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Comment by kylixz | Hacker News Reader

I did this for about 2 years across the United States. If you’re employed, make sure your manager is supportive/already remote friendly.

Get good internet. I found Verizon to be the best for cellular and this was before Starlink Mobile was available. Get a directional cellular antenna and mount (not a repeater/amplifier) and learn how to point the antenna at towers if you plan to do any “boondocking” out in the west of the US. Otherwise, everywhere else these days likely has internet.

Compost Toilet is a win in my book. Very little maintenance and no nasty tanks to deal with. But, it’s not for everyone.

Decide if you need showers in your wheeled home or not. That drives the cost of your rig significantly. Most RVs are absolute trash for quality south of $50k.

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> Most RVs are absolute trash for quality south of $50k.

It sounds like the pandemic generated such a crush of orders that now even more expensive ones are slapped together at the factory.

Mercedes Streeter at The Autopian (spiritual heir to Jalopnik) has been looking at her parents’ new RV.

https://www.theautopian.com/my-familys-62800-camper-is-junk-...

They always have been. THey're death traps. Super flimsy.

There’s this notion with many of these solutions that we could rent a few hours from Yellowstone, the parents could get up at the crack of dawn and drive while the kids sleep. Wake up kids, that’s Yellowstone up ahead! But most of these contraptions specifically warn against operating them while occupied. They aren’t built for accidents.

They're basically cut-rate mobile homes on truck chassis.

This vid is a great illustration of both how easy it is to get into an accident, and how much damage even a glancing blow does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VuRtNajq-Yo

Community has an episode at the end where they trash a camper. It seemed comedy driven at first but the longer I looked at it and campers the more plausible that scene seemed. It’s foam and plywood.

Edit: I finally clicked through the autopian link from up thread and it’s reminding me there’s a guy I watch sometimes who does conversion vans. All of his stuff is built around those extruded aluminum rails. He hasn’t figured out how to make use of those last few cubic feet yet but he seems to do a good job and they’re fairly sturdy. Last I watched he was perfecting his showers.

I now wonder what it would look like if he converted buses instead of shop vans. You have a superstructure that might actually survive a hit, they’re already set up for AC units, you “just” need to build repeatable interiors. But you need much more shop space, time, and capital to do something of that sort.

Mercedes writes about all sorts of interesting conversions, like these transit buses.

https://www.theautopian.com/this-1948-gm-old-look-transit-bu...

https://www.theautopian.com/how-a-couple-turned-a-gillig-tra...

There was a guy on Reddit recently complaining about how hard it was to keep up with orders for his teardrop trailers. A bunch of people told him he wasn’t charging enough and should raise his prices and use the money to hire someone and also to look for better deals from suppliers (eg, larger orders less frequently).

Link to this guy?

He was unshockingly backlogged six ways to Sunday so if you’re looking for a deal that won’t be it. I can look if you still care.

He's posted to r/DIY a few times I think.

https://odysseyteardrops.com/

Pretty sure it was this guy.

Yeah those look like him.

Those are some very complicated trailers and he’s charging the same or less than simpler ones.

My parents (now ~70yo) ordered an expensive offroad trailer/caravan around the time COVID hit. The regular build time plus delays will put it at almost three years from order to delivery. For people who are not exactly getting more agile each year! I feel for them. They have very limited recourse against the delays also.

Thank you for sharing that post.

I nearly felt allergic while reading about the endless quality control issues. Piecework only "works" when people easily can and do verify the product delivered. A combination of customers and shareholders are getting boned by workers, their managers, and the dealerships here. Incentives matter.

Most RVs are absolute trash for quality

There, edited it for you for accuracy. :-) Seriously, our Thor retailed for $100K in 2018, and I've been through that entire vehicle while installing solar/inverter/battery. As I've told my spouse, "there isn't a straight screw in that whole interior". I've probably pulled a bathroom garbage container worth of crap out of the walls (leftover trimmings and the like). Yeah, didn't think anyone would look in there, eh? :-)

Sorry to be the wake-up call, but Thor is one of worst brands out there for quality.

> south of $50k

"South" to mean down or below, and likewise for north, drives me up a wall. If you are standing at the south pole, north is down. There's also no concept of up/down in space, and so northern hemisphere normalcy is false. To Australians, North America is below!

On a conventionally oriented map, south is always down, and north is always up. "Down south" and "up north" are also very common phrases when discussing relative geographical locations, due to the same reason.

Up a wall? Why not down a wall or across it?

And yet you know exactly what they mean when they say it, indicating maybe it's a useful convention, even if imperfect.

And if you turn around, left and right change places... woah.

Snide comment aside, it's obviously in reference to standard map orientation. Maps had to be oriented somehow, unless you're advocating for the chaos of arbitrary individual map orientations.

Having trouble with figures of speech has been linked to schizophrenia. e.g. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.0067...

I'm Australian and don't know anyone here who wouldn't consider North America "above". Can't imagine having the time to be that pedantic. Using "north of $50k" to describe something more expensive than $50k is very standard here too.

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