New Grandby Today 12/8/16

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camper rich

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Picked up our new FWC Grandby today at Equipt Expeditions in Salt Lake City. It was nice to see how much room it has compared to their Hawk display model. It is a front dinette and has a self contained shower and cassette toilet, Isotherm 130 compressor fridge, king size bed, 160 watt Zamp solar panel, water heater, and they installed the two 6 volt Lifeline golf cart batteries I purchased. It also has the Batwing Awning and camper jacks.

It is installed on my '08 Dodge 2500 extended cab shortbed with the tailgate down. The truck has Timbren suspension inhancement both front and rear and new Pro Comp shocks. It dropped 1-1/2" in the rear when the camper was lowered onto it. I did not have my Warn winch on the front to help level it, but it will be there for our trips.

I haven't had a lot of time in it yet, but I did notice it has a BlueSeas voltage separator under the dinette seat. FWC also added the wooden pads to the bars on the roof so that we can use our On Stage speaker stand to lift the roof when I have my kayak up there.

On the way home I stopped and had the propane tanks purged and filled.

Our first trip will be a run over to Denver to pick up our new Ruger Offroad Trailer that I will need to carry my inflatable boat and motor to Baja in January.

This is my second FWC, the first being a 1998 Ranger II Shell that I bought new and just sold after 15 trips to Baja. At 70 years old I hope I get another15 trips out of this one.
 
Congratulations. Our Grandby is set up nearly identical to yours. We are scheduled to receive it on Feb 1st. Would love to see some pictures of the camper on your shortbed 2500.
 
Spent time today trying to figure things out, like how the cassette toilet works and how the charge controller works. I found a place to store the On Stage Speaker Stand jack (I mounted the brackets just under the passenger side dinette seat cushion). I need to find some sort of riser to use with the speaker stand to make it lift the top in the rear of the camper. It is about 7" short.

We also decided our Cat Litter Box needs to go under the table. I was happy to find there are 8 of the little nuts that slide in the Yakima Tracks already in there. That means that I will have extras when I mount my extra solar panels on my Ruger Trailer where I will have two extra batteries running my ARB fridge as a deep freezer.

I received a new Nato Style gas can to go in the Adventure Trailer can holder I'm going to mount on the back, and I pulled out the two propane cylinders to see how to drill through to mount some 1" aluminum U channel underneath the step to help support the gas can holder.

I had the thing plugged into my garage half a day before I found all the circuit breakers were shut off so the IOTA wasn't charging the battery at all. Luckily, there was enough solar on the 160 watt panel to keep my batteries up, although I really wasn't running anything but the LED lights. I finally found out I needed to push a button on the water level panel to display the battery charge, and all four LEDs lit up.

We're not going to put water in the systems until we head south in January due to the freezing weather up here.

I did replace the #10 AWG wire that connects my two 6 Volt batteries in series with a #4 AWG wire. I also looked at the #10 AWG wire running from my starting battery to the truck bed. It looks rather pathetic next to the #8 AWG wire that is right next to it and runs to the other side of the truck bed (for my old shell model). I will get around to using that #8 wire.

Anyway, I've got a lot to learn, there's a lot more to it than my old shell.
 
Congrats on the camper. Sounds like a lot of fun. We'd love to see pictures of your new setup and mods!


Sent from my iPhone using Wander The West
 
camper rich - I'd like to see the bracket you use for mounting the speaker stand/lift
 
Don, I am not sure what bracket your asking about. If it's the pad that goes on the lifting board, here is what they look like.

post-3761-0-88474700-1370969767_thumb.jpg


One end of the lift on the floor, the other in the pad's hole.

If that is not it, google 'Wander the west: speaker lift' and you will get a number of threads on the topic.
 
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