Overnight in my DIY Japanese Kei (Mini Truck) Camper | First Night

I don't know if the camera does any justice for how small this thing looks in person the fact that it's so small makes it feel cozy it's nice it's so crazy to see it those are normal siiz cars and that's how much space they take up and then there's mine [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Beau all right so had to close the door because it's a little bit uh a little bit noisy out there with the highway but today is the inaugural trip of the Japanese mini truck camper so I've got everything mostly finished there's still a few small things that I have to get done but since the last time you guys saw me we got some new tires on this thing look at the tread on those bad boys nice not dry roded I'm not worried about them exploding so that's good and then second since the back of this camper weighs a bit more than just the truck bed weighs the uh back end was sagging so I had some custom leaf springs made to lift this thing back up give them some Arch and a little bit more spring so I'm not swaying as much while I'm driving driving around and they've been absolutely amazing I drove this thing around for like 3 hours the other day I drove like a champ but other than that she's pretty much the same on the outside the inside got some new upgrades we got a plant up there and then these are just velcroed up so it's just a blackout curtain that I cut out and then velcro to the wall to cover up my windows and the door over here so I can have some privacy tonight these are just temporary they actually don't look too bad and then we've got our Lagoon table all finished up I'll step in it's quite a big step to get in here though because uh the leaf spring raised it about 4 in so it's like waist high so it's quite step to get in here but got a lagoon table can't really tell but I etched a topographic map of the Brooks range in Alaska on there should have etched it a little deeper but still looks good I didn't finish the couch cushions either so uh I'm going to get these wrapped in a a nice kind of fabric but for now this is just a sheet that's draped around them and then for the strip we've just got the essentials Fork spoon plate and then a uh cook top some other cooking utencils and then some pots and pans down there and I got some other stuff stored in these little cies down here but other than that that is pretty much it for what has changed since I last saw you guys and if you're wondering where I'm at right now what this shop is it's my new shop well not entirely my new shop because I'm sharing it if you remember when I was building the mini truck and on my road trip I had a friend named Kyle who uh was starting a YouTube channel Channel have arrived so this is Kyle and Nick and since then I have decided to help him start his own YouTube channel so we got this shop space here for him and for me to build on his new Channel The Chop Shop where we're going to be building the craziest coolest campers kind of like this one and Kyle's going to be the one primarily building them all and whenever I'm around not traveling in whatever crazy camper I've built I will be here helping him so we just moved in a few days ago but a bunch of cool stuff is going to be happening here and I'm superc about it so make sure you guys subscribe to them if you want to see those and occasionally me on another Channel I'll link their stuff down in the description but I think it's time to get out of here she has been itching for a trip for the last 6 months since I've been building her I think it's finally time to go go ahead and get this turned off and this is also hooked up to solar so it's at turn it back on it's at 64% right now so we'll see this is the first dry run of everything to see what works what doesn't work what I want to add back here for when I go on my big trip what I want to take out and then what I want to do differently so just kind of a test run today but we'll see how much solar we get in to this battery bank here oh and that's the wrong side I just forget this thing is rightand Drive yeah not the most spacious driver seat my knees are pretty much up against the steering wheel if I get an accident I'm pretty much dead there is no safety features in this thing no airbags I don't even think this is safety glass I'm pretty sure this just shatters into sharp shards at least I think they don't use safety glass at least on these older vehicles in Japan so I might get that changed soon First St I think we got to go pick up some [Music] groceries apologize for the beat [Applause] this thing is so sick and this thing actually goes decently fast even without the weight on it if I'm on flat ground if I'm on a hill though it's a completely different story Max I'm going is 20 mph but I can make it up at low and slow right now we are going just about 60 km per hour We're slowing down now cuz there a big bump but 60 km per hour is roughly this I don't know the exact calculation for it and also when I put in my GPS I have to type the option to uh avoid highways cuz even though this thing technically can go on highways there is no chance I would feel safe in any way driving this death trap at 60 MPH down the highway and the turn signals on the off inside so I always accidentally turn on the windshield wipers when I'm trying to [Applause] turn it also does have a radio [Applause] but I've tried to turn it to every station oh it doesn't really pick up much no music for now till I get a radio installed also I'll show you guys once this light turns green but when you press on the gas it legitimately sounds like you're turning on a lawn mower [Music] and the funny thing about these doors I think it was a safety mechanism so you didn't lock your keys in your cars but if you push this down and then close the door it pops back up so the only way to lock it is from the outside I also want