This Fiberglass Truck Camper Is Built Like A Tough Service Body Because That’s Exactly What It Is

When you drive through a city, you’re bound to encounter the backbone of many service fleets, the service truck. These trucks will often have a service body of some kind on them and sometimes if you squint, some of these service bodies look like they would make a cool camper. If you’re one of those people, you aren’t the only one to think this. Ohio-based startup Grumpy Bear Campers is taking fiberglass service bodies from Spacekap and is turning them into the Koda camper, a truck camper that’s equal parts sleek and beefy.

An interesting corner of the RV world is the utility vehicle conversion. Recently, I showed you one of the many cargo trailers I’ve seen to get converted into a camper. Ambulances and box trucks are also pretty popular platforms to make campers out of. Less often, I see service body toppers for contractors turned into campers. There have been a number of custom builds out there using Spacekap Diablo service bodies. Normally a walk-in mobile workshop for tradespeople, now you can get one of these service bodies as a camper and you don’t have to build it yourself. First reported by Truck Camper Magazine, the 2023 Grumpy Bear Koda is a service body camper right from the factory.

Serving Trades For A Century

The service body has a special place in automotive history. What is a service body? The simple answer is that a service body is a box that sits behind the cab of a truck, enabling the truck to serve a role for a trade. You’ll see trucks with service bodies carrying generators, welders, and cranes. Trucks with service bodies work as mobile workshops or as the base of operations for someone conducting repairs. Service bodies can be found on trucks working for telecommunications, construction, power generation, and many more fields.

As Motor Trend writes, it’s hard to pinpoint the very beginning of the concept of the service body. Indeed, there have been custom trucks for about as long as the truck itself has been around.

Motor Trend notes one early example of a service body came from the Martin-Parry Corp. Formed in 1919, the company was the result of the merger of two coachbuilders, Martin Truck & Body Corp. of York, Pennsylvania and Parry Manufacturing Company of Indianapolis, Indiana. Martin had been producing bodies for Dodge Bros trucks since 1916 and in the early 1920s, the merged companies advertised “Multi-Service Bodies” for Ford Model Ts and TTs. Other advertisements claimed “A Size for Every Truck A Style for Every Need” while showing off a variety of different service bed attachments.

A cabinet body type of service truck appeared in the 2003 book, Standard Catalog of Light-Duty Ford Trucks by John Gunnell. In the book’s entries of trucks for 1937 was the Ford Model 79 Series 810 cab and chassis. Attached to the truck were two banks of steel cabinets, connected by a ladder rack and with a bed accessible from a steel step. Gunnell’s book continues that service trucks found themselves on the battlefield in World War II and after the war, the concept of having specialized trucks really took off.

Fiberglass Service Bodies

Spacekap (a brand of Fibrobec) arrived on the scene in Canada in 1972 with a fiberglass service body. Back in those days, fiberglass took off as an innovative way to build a durable, yet lightweight camper. The fantastic Boler was built in Canada only four years prior and Scamp was just about being born around this time as well. Fiberglass truck slide-ins were being built during this era, too.

Spacekap wasn’t the only company offering fiberglass service bodies. Stahl sold service bodies for a huge variety of trucks, including the Chevy S-10 and Ford Ranger. The company also sold a fiberglass service body for a full-size truck that weighed at most 840 pounds.

In 1992, Spacekap introduced the Diablo. The Spacekap Diablo is a fiberglass box that weighs 725 pounds in 6-foot form or 825 pounds in 8-foot form. When attached to a full-size truck, it turns that truck into a sort of van. Spacekap says it’s the first service body to specifically meet the needs of electricians, plumbers, and contractors. The company also says that other industries buy these including those working with fiber optic splicing.

The advantage of buying one of these, Spacekap says, is the fact that it’s universal and transferable. So, if you decide to upgrade to a new truck, you can move the Diablo to your new mobile office. Also, since these are mounted onto the backs of trucks, you can have a more capable off-road vehicle overall than just rolling around in a Chevy Express.

The 2023 Grumpy Bear Koda

Grumpy Bear Campers is a new face in the RV space. The company was founded by William Zantopulos and Andrew Rohr. William brings experience working at Little Guy Worldwide and worked with the company when it transitioned to Liberty Outdoors. Meanwhile, Andrew is a mechanical engineer with two decades of experience working with composites. He spent over a decade working with fiberglass truck cap manufacturers including ten years at ARE and Liberty Outdoors.

