Simple Rooftop Tent

What could be better than a road trip through scenic locations? A road trip through scenic locations with a homemade rooftop tent (RTT), of course! A poor man´s intro to glamping!

I am a guy who gets around 400 new project ideas a day - some crazier than others. While planning a road trip to Nordic countries with my now fiance I thought to myself "Instead of going the easy way and camping like a normal person why not build a rooftop tent and attach it to my Volvo 850!" After a couple of days of crafting and around 300 €, I emerged from the shed with a fully functional mobile shelter.

Two weeks and 5700 km of road trip later I have to conclude that this was one awesome idea. I could not be happier with how it turned out.

But enough talk, let me show how I built this bad boy using readily available materials and simple techniques.

There are more awesome photos at the end of the article if you are not much of a reader. The video gives a great overview as well. I have added photos of other people´s tents to the final step. My design is being replicated all over the world and this makes me tremendously happy! If you also happen to build a tent inspired by this article please share photos as I would love to feature you here as well!

If you enjoy the video and the article be sure to subscribe! You can also find me on Instagram where I post all sorts of build stuff. Thank you!

Materials:

• Decathlon 2-person Pop-up tent (50€)
• Mattress for comfort (80€)
• A sheet of plywood (3000X1500 mm, 18 mm thick. In imperial it would be 10x5 feet and 3/4 inch thick) (80€)
• An aluminum ladder that is at least as long as the car is tall. (25€)
• 3 mm sheet metal for the hinges
• 4 small hinges for the ladder (around 25€ for all the hardware)
• 2 metal pins for connecting the ladder to the small hinges (these pins are used in trailer hatch hinges)
• Bolts (16 pcs. M6) for connecting the ladder hinges to the plywood base.
• Bolts (2 pcs. M12) for connecting the main hinges to each other.
• Bolts (8 pcs. M10) for connecting the main hinges to the plywood.
• Bolts (8 pcs. M10) for connecting the tent rods to the main hinges.
• Bolts (4 pcs. M10) for connecting the tent to the roof rack.
• Corresponding washers and locking nuts.
• Paint for plywood and metal parts. (10€)
• Heavy-duty buckles (2 pcs.) and angle aluminum for keeping the tent closed while driving
• Wire clips, and a few panhead screws for connecting the tent to the plywood.
• Rain cover material (further explained in step no. 6) (50€)
• Buckles (8 pcs.) for attaching the rain cover to the tent

The prices included are what I paid for this stuff (august 2021, Estonia). Prices probably vary a lot in different locations.

Roofrack is needed to attach the tent to the car. If you do not have any I recommend building it as I did. I used two rectangular tubes and attached those to the car using muffler brackets. Cheap but very sturdy - good for hauling material as well!

Tools needed:

• CNC table or metal cutting tools
• Drill with drill bits
• Angle grinder
• Vice
• Hammer, metal file
• Measuring and marking tools
• Circular saw
• Wrenches
• Sewing machine and scissors

The total cost of this project for me was just over 300€. Considering that rooftop tents usually start from 2k it´s not bad. Saving money is one thing but creating something with your own hands is priceless!

I think the inspiration for this build came from Patrick Remington´s Youtube video I saw a while back. He explains the process of his RTT build really well. Check him out!

Rooftop Tents need special kinds of hinges as you need to be able to fold the tent with a mattress inside of it in half. Any regular door hinge from the hardware store will not work. This sets back a lot of DIYers as you can´t really find many resources about it online. Well, up until now. My hinge design has accumulated quite an interest and that is why I have set up an Etsy shop. Over there you can find a hinge kit for building an RTT. As shipping can be quite expensive I am also selling CAD drawings of the same thing. You can insert these into a CNC or use them as templates for cutting out by hand. Several different design alternations are included in the package!

Important things I noted while designing the hinges were that the plywood I was going to use was 18 mm thick and the mattress was 100 mm (4 inches) thick. A little bit extra for bedsheets and the tent fabric and I got the height of the hinges. Looking back I would make it just a little bit taller as I could not really leave sleeping bags inside the tent while folded. (fixed in the new design)

At the time of building the tent, I was not too familiar with plasma CNC machines. That is the reason why I just marked the hole locations instead of cutting them out. I drilled out the holes with a drill press later. The newer versions have the right-sized holes already cut out.

Note that a CNC table is not a must for this project. The shape of the hinges is pretty basic and could easily be replicated using a cut-off wheel on an angle grinder. But as my neighbor and a fellow Youtuber, DonnDIY was kind enough to help me cut out the hinges using his homemade CNC table I used that option. Plus it was super interesting to see that machine in action.

Then it was just a matter of bending the hinge 90 degrees. I clamped it in my vice and hammered until I had the right angle.

