The cab they made smaller

The bed they threw away

MAK and Owen have lived on the road since 2016 and have worked through a Honda Element, a Vanagon, a Sunrader, a Tacoma and a Tundra to get here. Jolene is a 2023 Tundra TRD Off-Road, bought new in Virginia Beach, driven to Main Line Overland in Philadelphia, and stripped of its bed before it was broken in. In its place is a Norweld aluminium tray with four boxes slung underneath, a drawer that pulls out of the back, and a water tank inside the structure. A Four Wheel Campers Hawk went on top of it in Sacramento.

The tray is the photograph. It is not the interesting decision, because a flatbed on a truck carrying a flatbed camper is close to a requirement, and most people who do it can tell you what it looks like rather than what it is for. The interesting decision is one row further forward.

The decision underneath it

The third-generation Tundra is sold as a double cab and as a CrewMax. The CrewMax has the bigger back seat, and for two people who live in their truck and work from it, more enclosed heated space is the obvious buy. They took the double cab, and when a mattress company asked them why, they answered in one sentence.

We went with a double cab rather than a crew max to keep as much of the camper's weight in front of the rear axle as possible.

A camper on a tray is a large mass on a lever. The rear axle is the fulcrum, and everything behind it presses down at the back and lifts at the front, taking steering weight off the front tyres and loading the rear springs harder than the raw number suggests. A shorter cab moves the cab's back wall forward, and with it the front edge of the tray and everything stacked on it. Nothing about the camper changed. Where it sits relative to the wheels did.

Then they deleted the rear seats and put locking aluminium boxes in the space. Taken together, the two moves say the cab was never being bought as accommodation. It was being bought as the point where the load starts.

Specified for weight it did not have yet

The build order is stated plainly on their own site: the suspension overhaul happened in preparation for the camper, not in response to it. Dobinsons springs and IMS shocks at both ends, adjustable upper and lower rear control arms, an adjustable panhard bar, adjustable sway bar links, and Air Lift Load Lifter 5000 air bags with internal bump stops. The rear spring is an 80 Series Land Cruiser part, because in 2023 nothing existed for this truck.

The part of that list worth stopping on is the PowerBrake stage two big brake kit. Adding a camper is usually treated as a springs problem. It is also a brakes problem, on every long descent, at a mass the factory system was not sized for, and it is the item most camper conversions never touch. Whether the owners or the shop reasoned their way to it, someone did.

The second time

Their previous truck, Roxanne, was a 2019 Tundra with a Norweld tray, a Four Wheel Campers Hawk flatbed, a ComeUp winch behind a Stealth Fighter bumper, EVO Corse wheels and Dobinsons suspension, built by the same shop. Jolene is the same system a generation later, down to one tray tier: Roxanne's parts list reads Deluxe Lite where Jolene's reads Deluxe. That is worth knowing before reading any of the choices above as insight: these are repeat decisions, made by people who have already lived with the results for four years and across Baja, the lower 48 and Alaska.

It also sets up the sharpest thing in the sources, which is not in the build page but in the comments underneath it. A reader asked which trim to start from. Owen told them to buy the cheaper one. He had paid roughly ten thousand dollars in package content to get an electronic rear locker and the extended-range tank, and said he would skip the locker if he did it again. A builder who publishes that alongside his own parts list is a builder whose parts list can be read at face value.

What we could not confirm

We have not weighed this truck or driven it. Everything here comes from what MAK and Owen published, one magazine feature, one brand interview and the shop's record of the previous truck. The photographs are GonDirtin's, from the owners' own build post.

No source gives a corner weight, an axle weight, a payload figure or a finished mass, which is the gap that matters most on a build whose logic is where the weight sits. Nobody states how far forward the double cab actually moves the tray against a CrewMax, so the size of the effect is unknown even though the direction is not. The amber lenses are recorded as fitted and never explained. The owners promised a video series covering the reasoning behind each decision; we have not watched it, and it is the obvious place to go next. Their own post calls Jolene their fifth rig while the magazine feature calls it their sixth, which turns on whether a six-month trip in a Honda Element counts as living on the road.

What it gets right

What it gives up

The kit

Lighting

A 40 inch Baja Designs OnX6 Arc mounted inside the Addictive Desert Designs Stealth Fighter bumper, below the hood line, with amber lenses fitted in place of the clear ones. Amber Baja Designs Squadron Sport combos sit at the bumper corners. The bar runs on a factory-style switch rather than an aftermarket panel. Nothing is mounted on the roof or the A-pillars, and nothing on the camper faces forward. Read against our ditch-lights guide, this is the low-and-amber answer to airborne dust arrived at twice over: the position keeps lit air out of the driver's sightline, and the lens colour reduces what scatters back out of it. They state that they swapped the lenses and never state why.

Storage

A Norweld Deluxe flatbed tray in place of the factory bed, with four under-tray toolboxes, a drawer integrated into the tray that pulls out from the rear, a 16 gallon poly water tank and bolt-on flared mudguards. The ARB twin compressor is mounted inside one of the tray boxes. In the cab, the rear seats are gone and Terra-Quest Offroad extruded aluminium locking boxes stand in their place, with a locking safe in the centre console. A Prinsu cab rack carries the roof load and traction boards ride on a rack at the back of the camper. The pattern is that the heavy, frequently used things live low and outboard, at the height of someone standing next to the truck.

Recovery

An Addictive Desert Designs Stealth Fighter winch bumper carrying a ComeUp Seal Gen2 12.5rs and a Factor 55 Flatlink. MaxTrax on the camper's rear rack, and the ARB twin compressor in the tray for airing back up. The same winch and the same class of bumper were on the previous truck, which is the pattern across this whole build: parts that worked once were bought again.