Tacoma short bed camping build

I am in the process of coming up with an affordable, functional, and easily removable sleeping setup for the bed of my shortbed Tacoma. I wanted something I could use for normal camping and also stealth parking lot camping when I go on overnight surf trips. The biggest challenge I am having is the 5 foot bed and the fact that I’m 6 feet tall.

So far, I have built an elevated sleeping platform which allows me to lay stretched out diagonally comfortably. The design I used quickly breaks down into three pieces and can be stored in the bed of the truck or in the garage. I also liked this design because it breaks down and can be layed flat on the bottom of the truck bed (to accomadate two people sleeping with the tailgate open).

I used 3/4” Plywood for the entire thing and glued some cheap carpet from homedepot onto each piece of the platform.
I also cut one piece of 3/4” plywood which slides under the platform for additional support. The support beam locks into place with the grove in the bed and guide pieces that I screwed to the bottom of the front and rear platforms.

I just ordered a softopper which I should be installing in the near future.

The next step after the softopper is I want to build some sort of discrete small canvas enclosure for camping with the tailgate down.

I can add additional pictures once the next steps are finished.

I will attach some of the pictures of what I have done so far. I’m sure this design has been used before, but if not, hopefully it gives some people ideas or inspiration for trying to camp in their shortbeds!

 

Nice and simple. I like. But are you gonna sleep on that? Pretty sure at 6'3" it wouldn't be very comfortable for me.

 

Im only about 600-601, and I fit perfectely diagonally with just enough room to strech my toes out... If I was 603 then it may be a little to small to sleep comfortably.

 

So i've followed a few threads with the same issue 6'-3" 5' bed and currently have a softopper looking for quick sleeping platform. The closest idea would be to build 2 sliding drawings that the top lip of the drawers to handle an additional board width (total 4 boards) when tailgate is dropped and drawers pulled out. Just recently softopper just release the following to accommodate the tailgate down sleeping idea.

 

Fitting a six foot man in a five foot bed. The pythagorean theorem says it's possible but will be tight

60.5^ + 41.5^
≈
73.36552^ inches

 

Yeah, I saw that tent for the tailgate from softopper when I ordered my topper.

It looks nice but Im not 100 percent sure it would work for what I an trying to do with it. I am going to attempt to make something similar myself that is a little more discrete.

Im thinking of a piece of canvas that snaps or secures somehow to the end of the tailgate and runs diaganally to the bottom of where the softopper rear window closes. If I didnt care about it being discrete and being obvious that somone was sleeping in it in a parking lot then I would go with the softopper one for sure. Also don’t want to have to set it up and take it down whenever I want to drive

 

We extended our short bed sleeping platform to 7-feet also by adding another board supported by the drawers partially pulled out, my first one of these on my 1st gen (avatar pic) used a latch to lock the boards together and was self supported with folding sides. We camped with the tailgate and cap glass door open and my wife made an add on tent by cutting the floor and back side of a Walmart dome tent that would wrap over the glass door and under the tailgate. Its funny looking, as if we backed into someone’s tent and drove off with it, but it worked great in Pacific Northwest rains, and other bad weather, and mosquito proof.

 

I like the idea of the drawers sliding out to have an additional board at the end.

 

Here is a guy who had a similar set up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SshA4lTikeA

 

With my new RTT and platform, I could sleep 4 adults in full length comfort, or in my case, let my kids sleep above and my wife and I sleep below in full length comfort, just like we used to in my old VW Westy camper , bless it’s long lost soul.

 

Do you guys even fetal position





Gotta roll yourself up into a ball.

 

I will buy similar this summer. Good enough for me!

 

Nice, good idea cutting the tent. How did you secure it to the truck? bungee cord or something

 

yeah that youtube video is actually what I was basing my idea off of; he used reflectix I believe, instead of canvas. I want to try to do something similar to that. Still waiting to see his part 2 to that video but havent seen it on his channel

EDIT* Actually this was the video I was thinking of when I commented.
https://youtu.be/a7UAe3dXBoY

 

We used a combination of tarp clips, bungee cords and spring clamps. It’s really easy to clamp to the truck and the tent cost about $30 new. Get a 3-4 person one that uses two cross poles so the floor is rectangular or square, not a hexagonal dome tent.

