The Toter Story

We play Old-Time Appalachian Music, and a couple of years ago we were at the Clifftop, WV Appalachian String Band Festival, camped cheek-and-jowl with four or five thousand of our most intimate friends.

There are a couple of guys from North Carolina who are regulars at Clifftop who have teardrop trailers—one, a restored original and the other a new reproduction of an old design. When we saw them, we thought they were just TOO COOL. It had rained mightily and was cold. (In West Virginia, August is not necessarily a summer month). We were camped in tents, and while we were relatively comfortable, we had spent several hours setting up our tent city, and found it necessary to expend a large amount of time and effort in keeping ourselves and our stuff more-or-less dry. Those dry little caves on wheels looked mighty comfortable. For the next several months after the festival, we obsessed about teardrop trailers, lurked on the teardrop websites, and sketched an untold number of designs and details. We began trying to convert an old boat trailer that had been converted to a utility trailer into a teardrop. To make a long story short, it was too big, too heavy, and too complex for what we wanted. It was reconverted into a utility trailer and is still in use today. From that episode, we learned a valuable lesson: SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY.

As British techno-philosopher C.A.R. Hoare has said, "The unavoidable price of reliability is simplicity."

We decided to start over from scratch… well, not absolute scratch. We decided to buy a 4x8 utility trailer and build the camper box on it. It was a little smaller (and considerably lighter) than our old boat trailer, but our design allowed us to use 4x8 sheet goods and avoid a lot of seams (i.e. potential leaks) and complexity that compromised structural integrity and weather-tightness.

Lacking a source of B-29 aluminum like the post-World War II teardrops were made of, we began to look for alternative materials. We liked the idea of a “woodie” using exterior plywood for the sides, but the top needed to be of a more impervious (and maintenance-free) material. We settled on FRP (Fiberglass Reinforced Plastic). It was locally available, could be easily worked with available tools, was eminently waterproof, and could be bent around the frame of the Toter We did not know how it would stand up to UV light, but we decided to try it. After more than a year of sitting outside (including an Ohio winter), the wood trim needs some maintenance, but there are no signs of any material degradation of the FRP—it looks just like it did when we put in on. When we built the first Toter, the only FRP we could find was in eight foot lengths so a seam was required. We found a plastic extrusion strip that has worked and we have seen no sign of leakage, but for the production models, (I am happy to report) we have found a source of ten foot FRP so there’s no seam and no potential leak.

Other design considerations emerged. We wanted two doors so no one had to be climbed over to get out of the trailer. The doors needed to be as large as feasibly possible. For the interior, we chose white masonite beadboard for the sides and solid white masonite for the ceiling. The trailer needed to be insulated for sound and thermal gain/loss. In the original Toter, the sides were built of ¾” pine shelving half-lapped at the joints and epoxied together. The production models have been refined further, using plywood for added strength, less complexity of manufacture, and less weight than the original.

The kitchen has undergone an evolution of refinements too. Early on, we weighed the cost vs. benefit of having a water system. If you have a fresh water system, then you need a wastewater system. We decided that the complexity and weight and expense of installing a water system was not justified by the advantages of having one. Most campgrounds have spigots. You can heat dishwater on the stove, and a dishpan or two can serve the purpose admirably. Drinking water is readily available in containers of almost any size.

We started out with a three-burner propane stove with a toaster oven from Harbor Freight. It had to be “plumbed in” to a 20 pound propane bottle. This process involved a torturous run of copper pipe, and a plethora of potential leaks and dangers. The oven was nice—we made a pone or two of cornbread—but the stove was tall and sat on an already tall shelf. It dominated the kitchen. We opted for a much simpler option—a 2-burner camp stove that runs on the small propane cylinders.

We discovered that this stove will run for over two hours on a cylinder of propane. That did it. The big stove and gas bottle and plumbing came out and the efficient little stove went in. If we want to bake, we have a Coleman camp oven that sits on top of the camp stove and folds up into a relatively flat package. In the original kitchen, we surfaced the countertop with flashing aluminum. It looked great—for a while—then started to show wear, scratches, and shiny spots where stuff sat on the aluminum to travel.

In the production models, we have opted for laminate countertops. Sixty years of use has made this material a proven countertop system. If you have to have granite or Corian, we can talk, but it’s a camper, for crying out loud!

Finally, the original Toter was useable, and we had the choice of taking it to a music festival in Northwest Ohio, or staying home and finishing the trim pieces. That choice was a no-brainer and we had a great time camping and playing music. The trim was finished a few days later.

A primary reason most people prefer a camper to “drinking muddy water and sleeping in a hollow log” is that a camper MAY have a comfortable bed. Most teardrops use a foam pad for a mattress. The limitation is that the mattress must fold or roll up into a size that will go through the cabin door. Foam can also be easily cut to fit the camper’s non-standard bed size. There are some magnificently comfortable foam mattresses available, but they tend to be pricey. The Toter bed is the size of three-quarter size bed—the same size as large roll-away beds. The bulkhead panel at the foot of the bed comes out to allow installation of a “hard” conventional innerspring mattress. We offer as an upgrade option, a custom-made “Posture Guard” innerspring mattress. This is a high quality, very comfortable mattress.

We took the Toter to Clifftop for the 2005 festival, where some cross between a hurricane and a monsoon wreaked havoc on the temporary town. A half-hour after the storm, as most of the campers tried to cobble and patch their tents back together and wring out their sleeping bags, we were grilling salmon. We and our stuff had remained high and dry. Everywhere we went, people inspected and admired the Toter. From our own experiences using it, we felt that we had a very good design that was being refined with every trip. If our experience was indicative of anything, it was that if Toters were available at a reasonable price, people would buy them. So, we have rented an old boat shop in Harveysburg, OH and tooled up to build them.