The holes in the hinges are as follows :

• The single top one is for connecting two hinges together - this will also be the pivot point so be sure to use good quality M12 bolt in there.
• The four middle ones are for connecting the tent poles to the hinges. As I will explain in the later step, it is unnecessary to have four holes - two is sufficient (at least with the tent I was using). These are M10 as well.
• The two bottom ones are for attaching the hinge to the plywood. M10

Now, the tent to the hinge connection is where it gets exciting. I came up with a pretty cool way to do it and I think it is pretty unique as well. I used M10 bolts to clamp the tent poles to the hinge. To do that I first filed a flat spot right under the head of the bolt and then drilled a hole. This hole would hold the pole while being clamped to the hinge. More photos and info in a later step...

Another pretty cool solution I came up with was the ladder. Usually, these homemade (and some commercially available) rooftop tents use telescope ladders. These are bulky and add quite a bit of height to the folded-up tent. Plus it is a waste of a ladder if you ask me. They are not cheap either - 2.8m (shortest) one would have been around 80€ for me.

Instead, I opted to use a simple aluminum ladder that I got for 25€. The ladder has to be higher than the roof of the car. You can always shorten it as aluminum can be cut using woodworking tools. For my design, I drilled 12mm hole in four hinges and attached them to the plywood base as shown in the photo. Two 12 mm holes were also drilled at the top of the ladder. I think you know where I am getting with this. The ladder and the hinges are connected with a metal pin. When not in use the ladder can be stored in the trunk of the car and the hinges would fold down. This way the ladder construction would only add 5mm to the tent while it is folded up.

A big bonus is that since the ladder is being modified so little it can easily still be used for other applications. If you are wondering how strong this mechanism is be informed that after 2 weeks of camping I noticed only very minor bends in the hinges. Nothing I would worry too much about. And nothing a few wacks with a hammer could not fix!

Next, I attached the hinges to the plywood. All the sharp edges were chamfered using a hand plane. Bolts, washers and locking nuts were added. The whole thing was attached to the roof rack using four M10 bolts. It does not seem gnraly but I assure you I never had any problems or fear that I would lose my tent on the highway.

By the way, the platform for this specific tent (Quechua 2 second) measures 1500 mm in width and 2X1190 mm in lenght.

As my roof rack was homemade (for less than 10€), I decided to just bolt through them. Another solution would be to fabricate some special brackets but to me, it seemed unnecessary. Check out this great video explaining how to mount a tent to a roof rack. As I had made my rack very low profile (wind resistance reasons) I had to make sure the bolts would not start scraping the roof of my car. Luckily, I had just enough clearance to avoid that.

C-channel, facebook

Now, the tent! As you can see from the second and third photos the tent poles were cut in half. Yes, once you go on the roof you can´t camp on the ground anymore. It is a commitment! To connect each end of the pole to the hinges I used the previously mentioned bolt clamps. In the photos, you can see that I added washers between the hinges and the poles. This was a big mistake! As the clamping surface was smaller on that side I managed to break around 5 cm (2 inch) pice off of the pole a couple of times. This resulted in the tent not being as erect as it was supposed to be. The only fix would be to replace the poles with new ones. Do not add washers there! And do not overtighten the bolts - these carbon fibre (or whatever) poles are quite brittle.

Also, there is really no need to clamp the lower poles to the hinge. Here I am referencing the pole that runs along the bottom edge of the tent. Instead, I would have just nailed it in place with wire clips. After painting the plywood I did add wire clips to the outer edges of the tent to keep it firmly against the plywood.

Tho support the tent while it is folded I made two corner brackets from a piece of wood and aluminum angle. Photos are quite self-explanatory I hope. These brackets hold the folded-up tent always at the same height making sure it would not sag or bulge.

For some reason, I have no photos of them but I also added two straps with buckles to hold the folded tent closed. They were attached to the outer edges of the plywood base. These are really important! They hold the tent closed while on the go! You can see those straps in the video.

After that, It was time to paint everything. I removed all the hardware, cleaned it with acetone, and spraypainted it black. The plywood was also painted black using weatherproof paint. At first, I wanted to use film plywood but since it was double the price of regular plywood I opted to just painting it. A can of paint was just 10€ - it made total sense!

I also removed all the unnecessary straps and buckles from the tent. The tent could not be used for regular camping anyway so the old pop-up mechanism parts were useless.

To protect the folded-up tent from rain, splashing insects, and wind I sewed a rain cover for it. I would not really go too deep into this step as I am probably not the right person to give out sewing tips. I am terrible at it but somehow it turned out OK.

For the fabric I used water-resistant fabric I found locally. I used something like 2.5 meters of it (1.5m wide). For hardware, I bought a bunch of buckles, some straps, and a matching color thread. The tape-looking thing you see in the photo is supposed to be some sort of waterproofing strip that you iron and sew in between the fabric. I do not really know if it works or not.