 

I’ll set the tent up and get a pic of it posted this weekend, but it was just 3 long cuts forming a sideways ”H” with one horizontal cut along the upper side of the back wall, the downward slit continuing into the floor about 1/3 of the way through it and the last horizontal cut across the floor forming two flaps in the back wall.

 

Hee Hee, you’re obviously not a parent. Got really tired of having to do that camping for a week with kids! told them they could sleep up in “the penthouse” and they very happily leave us alone!

 

I like this idea...but damn it is ugly. I hope they work on that idea so that it is more streamlined and incorporates better with their Softopper.

 

I like your idea, and the Softopper tailgate attachment looks terrible. Please keep us updated.

 

I know this thread is old, but just realized I was negligent in updating the outcome of my camping build. I ended up getting the softtopper and realizing the decking I made did not function very well with the topper as the supports from the softtopper kind of got in the way making it a pain to remove the plywood pieces. Also, I did not like that there was very little headroom to sit up and maneuver around and there was no way both my GF and I were both fitting in there comfortably. So I ditched the plywood deck and came up with another plan.

I decided that I wanted to have room for myself and my girlfriend to both camp in the bed of the truck, so I would have to do some type of tailgate extension. I did not like any of the options I found on line because they did not fit my specific needs. They were not low profile / covert enough and seemed like a pain to set up.

I ended up building a collapsible foot extension that could be put up and taken down from inside the bed of the truck with the softtopper on. The way I built this was by taking two pieces of plywood and stapling waterproof canvas that I got from Amazon to the wood. I used hooks and snap buttons (the kind used on canvas boat covers) to secure the canvas to the tailgate. This worked really well actually and gave us both room to lay down and stretch out in the bed of the truck. As for sleeping surface we just used self inflating camping mats and sleeping bags. We did several weeks of camping this way and it worked very well overall. We used this in rain and did not have any issues with leaking.

Since then we have now gotten a cargo van that we converted into a camper, which negated the point of having a camping setup on the Tacoma, so the truck be is now back to its original state.

Unfortunately I cant find any pictures of the entire setup in use, I deleted them off my phone by mistake. But I just went out to my garage and took some pictures of the foot extension part to better explain how it works.

PIC 1: Here is the extension all folded up. It only weighs about 5-10 pounds or so and folds up small enough to store easily.


PIC 2-3: Here is the extension unfolded and attached to the tailgate. It only takes maybe 30 seconds to unfold and attach. Super easy.


PIC 4: Here is me laying stretched out in the bed, with plenty of room for my feet (Pardon the awesome pajama pants). I am 6'01" and there is plenty of room. My GF is 5'08" and there is room for both of us to fit easily.

PIC 5: Here is a picture of the inside, you can see how I just stapled the canvas to the plywood. The staples don't look very nice when you look at it up close but they work perfectly fine. I also put some seam sealer that came with my softtopper over all the exterior staples to better water proof everything. You will notice a small gap between the edge of the extension and the bed. To fill this we just wedged our sleeping bag cases in there, I'm sure someone else could come up with a more elegant solution though.


PIC 6: I used these button snaps to attach the canvas to the inside cross rail that comes with the soft topper. I just had to add a screw in mounting snap onto that cross rail. (sorry I don't have a picture of that because I took my softtopper off the truck recently).



PIC 7: I put a snap that connects the canvas to each corner of the tailgate.



PIC 8: I bent some thin scrap metal to function as a hook over the tailgate latch. This is the main mounting point, all the snaps are secondary.


Basically the way I would set this up when camping is
1) We would crawl into the bed of the truck with the softtopper all closed up.
2) Unfold the extension.
3) Place the hooks on.
4) Reach through the gap to attach the snaps to the tail gate.
5) Attach the snaps to the softtopper cross support beam.
To get out of the truck in the morning we would just reverse the process.

I wish I still had the pictures of everything all together so I could explain this better, but hopefully it all makes sense anyways. I am sure if you were to make this you could make it look much nicer than I did. I was just using this essentially as a quick build prototype to see how I liked it, and I feel like it was the best solution for us camping in the shortbed as it is covert enough that you can camp places like a Walmart parking lot if needed, because it looks almost like an extension of the softtopper.

Here is a picture with the topper from one trip I found, unfortunately the extension is not put on here, but it even worked with the bike rack and everything.


I know this is not the best post because I don't have the best pictures to explain the build, but hope it still can help anyone looking for some different ideas.