to make sure my back door is locked there we go and even though this thing does have uh some pretty decent pickup even with all that weight on the back still take about two business days to go 0 to 60 in it so today in honor of the first day of camping in the Japanese mini truck I figured we would cook a Japanese dish and since I recently cooked Ramen not doing that and instead we're going to do gudong which is a pretty simple dish u means beef and Don means Rice Bowl so we're making a beef Rice Bowl she's so beautiful I don't know if the camera does any justice for how small this thing looks in person it's so crazy to see it one thing I do have to figure out though in the long term is how I'm going to store my food cuz I don't have a fridge so I'll definitely need to figure that out but for now I've actually never seen it before this place had a dry ice I don't know why but it'll keep my Stag andiz and cold until we cook it tonight oh it's so cold that's my portable refrigerator and the rest of this dry ice I'm just going to use to keep my drinks cold so I'm hoping I can find a spot to what I'll call stealth camping Al be it it's very difficult to call anything in this vehicle stealth camping down on the bay and I'm just kind of hoping we find a spot but I think we will Top this thing does have AC I've actually never used it I've kind of been scared to use it while driving cuz I don't want to overheat the engine but wow that is actually nice and cold who would have thought AC heat I don't know what this little econ button does maybe that's economy AC anyways get that off cuz the window's down is enough I also need a backup camera cuz I cannot see anything when I'm backing up in this thing [Music] just barely reaches but it reaches where do I get one uh Japan taking it out for a test drive that is freaking cool appreciate it that is uh one thing that always happens with that fil when I'm driving this every time I stop it someone says something it's pretty cool woo she's cruising look at that beautiful day definitely going slower than the other cars but we're going pretty fast over 80 almost over 80 and she's got more we're past 80 almost going 90 km an hour which is this all right so we're pulling down on this little island to uh look for a spot hopefully to stealth camp tonight so ideally I'm looking for a spot like one of those but it looks like most of them are taken all right I think we're getting lucky though we might have found a spot now mostly these other Lots over here have no overnight parking signs the only sign here is 3H hour parking from 3:00 to 6:00 and it is almost 600 p.m. already so this it's going to be camping the night right on the water I brought some fishing gear too to do some fishing tonight get some practice in oh god oh it's dark in here there we go oh so cozy in here pop the fan get some air flow going and then these just kind of okay pull down with velcro to let some light in open up these windows get some air coming through well I'm going to come up with a more permanent solution for these windows but honestly for now those uh those covers honestly work pretty good might use these for a little while and honestly despite the tiny size in here it doesn't really feel too crimped I mean I can stand fully straight up pretty much from here until here so about 2 feet of standing straight up right where I'm going to be cooking tonight which is perfect but everywhere else I do kind of have to crouch but it's not really too bad I'm actually very surprised I got away with keeping it as tall as I did I really thought it was going to be overly ambitious to want to be able to stand back here but honestly makes it so much easier for hanging out and I'm really excited to test this bed out see how well it works tonight but this table is perfect it slides out right here for me to be able to have dinner on and I can tuck it away over on this side or I can swing it around and tuck it away kind of over there even more out of the way the fact that is so small makes it feel for some reason so cozy it's nice but now that we've got our spot we're all settled in we got this uh Camp store for cooking tonight I actually bought this one cuz it's much more compact so this was the uh cooker I was originally going to use cuz it fits in this drawer it's nice and small it's got two burners but it didn't come with the propane attachment hose so I can't hook it up to any tank so sadly I have to return this and uh order another one so I can't use it for this trick but this will be uh what I use for cooking in here I bought this one temporarily it's much bigger and kind of a lot harder to find a place where it fits but it's good for this uh first temporary trip but brought some of my fishing gear so before we cook some dinner we'll see if we can catch something oh and also in case you wondering the battery bank is at 82% 82% down here we're still getting power in though so we're actually getting more power in so it's still charging right now with uh with a little bit of some we have left but we'll turn these lights off to not waste any power while we're outside I also moved the mini truck back one spot cuz I want that back spot over there so I can open my back door and not have anyone behind me so every time a spot opens I'm just going to back up into it and go down here and C cast a few o almost spit the dust on that one fishing went uh exactly as he usually does didn't catch uh didn't catch anything was out there for about 45 minutes to an hour I didn't really expect to catch anything but there was a little mini mart right around the corner over there like a deli for the marina so I picked up some uh chips of little snack Pap towels and another Diet Coke because guess I didn't realize how cold dry ice really is but it froze my other Pepsi completely solid and started to freeze my steak so I had to take that out when I was walking back