Author: Simon

Building a vehicle like Baloo takes a few years. Some of this is the physical construction but the greater part is the planning, preparation and discussion necessary to drive the project.

When I first met up with Thomas Ritter at the Unicat workshop, I had a few clear ideas about what I wanted but only a few. I also had many questions and a massive list of uncertainties. We spent a whole day looking at vehicles, talking about my plans and discussing possibilities. By the time I left my head was awash with ideas and dreams. It was all possible. The life that Diane and I had discussed many times might actually be possible. The vehicle would be based on a commercial 6×6 truck with a motorcycle mounted on the back.

Diane and I have a long history of camper vans and motorhomes. We had a good sense of issues that needed addressing so that we could travel, full time, in a vehicle. We were far less certain of how to resolve these issues.
One of the fundamental problems is simply that of capacity. Fresh water, grey water (from the shower and sink) and black water (toilet) are heavy. A conventional camper is limited to a maximum weight of 3,500kg so that it can be driven on an ordinary (class B) car licence. Despite being made of lightweight materials the vehicle and its systems will take up most of the allowable weight. The final payload is typically just a few hundred kilograms so total water capacity will usually be well under 200kg. This translates to just a few days of water, especially if you want a shower each day. The toilet will be full in a few days. Not a problem if you stay on campsites but makes going further afield difficult.

Similar considerations apply to batteries. It is difficult to carry enough capacity for more than a day or two and difficult to keep them charged.

In the winter keeping a camper van warm can be hard work. LPG is the usual energy source for heating, cooking and water heating. LPG is compact but even so our experience was that we could easily burn 10kg a week in the Alps and that meant a weekly trip to buy gas.

Our previous camper was a beautiful tag-axled Dethleffs Esprit. With a curbside weight of 5,500kg (class C1) this gave us a bit more scope but even so, being more than just a few days away from a campsite services was tricky. Worse, as a vehicle it was horribly compromised. The immense rear overhang would ground out on the slightest inclination and the front wheels would lose traction on even slightly damp grass.

With a truck, the payload is measured in tonnes. A 6×6 can go anywhere. A motorcycle is the perfect complement to a somewhat ponderous truck.

There was clearly a great solution here. For me there were two immediate problems. I could not drive a truck and had never ridden a motorcycle.

Vehicles like Baloo do not come off the shelf. They are quite uncommon. In fact our concept of a dream vehicle seemed to be something unique until we met up with Unicat.

The plan, here, is to post a series of articles describing how we set about working with Unicat to come up with the sort of vehicle we wanted. Unicat are, in my opinion, the absolute world leaders in this sort of thing. You can find them here: https://www.unicat.net/

The vehicle is a genuine mobile home. Not a camper van. The difference is to do with compromise. When camping you accept using sleeping bags and paddling across the grass to use a shower. That is all great fun. For a while. Eventually you want to get back to your proper bed and your own shower. We wanted a mobile home that we could live in for years on end so we needed a vehicle that did not compromise how we lived.

Baloo is what we ended up with.