I used to have a camper. 10-foot old thing on my second truck. 69 gmc frankentruck. That was it's name because it had parts from at least four different vehicles: the 69 gmc, a 77 one-ton Chevy van, air filter from a Lincoln, and an engine from an iroc camaro. God I loved that truck, it started out its life in 1968 or so as a 1/2 ton 2wd gmc truck with a 396 big block and turbo 400 trans. I bought it in 96 and two weeks later the Dana 44 rear end spit a spider gear out though the cover. I wanted a 14 bolt for it and found a 77 Chevy one-ton sport van 30 that was being parted out. I bought the whole thing and to make a long story short(er), put the whole suspension, everything, under my gmc. All the a-arms and everything fit perfectly. All the springs fit accept the rears are flat in a van, so I put some three inch blocks in the rear. Gota love all the common parts on gm products.
Anyway, later I put an engine from an 87 iroc z camaro in it. The 5. 7l tpi engine, the 3. 73 rear end, the 10 foot camper, and one-ton van springs where working together like a symphony. The frankentruck was beautiful. The 5. 7 tuned port engine made it's peak torque at 3300 rpm, right at 75 mph. No matter what I always got 11 mpg with the camper, good thing too as I only had a 22-gallon fuel tank. Now here is the kicker- it had a top speed of 102 mph!! It was so much fun; on our annual trip to Vegas I passed a lot of cars at over 100 mph. We went that speed all the way from Vegas to Mesquite. The look on some of their faces was priceless! I actually had a passenger in a car we passed take a picture of the rig as it passed them. They where going about 95 and when that lady whipped out a camera, I about ran off the road because I was laughing so hard. To fully understand why they took a picture you need a mental image of the sight. My truck had faded blue metallic paint with that rust stopping black paint in patches all over. It looked like a blue and black cow. Then there was the camper. I think it was made in71- white and gold ugly thing. The truck had a terrible problem with frame flex with that camper on it. I would watch the front of the camper that came out over the cab bounce up and down and I got an idea. I made some brackets and welded extensions onto some rusting old red shock absorbers I had lying around from the conversion. I put those babies on between the camper and the fenders and that thing rode as smooth as a cloud. I had no idea that I could buy things like that. Oh well. The brackets and extensions where bare steel, so they rusted too, but I didn’t care much. Now that you can mentally picture the rig you can understand why someone would want a picture of it while it slowly crept past them at over 100 miles per hour with me, the driver, laughing my a$$ off and swerving around a bit. Oh ya, my friends where in the back playing Nintendo, and when the truck started to sway a little, they looked out to see what was going on. They said that they looked out and saw the people taking pictures and my friends just hit the floor laughing. I will always remember that trip and chuckle. Sorry for the long post, just wanted to tell a story.
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