I want to give you guys a little bit of perspective on the size of the mini truck cuz it was almost comical looking at it from across the road and how much how much space my car takes up in a parking spot versus a uh normal siiz car those are normal siiz cars and that's how much space they take up and then there's mine you probably Park three of them in that parking space it just looks so goofy sitting there the sun is probably going to start sitting here soon so I'm going to get started cooking dinner and I don't know what happened while I was out there fishing but there are quite honestly a million sailboats all over the place out there I don't know what's going on today but there's so many of them out there but I'm getting hungry so let's cook some [Music] gon there she is our cooktop for the night definitely way too big for the space but I think for now we'll set that to the side while we get everything prepped up so it's snowed in here all right got ourselves a bit more organized over here so the only thing we have to prep for this meal is an onion and some ginger you can also use berock root I couldn't find any obviously at the store if you go to an Asian specialty store you might be able to find it but Ginger is a good substitute and the whole purpose of this trip is kind of to figure out what's the best way to go about laying out all of the stuff in the back of the uh the mini truck cuz there's a million things that I didn't think about while I was building it that I'll probably realize tonight and or in the next few days so this is a good trial run to kind of figure out what works what doesn't work and how to best do and this onion will not [Music] peel oh wow I've always seen uh people do this but I've never done it myself peeling Ginger with a spoon it's much faster than it is with a peeler wow who would have thought and that is pretty much it for the prep of the veggies still got to prep the meat and if you are going to do this yourself you do want to make sure it's pretty thin because it's going to be cooking in kind of a broth so you don't want it to take too long to cook some dude just walked by and said I like that K truck better than the Porsche there we go that should be enough I really do wish I was able to use my other Grill but nonetheless here we are first thing we got to do before we can do anything else with this dish is get this rice cooking cuz that is going to take the longest I'm going to get that going normally you'd want to wash your rice but I'm not going to worry about that in the truck eyeball in the water there looks about right need a little bit more there we go we'll bring that to a boil and we'll let that cook for right around 10 minutes I also am just now realizing that I forgot to bring a lid for my pot so we're just going to have to do the best that we can on cooking this rice without a lid made to make sure FL out of my other pot also wait for that to boil I forgot there's a bunch of cool stuff you can do with dry ice as long as you don't hold it for too long at a time I remember if you like put it in a spoon if I can find where my spoon is it'll [Music] sizzle the Science Guy so the rice is done supposedly all right so that Rice definitely was not cooked all the way so add a little more water got to back in there but I'll show you guys how much of a cross draft this window has blowing in so much air and that's what the fan off just with both windows open a lot of air flow coming through there we go that looks like a little bit better cooked price first things first we're going to get the sauce I'm just going to do that directly in this pan before I do that I'm going to get this rice scraped out into the bowl because I will need this pot again for cooking an egg up look at that boiling but we work on the sauce and for that we need about 1/2 cup of water so about 1/3 of a cup of mirin or sweet cooking sake and a little bit over 1/3 of a cup of soy sauce and then finally I don't have any measuring spoons about 2 tbspoon of brown sugar and then the final ingredient is optional I just had some leftover from the ramen I cooked but this is just Dashi powder which is basically just combo water AKA kelp water so since I had it we'll add it in there but you don't have to just sprinkle a little bit of that in there just gives it that nice Umami flavor and then we'll mix that up and get it all nice and Incorporated and bring that to a boil and it looks like our water is boiling so we can go ahead and throw our egg into there we're going for a soft boil so right around 7 minutes and then we can go ahead and add our vegetables into our sauce and this smells absolutely Heavenly we going go ahead and add in our meat and I'm going to try to lay this in here as evenly as I possibly can just throw that in there and we can go ahead and let that stew for right around 5ish minutes until the meat Cooks thoroughly through and that egg has got got another 2 minutes on it here go the timer for our egg and you're supposed to take this egg out and put it right in a bowl of uh ice cold water I don't have that but I do have dry ice so I'm just going to set that on top of the there for like 3 or 4 minutes let it cool down and this has about another maybe 1 to 2 minutes and it looks can't really see it cuz it's so steamy but it looks so good there we go that is pretty much it get the fire turned off we plate up some dinner egg is still in its little ice bath cooling down a little bit this looks so good take that and top our rice look at that beautiful and we have the final piece or hopefully softboiled egg not going to lie being in here does make me miss having the uh van in a 30- gallon water tank and not a foot pump I have to press to get water to come out Moment of Truth ah it's like almost softboiled I think I cooked it a little bit too long last time it was a lot better oh wow first time having this and this is