New Totse

My boss is giving me his late mom's old 80's Minnie Winnie because him and his sons all have 5th wheels and I'm fucking stoked. I guess it needs a brake line (so probably all 4) and the roof may need to be resealed, neither of which are things I don't know how to do easily.

I always wanted to mod a van to be a place I could live in. That gets expensive fast though.

Man, I'm so excited. I've been looking into a KOA membership, and it's like $33/year, so with the %10 discount on all campgrounds and random free days for rewards members I could absolutely see some use out of it.

It's nearly 40 years old though. Make sure you're not putting more into it than it's worth. In my experience anything given away usually has more wrong with it than the person lets on.

Lady had it inspected every year up until it was parked, and just had the carb rebuilt maybe a few hundred miles before it was parked.


The thing is it belonged to my boss's mom, and since she stopped using it it's been parked, and he'd rather see me and my kids use it than it sit and rot in the weeds.


Trust me, if I end up needing more than brake lines and the common maintenance stuff (Oil change, coolant flush, actual brakes, tires, et cetera) and MAYBE some interior shit done I'm walking away. The nice thing though is I was prepared to spend up to $3000 on an RV so if I slowly put that into this one it might not be a bad deal.

So some updates:

Went up to move it so my boss could clean it out for me and I couldn't get it to start without spraying gas into it directly, so I ended up getting a carb rebuild kit and have that all good to go, so now Monday after work I can go get that moved, and next weekend should be able to bring it home.

Good to hear.

Hell yea!

Yeah. The guys on this RV Discord got me a little rattled talking about how you need to book 6+ months in advance, but I can literally debunk that by going on the MN State Park website and looking at the calendar. Yeah, I'm not going to be able to just go "Ope, I'm going camping tomorrow", but if I'm willing to book ~10 days in advance I'll be fine.

Then the stupid GoRVing Reddit wanted to talk about how finding a campground without a 10 year rule is rare, but luckily the more experienced people jumped in and were like no you're dumb, people have newer campers because they like having newer campers

Got the carb installed, it leaked gas, took it apart and figured out I didn't set the float, then took it apart a couple more times to get the float dialed in. Idles great, bogs when I stomp the gas, but someone removed the choke so for all I know it just wasn't warmed up enough.