Photo: eBay User: Classic Auto Showplace
Pickup bed campers are awesome. You'd never anticipate how much living space you can cram into a space meant to haul eight-foot log planks around in. But every once in a while, you find what looks to be the top end of a 30-foot yacht slapped on the back of a pickup bed. This is a 1963 Ford F-100 V8 paired with an equally-aged Del Ret Sky Lounge camper bed, and it's nothing short of magnificent.
Based out of the Detroit suburb of Troy, Michigan, this stunning red truck looks factory fresh like it did back in the dog days of the Kennedy Administration. But it's all a very meticulously executed and very skillfully implemented rouse; there's almost nothing left of what this truck used to be underneath. Though the body's from 1963, the 60s-vintage chassis wouldn't have had a hope in hell of handling the weight of the camper on top. So the new frame comes from a 1977 F-250, painstakingly paired with the older body to make a truck much better at handling the extra payload.
Under the hood sits a gargantuan 460-cubic-inch Ford 385-series V8 that would've been found under the hood of F-Series trucks around the same time this camper truck's chassis was manufactured. With this in mind, mounting the engine to the chassis is the only part of the whole operation you could write off as "bolt on." That said, the finished product really does look as OEM as the day it hit a Michigan dealership lot back in the early 60s. Speaking just about the truck alone, it's one of the flashiest classic custom F-Series trucks we've seen in a very long time.
That's not even taking the camper above into account! As one of the most notorious names in American camper production in the 60s, Del Ray made a habit of fabricating pickup camper trailers that realistically shouldn't fit in the bed of a truck yet somehow stay upright. As for this one, it straight up looks like someone slapped a two-story duplex apartment on the back of a truck bed, lined the inside with real 60s-vintage wood grain, a sink, a stove, and a bathroom, and then sold the whole thing together as a package deal. Honestly, that's probably not far off from the story in real life.
Even the curtains have a certain 1960s charm that looks like the interior of a suburban house of the period. For people who might've grown up in houses like this, the appeal of bringing some of the comforts of home along with you on your big retirement road trip does admittedly sound like an awesome time. Just do yourself a favor and bring a mobile hotspot.
Under the hood sits a gargantuan 460-cubic-inch Ford 385-series V8 that would've been found under the hood of F-Series trucks around the same time this camper truck's chassis was manufactured. With this in mind, mounting the engine to the chassis is the only part of the whole operation you could write off as "bolt on." That said, the finished product really does look as OEM as the day it hit a Michigan dealership lot back in the early 60s. Speaking just about the truck alone, it's one of the flashiest classic custom F-Series trucks we've seen in a very long time.
That's not even taking the camper above into account! As one of the most notorious names in American camper production in the 60s, Del Ray made a habit of fabricating pickup camper trailers that realistically shouldn't fit in the bed of a truck yet somehow stay upright. As for this one, it straight up looks like someone slapped a two-story duplex apartment on the back of a truck bed, lined the inside with real 60s-vintage wood grain, a sink, a stove, and a bathroom, and then sold the whole thing together as a package deal. Honestly, that's probably not far off from the story in real life.
Even the curtains have a certain 1960s charm that looks like the interior of a suburban house of the period. For people who might've grown up in houses like this, the appeal of bringing some of the comforts of home along with you on your big retirement road trip does admittedly sound like an awesome time. Just do yourself a favor and bring a mobile hotspot.
Google News