definitely going in the bank as a meal I will be cooking again this is really good honestly it could have used a little bit of kick to it like if I had a little bit of spice I think that would have made it a lot better but I think overall I'd probably give it a uh 7.4 out of 10 but I'm not going to lie the mini truck is handled way better than I thought it would I'm very excited for all of the adventures I'm going to take this thing on I think since I can't take this thing on highways first place I'm going to do or the first road trip I'm going to do I haven't really planned it out yet is I'm going to drive this thing up Route One in California I just drive it up the coast since that's not really a highway just kind of like a byway speeds aren't too high and I can kind of cruise along and not really have to worry about someone hitting me going 80 and completely crushing the entire truck so stay tuned still got to plan that out but want to finish dinner I will check in with you guys when I'm finished honestly overall first experience definitely a lot smaller definitely a lot more uh work to cook something and find places for everything and put stuff away but honestly not as bad as I thought it was going to be it's actually pretty convenient cooking in here despite how small this space is and once I get it kind of better organized and figure out exactly where I want to put everything and kind of how I'm going to make this work as seamlessly as possible I don't think it'll be too bad if I'm going to be honest the only major thing that I have left to add to my camping setup here is a gaming setup with my Xbox which I think I'm going to mount a TV to that wall right there and then kind of have this table and have the TV right there so I can also watch it when I'm landing whoa someone just drove by at like 100 milph anyways G me monitor the there Xbox under the table I'll be able to play here and watch while in bed but in the meantime I do have my new gaming laptop so I figured I'd give the mini truck its first test in all facets cooking sleeping and gaming and I also kind of wanted to see how much power I used up in a normal night I don't know if you guys can see that still 70% battery left and I've had the lights and fan on for the last I don't know 4 hours but I will uh leave that on all night let my laptop charge once I'm done playing some video games and we'll see how much uh how much we have left I'm just going to connect to my phone's Hotpot cuz I don't have any Wi-Fi in this rig yet and for some reason all my stuff from my Xbox won't load over into my uh laptop so I'm going just start over with this account but like the van I like to have two lighting modes one is for maximum light when I'm trying to do stuff in the van and then one for night mode so that is my night mode light but I'm kind of winding down in the van that I don't want the bright lights on on top I can just leave that one on and it's more than enough light for doing whatever I'm going to do AKA complete my ranked matches in rocket [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] League all right we're done playing video games everything's kind of cleaned up it's time to test out the slide out bed I'll turn on my lights so you can see a little better test out the sliding bed see how well that works and see if uh we get a comfortable night's sleep I will say one thing laying on this without it pulled out is just a little bit too skinny like my arm kind of hangs off so when I'm trying to sit here and look at my phone it's like a lot of work to keep it up other than that it's not too bad this is one thing I swore I would never have in a vehicle is a bed that you have to build and make every single night but there was just really no other option with the mini truck I had to do something I'm really glad I didn't go with the build-a B up here cuz that would have been so much work but yeah got a nice little compact comforter this thing is Tiny there we go that's the bread I just got to Hope none of these planks break as I go to sit on it cuz I already broke two of them I honestly wish I could have done a little bit thicker foam but anything thicker and I wouldn't be able to sit on it um when it was set up as a couch definitely have to get a bigger blanket than this one it's a little too tiny but it is pretty comfortable but it is getting late so I will catch you guys in the [Music] morning good morning I didn't get the best night sleep last night but it definitely could have been worse it's not because of the mini truck there was just people outside and cars driving by that were super loud but the bed was definitely comfortable enough wasn't the most comfortable bed I've ever slept in but oh my back overall great first night nice still morning a little bit of overcast keeping it kind of cooler back here just like that we're back in day mode so far overall though I'm really happy with how the truck camper came out how everything's working how everything fits back here I just need to get myself a little bit kind of more organized and figure out the best way to do everything cuz I'm so used to having everything at my fingertips with living in the van and not really having to worry about it but here I got to be a little bit more creative so we still have power we didn't run out lights still come on uh 31% we used a decent amount keeping the fan on all night last night maybe I will upgrade that power bank to something bigger but I think that's it for this video I'm going to be getting out of here taking this thing back to the shop and maybe making some changes from the things that I learned on this trip before I take it up the coast uh on that big trip up to however far north I make it but as always truly appreciate you guys watching if you haven't already think about clicking that subscribe button it really does help out the channel and I will catch you guys next time