! In the mean time I added some extra insulation in our pop up material for winters. When the camper was being built, I had phoenix pop up sow some velcro into the soft pop up...
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