Pickup Truck Camper Shell work in progress

In between my current run of building a plethora of compost toilets I am working on building myself a camper canopy for my pickup truck. This is a bit more of a conventional carpentry project than my usual fair, in that I'm using glue and screws to join it all together and cladding it externally in thin marine ply to keep the weight down.

The main frame is made from 2"x2" Larch that I milled a while ago and stacked to season and the roof ribs are cut from 1" thick Ash.

I struggled with the idea that the whole thing would be clad in soulless, bought in plywood, considering that I co-own a sawmill and mill up lots of beautiful homegrown timber. So (with some slight worries about weight) I have decided to clad it internally with some incredible spalted Beech boards that I had milled to 8mm thick for another project.

I am hoping that the canopy will be removable with 4 people when all the cladding and insulation is installed, but we shall see....

Membrane on, ready for insulation

Cleaning up the spalted Beech cladding

The current plan is to roof it with Aluminium sheet and to try my hand at some traditional style sign writing on the plywood sides.