The Drifter - Specs and FAQ

Good point gents!

 

Senator Steve! Welcome to the club. Glad someone else is benefitting from all my questions. I definitely have had a steep learning curve as this is so not my world and I am the least handy person I know. Look forward to hearing how you develop your Drifter. Best, Christy

P.S. Looking at bed stiffeners, kb voodoo rail caps, tires, and aux battery set up. That and making final decisions on options are keeping our brains full.

 

Thanks! This is much more realistic for my skill set than grinding metal. -Christy

 

Cooper ST Maxx are a good tire for combining highway manners with good all terrain offroad capability. Offgrid Engineering makes an almost plug and play dual battery setup if you don’t want to do much work.

 

I got 50K out of cooper St Maxx tires without a flat. These are heavy so look out for a mpg hit. they did get noisy at about half tread.

 

@rockymtnbushwacker I’ve noticed mine have gotten a little louder as well. I have around 21,000 miles on mine with plenty of life remaining. I’m 4000 miles from home and the truck right now but I’d say they easily have over half the tread depth left from new. They do well on snow and ice provided you don’t drive like a jackass. They aren’t as good as dedicated studded snow tires but are good enough that I haven’t felt the need to change them out for our six month winter.

 

Heard you stopped by MULE today? What are you looking at having them do?

 

Did this on mine. Works perfect.
Wanted to keep a top bolt for the stiffeners and use one for the rail caps.
The rails caps arent going anywhere either way

 

Welcome to the family

 

Hell yeah!!

 

Confirmation of the roofs structural integrity

7100 ft in Wa state

 

Auxiliary Battery setup. Just not sure what to do here. We are weekend warriors. We want lights, fan (both ordered) and anticipate using the extra ports to charge phones and keep our mini bose speaker powered for music when wanted. Currently have a Yeti, may or may not upgrade to a fridge. Heat (propex!) will be tempting, but in our 3 season camping experiences with the vanagon, we used it on chilly mornings for a few hours at most on a given day so probably not a huge energy draw. Lived in Africa for 2 years without a shower and never thought a sprayer was essential in the vanagon for our needs so not interested in putting in a water pump. Interested in keeping the back open when not camping so not thrilled with the idea of putting the dual battery in the back. Our 2015 sport can only do a side by side so looking at the off-grid engineering with the Odyssey 1400PC batteries and ML-ACR. Sufficient for our needs? If put a larger one in the back how would you secure it if that's all you had back there? Back = could easily have more power but also more inconvenience.

As an aside, it was fun to see all the front runner stuff in person and to roam around the shop. I had only seen frontrunner items online. They guys there, esp. Hans was so incredibly generous with his time which was super appreciated.

 

This thread's been too light on pics lately!
Here's a few from recent trips.

Also, I really need to get back in the habit of using the DSLR instead of the phone...

 

Hey Christy!
Another resource closer to home for you would be Adventure Ready - south end of Ballard Bridge, Seattle Pacific area.
I'm in the middle of my build and am installing the Odyssey PC1800 in the bed. Easy enough to secure the battery and simple for wiring. The house battery will be completely separate from the truck battery and will only be charged via solar panels or shore power. Plenty of juice for Fridge, lights, USB charging, Propex furnace, and water pump.
My rig is always available if you'd like to check it out anytime.
Cheers
Eric

 

Odyssey and ML ACR is definitely a great combo and is more or less what I use. Haans is good people too, he let me know you guys came in.

FWIW Adventure Ready doesn’t have the best reputation locally among customers and vendors.

 

All with a grain of salt. More resources the better not touting one over the other - good to have options.

 

It’s definitely more than a grain of salt - I mean they fucked my truck up (but did make it right..just took a lot of pushing and time) and don’t treat their long term employees very well. They claim their specialty is 12V electronics yet their main installer no longer works there (he works at MULE) and the new guy is a former 4WP guy.

That all being said they carry a unique product line that other places like MULE don’t - I would just be cautious around them.

 

Very nice! You should add some pics to the calendar submission threads

That bottom one for sure!

 

Thanks!
I'm not really happy enough with the resolution to go that far, but I just did a quick auto-HDR on my phone, so maybe I'll see if the original quality is worthy of a true tune-up.

 

Well compared to some of the other pics in that thread, you’re miles ahead.
I’d love to see some drifters make it. Worth the post in my opinion