landman
Well-known member
Hey All,
I’ve been meaning to start my build thread for awhile, but like all of you here, free time is hard to come by. Regardless, I am going to do my best to keep this thing updated.
Anyways, before I actually disclose what the “Puller” project is, I fill you in on my background. My wife and I are avid mountain bikers and rock climbers, so these sports have always lead us on amazing road trips and camping adventures. For over a decade we just tent camped and kept it really simple. Then we both started getting a little tired of that. The making and break down of camp, just got old after awhile, I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. Since the overland scene was growing so rapidly we saw plenty of cool rigs over the years, which really motivated us to build something cool. We wanted a rig that would provide a more comfortable living space thats easier to setup then a standard campsite. During this time my company worked with Scott Brady from Expedition Portal / Overland Journal on a little project. Scott invited me to the Overland Expo during that time and it blew my mind. It really opened my eyes to the overland scene and the amazing and creative vehicles that folks build. I left the Overland Expo and I knew I was going to start the process of building out my own adventure rig.
I guess you could say my first adventure rig was 1990 Toyota Pickup. That’s a whole other thread by it’s self, but long story short I out grew it (a wife and a husky) which lead us to our first bigger build (which is not the “puller“ project), a Sprinter Van. Like a lot of people, I saw cool sprinter vans on every corner, on every social media post, and on every youtube channel. They were just in love with the sprinter / vanlife experience. Indeed they look amazing and they were wildly comfortable inside. So my wife and I agreed that we needed to get one and build it out. After looking around for year we found a good deal on a 2017 Mercedes Sprinter 4x4 170 Extended with only 1,800 miles on it. It was still new. The guy I bought it from was selling it for a insanely low price, so I bought it. I built it out methodically for about 8 months. Here is a video we made of it:
Sprinter Van Video Click Here
We used the sprinter van for about 4 or 5 month on a lot of trips and realized that the van was actually not suiting our needs very well. There are a few reasons, first being the van was nice...it was actually too nice (as odd as that sounds). Mercedes 4x4 Sprinter vans are not cheap to start with. We have a decent background in building, so we did minimize our build cost by doing 99% of the work ourselves (the only thing we had someone else do was cutting and installing the windows). Still, all in our build costs us about $70,000 USD. That’s a ******** load of money (to me). So when we had the nose of the van pointed down some sketchy dirt road that looked like it might lead to a really special camping spot, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it very often. Bashing it around, scratching it up, and generally putting a beating on it just felt crappy. It took all the fun out of exploring with it to be honest. The second reasons we sold the van was the over all costs of dealing with a Merceds product and more importantly how annoying the emissions systems are in the new Diesel engines. They are a huge pain in the ass for a ton of reasons. The last reason we sold the van is because we always wanted to keep the ability to flip the van for profit as an option for us. We noticed the market getting flooded with built sprinter vans and more noticeably box sprinter vans. Prices for nice sprinter vans started to (and still are) trending downward due to how many were on the market. With all the above we decided to sell the ol’ van and start with an entirely new build platform. This time we wanted to have a more capable off-road rig. Something that had a simpler engine dynamics. Something that would be fixable anywhere. Something that could handle 200k miles of dirt road without issue. Something time tested. Something different. Something a little more us and away from “trendy.” We wanted to go back to basics...kind of
Introducing the Puller Project (named in honor of Lewis Puller). Puller is a very rare beast. He’s a 2001 Dodge Ram 2500 5.9 L Cummins Turbo Diesel with a High Output Motor and a NON-53 engine block. It has that coveted and illusive 6 speed manual transmission. It’s bone stock and unmolsted with only 74k miles on it. Probably one of the rarest ones in the country considering it’s milage. All you diesel heads out there will know what a gem this truck really is. This bad boy will run till the end of the world, which is exactly what we want.
If that’s not cool enough, we’re working directly with @HiatusCampers to make the worlds first totally custom full-sized Hiatus Camper for Puller! We have big plans for the rig, but for now here are some teaser pics:
Hiatus Camper Website: https://www.hiatuscampers.com/
Hiatus Camper Expedition Portal: https://expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/hard-sided-pop-up-camper-by-hiatus-campers.210012/
More pics on below post (Limited to 10 per post).