According to Truck Camper Magazine, the pair wanted to build a lightweight and affordable fiberglass truck camper. Originally, this was supposed to be a camper of their own design, but William and Andrew realized that Spacekap already had already been making a spacious and durable fiberglass shell for two decades. The guys decided to use the Diablo as their base shell. If you didn’t know any better from reading this, the Grumpy Bear Koda looks like it was designed to be a sleek and futuristic camper right from the jump, and I love that. The rounded shapes and sort of funky front windows are still a welcoming sight when so many RVs are still boring boxes.

The shells come to Grumpy Bear as they would for a truck, but with fiberglassed plywood ribs with fiberglass and closed-cell foam insulation inside. Grumpy Bear then builds on those ribs. The team adds jacks, side windows, and builds out the interior. When all is said and done, the finished camper doubles the Diablo’s weight to 1,650 pounds. Fully loaded, the Koda weighs 1,830 pounds. That’s a lot of weight for a camper meant for a half-ton truck camper, but we’ll get back to that shortly.

Opening the door to the camper reveals an interior that seems like a cozy place to sleep.

There’s a Wilsonart Thinscape composite table and countertop while the cabinets are laminated plywood. The cabinets were designed in SolidWorks and CNC cut. Grumpy Bear’s founders say that by using CNC, they were able to use every bit of space afforded by the shell.

The features are pretty neat, too. In the overhang, you get a bed that’s almost queen-size. Equipment includes a Suburban 16,000 BTU furnace, a Dometic refrigerator, a CAN sink and stove combo, a 10-speed roof vent, and 2,000-pound jackstands.

 

In terms of power, you’re getting a 100 Ah Battle Born lithium battery and a 30-Amp WFCO converter. Holding tanks include 15 gallons for fresh water and 8 gallons for the sink. There isn’t a bathroom onboard, but there is a Thetford Porta Potti 2.6 gallon portable toilet, a tankless water heater, and an outdoor shower with privacy curtain.

Options include custom interior and exterior colors as well as electric jacks, an 8,000 BTU air-conditioner, 200 Watts of Renogy solar panels, a second 100 Ah battery, and a 3,000 Watt inverter.

Awesome, But Heavy

The 2023 Grumpy Bear Koda is made for short bed trucks. It has an interior floor 90 inches long and a ceiling 6 feet, 2 inches high. Add that pretty full features list to the design and I think Grumpy Bear has a winner on its hands. This is the kind of camper that, when I see one in a campground, I’ll want to chat with the owner.

The part I start spinning my wheels on is the weight. Fiberglass camper builds are supposed to be pretty light. Yet, this is smaller than my U-Haul CT13 while weighing 500 pounds more, and 700 pounds more when loaded with options. This is a camper that’s supposed to be hauled by half-ton trucks, but at 1,830 pounds, don’t think that you can slide this into any half-ton.

 

Truck campers eat up your payload capacity. Payload is what your truck can safely carry; that’s your camper, your gear, your occupants, and the tongue weight of any trailer you stick onto the back. Using the 2023 Ford F-150 as an example, the 3.5-liter EcoBoost maxes out at 1,445 pounds, not even enough to carry the camper before you even hop in. The 5.2-liter supercharged V8 is even worse with a max payload of 1,400 pounds. The 3.3-liter V6 F-150 could technically do it with a max payload of 1,955 pounds, but then you realize that adding a driver and a full water tank will nudge you to the limit.

Optioning your truck with the 5.0-liter V8 nets you up to a 3,315-pound payload, but that’s for a single cab, long bed truck. Adding on different cabs and options changes your payload, too. The best a 2023 RAM 1500 can do is 2,300 pounds and the 2023 Chevy Silverado 1500 hits 2,260 pounds. Mind you, that Chevy is the 2.7 turbo four with a regular cab. The crew cab maxes out at 2,030 pounds.

What I’m getting at here is that this is a half-ton camper, but only if you have a really specific truck or won’t be carrying anything.

Prices start at $36,000 for the standard version and rise to $42,000 after checking every option box (save for custom colors). For comparison, a completely empty Spacekap Diablo runs about $13,000. Currently, Grumpy Bear is building one camper a month but wants to target one camper a week by the end of this year. Still, if you have a truck with enough payload, the Grumpy Bear Koda seems like a pretty cool choice. Being built out of a service body should mean a camper that might even outlast your truck, and I like that. If only it weren’t so heavy.

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