- Can the camper be easily modified?
- As in, do the inside wall panels, cabinets etc all come off easily so you can access the wiring, plumbing etc?
One owner's "easy" is another's "impossible," but a lot of owners find DIY repairs and refurbishing to be quite feasible. Basically these things are built from the inside out and repaired from the outside in. They come in two pieces, the upper shell and the lower shell, which are easily separated. Pull off the aluminum skin (attached with staples, mostly), and the entire upper shell wooden frame is laid bare (with fore and aft plywood bulkheads), and that exposes the upper shell wiring. The lower shell is basically a 3/4" plywood box with cabinets screwed to it. The plumbing is pretty basic, since there's just a water inlet, a drain outlet, a sink with faucet, and a water tank. The upper shell cabinets are really easy to remove/replace. The inner wall panels, not so. The rigorous approach is to totally disassemble the upper shell frame, then the panels can be removed from the bulkheads. The sloppy approach (which I followed) is to cut out the panels from the inside and fit replacements with very close tolerances. It's a tedious business but feasible.
Can a roof rack be added, or is the roof reinforced at build time for those?
Easy to add, on the back it screws to the rear bulkhead and at the front end it screws to the frame members adjacent to the fore bulkhead (which is the midships bulkhead on cabover models). Note that the payload capacity for the upper shell is 250 lbs which includes everything you store in the upper shell cabinets, plus the weight of the rack and hardware, plus whatever you put on the rack.
Also, I saw a camper recently that had this damage? What's involved in repairing that?
Pull the aluminum skin and assess/repair damage to the underlying bulkhead and frame. Replace the skin, seal the joint with butyl tape or suitable sealant, and protect it with some lightweight aluminum angle iron.