I’ve been meaning to start my build thread for awhile, but like all of you here, free time is hard to come by. Regardless, I am going to do my best to keep this thing updated.
Anyways, before I actually disclose what the “Puller” project is, I fill you in on my background. My wife and I are avid mountain bikers and rock climbers, so these sports have always lead us on amazing road trips and camping adventures. For over a decade we just tent camped and kept it really simple. Then we both started getting a little tired of that. The making and break down of camp, just got old after awhile, I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about. Since the overland scene was growing so rapidly we saw plenty of cool rigs over the years, which really motivated us to build something cool. We wanted a rig that would provide a more comfortable living space thats easier to setup then a standard campsite. During this time my company worked with Scott Brady from Expedition Portal / Overland Journal on a little project. Scott invited me to the Overland Expo during that time and it blew my mind. It really opened my eyes to the overland scene and the amazing and creative vehicles that folks build. I left the Overland Expo and I knew I was going to start the process of building out my own adventure rig.
I guess you could say my first adventure rig was 1990 Toyota Pickup. That’s a whole other thread by it’s self, but long story short I out grew it (a wife and a husky) which lead us to our first bigger build (which is not the “puller“ project), a Sprinter Van. Like a lot of people, I saw cool sprinter vans on every corner, on every social media post, and on every youtube channel. They were just in love with the sprinter / vanlife experience. Indeed they look amazing and they were wildly comfortable inside. So my wife and I agreed that we needed to get one and build it out. After looking around for year we found a good deal on a 2017 Mercedes Sprinter 4x4 170 Extended with only 1,800 miles on it. It was still new. The guy I bought it from was selling it for a insanely low price, so I bought it. I built it out methodically for about 8 months. Here is a video we made of it:
Sprinter Van Video Click Here
We used the sprinter van for about 4 or 5 month on a lot of trips and realized that the van was actually not suiting our needs very well. There are a few reasons, first being the van was nice...it was actually too nice (as odd as that sounds). Mercedes 4x4 Sprinter vans are not cheap to start with. We have a decent background in building, so we did minimize our build cost by doing 99% of the work ourselves (the only thing we had someone else do was cutting and installing the windows). Still, all in our build costs us about $70,000 USD. That’s a ******** load of money (to me). So when we had the nose of the van pointed down some sketchy dirt road that looked like it might lead to a really special camping spot, we couldn’t bring ourselves to do it very often. Bashing it around, scratching it up, and generally putting a beating on it just felt crappy. It took all the fun out of exploring with it to be honest. The second reasons we sold the van was the over all costs of dealing with a Merceds product and more importantly how annoying the emissions systems are in the new Diesel engines. They are a huge pain in the ass for a ton of reasons. The last reason we sold the van is because we always wanted to keep the ability to flip the van for profit as an option for us. We noticed the market getting flooded with built sprinter vans and more noticeably box sprinter vans. Prices for nice sprinter vans started to (and still are) trending downward due to how many were on the market. With all the above we decided to sell the ol’ van and start with an entirely new build platform. This time we wanted to have a more capable off-road rig. Something that had a simpler engine dynamics. Something that would be fixable anywhere. Something that could handle 200k miles of dirt road without issue. Something time tested. Something different. Something a little more us and away from “trendy.” We wanted to go back to basics...kind of
Introducing the Puller Project (named in honor of Lewis Puller). Puller is a very rare beast. He’s a 2001 Dodge Ram 2500 5.9 L Cummins Turbo Diesel with a High Output Motor and a NON-53 engine block. It has that coveted and illusive 6 speed manual transmission. It’s bone stock and unmolsted with only 74k miles on it. Probably one of the rarest ones in the country considering it’s milage. All you diesel heads out there will know what a gem this truck really is. This bad boy will run till the end of the world, which is exactly what we want.
If that’s not cool enough, we’re working directly with @HiatusCampers to make the worlds first totally custom full-sized Hiatus Camper for Puller! We have big plans for the rig, but for now here are some teaser pics:
Hiatus Camper Website: https://www.hiatuscampers.com/
Hiatus Camper Expedition Portal: https://expeditionportal.com/forum/threads/hard-sided-pop-up-camper-by-hiatus-campers.210012/
More pics on below post (Limited to 10 per post).
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