I will always buy a vehicle for it's mechanical attributes before its looks. But if I can improve the looks for low cost, I'm all for it. Now that the mechanical stuff was in place, I could improve the looks a little.
Of course, I picked the windiest day of the year to do this. I'd like to add another coat at some time, but it looks good from 10 feet away.
After 4 days on the trail, I came to understand why so many people have hot water showers on their rigs. So I hit up Kurt from Cruiseroutfitters and purchased a helton hot water kit. It is a heat exchanger that takes hot coolant from your engine, runs it through a coil, then into your heater system. Then the shower water passes by the coil and gets hot enough to shower with. I control the heat of the water with the heater controls. Pretty cool system. Since I don't have ABS or cruise control, I had lots of room to install this thing. BUt I still wanted it tucked out of the way.
Heat exchanger installed.
We had a chance to test the shower the very next night, out in Robber's Roost. It was 34* outside and we were very tired and nasty from a long hike earlier that day. One of the guys was brave enough to shower in 34* weather with a breeze. We got the truck running, cranked the heater on all the way and ran the shower. It pulled 34* water into the heat exchanger, and the output was warm enough for him to shower comfortably. He even said it was borderline hot at one point. So I'm sure it'll be plenty hot for future spring, summer, and fall trips.