Luckily the tent was just a square box so it was pretty easy to sew a cover for it. I made sure that the fabric extended over the bottom edge of the tent (1 inch or so) to avoid any water reaching up to the tent.

To connect the cover to the tent I used 8 buckles in total. To each edge, I sewed straps and added buckles. The receiving end of the buckles was screwed to the bottom of the tent platform.

This was another awesome idea I got while building this project. I figured when the tent was open it created a nice roof to sit under. It would sort of act as a living room. And what is a living room without a table? Folding chairs I already had.

My design for a table could not be easier. I screwed two metal hooks (that I had hammered to shape) to a piece of plywood. These would hook to the ladder. To hold the table up a small string was used. The string allows little adjustment so even if the ladder angle changes I can still make sure the table is parallel to the earth.

I first tried making quite a bit more complicated solution with a square dowel through the step of the ladder but I could not get it working really well with the angle. Adjusting the table would have been ruled out as well.

A living room but no walls?? Let's fix that. I bought a 2X3 meter tarp and some fabric rivets. The tarp was cut in half and attached to the tent base with fabric rivets. To keep the tarp from flapping in the wind I just rolled the bottom part over a piece of plastic pipe I had laying around. The pipe was then attached to the ground using the tent stakes. The stakes came with the tent.

It created a somewhat wind and rainproof room. I think the idea was brilliant but not once did I use it during my 2-week trip. Well, actually I tried setting one wall up once, but it was way too windy. Thank god that I decided to use a cheap tarp for it and not the expensive (20€/meter) water-resistant fabric that I used for the cover.

So what do I think of this rooftop tent and rooftop tents in general?

First of all, I have added a photo of me sitting on the outer corner of the tent. I wondered there might be some people who are doubting the strength of the ladder mechanism or the hinges or the non-braced plywood. There you go - that is all 90+ kg of me sitting there without any problems.

During the 2-week trip, I had zero problems with the tent. We were hit with rain, wind, cold nights and the tent showed no signs of wear.

The second photo shows me drying the tent with a small blower. Yes, I had a blower with me on a camping trip! Great for starting fires as well. The reason was that after all, it is just a tent. After a rainy night I could not just fold it up as the water on the tent would just be soaked up in the mattress making the next night's sleep quite terrible. And even if it was not a rainy night, water would still build up between the two layers due to condensation.

Cons:

• It is a tent! It is cold and wet, changing clothes is a pain in the ass, and midnight trips to take a leak are non-inviting. To top it off you are 1.5 meters above the ground.
• It is on the car. You can camp only in places accessible by car. And when you have a Volvo 850 from 1995 with a loaded trunk there is not much off-roading. I tried - it did not work! During the testing phase, I think I managed to damage a fuel line while driving over a field. Luckily I was still in my home country and it was quickly fixed by a mechanic. A tent like this would probably make much more sense on an off-road vehicle.
• Open to the environment. While in Norway we found it very hard to find a camping spot. Paying for one was not an option and there were close to zero quiet secluded forest roads. One night in North Cape we had to change the location due to the extreme wind that was giving us hard time. That night we had to sleep in the trunk as we could not find a windless camping spot. We jokingly say that we slept in the second bedroom.
• Increased fuel consumption. Anything you put in or on your car will increase fuel consumption. Though, I managed to beat my previous liters per 100km by around 0.5 liters. The previous best was 8.8 l per 100km. In Norway, I managed 8.2 l per 100km. Near the bigger cities where highway speeds were higher, I did notice quite a bigger fuel consumption (10.5 l per 100km)

Pros:

• Setting up the tent goes fast. At least faster than traditional tents. Pulling the handbrake to climbing into the tent took me less than 2 minutes. Probably would have taken me the same time to set up a regular pop-up tent with a mattress.
• It is different from all the others. Pretty much anyone can purchase a commercially-made roof tent but only a few can build it from scratch.
• It is fun to build! For me, this reason tops all others. For me, building and this kind of problem-solving is like meditation. I forget all the troubles while doing it.

So where are those marvellous photos taken? We took them during our 5700 km trip through Finland, Norway and Sweden. We swam in crystal clear waters in Lapland, reached the end of the world in the North Cape and saw a moose swimming across a fjord in Lofoten. What a trip it was! Definitely not the last time I will be visiting those places! Probably not with a rooftop tent though - I got some bigger ideas!

The car we use was my 1995 Volvo 850. She is two months younger than me! Just like the tent she survived the trip without a single problem.

This is it! An enormous thanks to you for showing interest in this project. I really appreciate it! I hope I have inspired you and given you some ideas for building your very own rooftop tent.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas on it. Also if you have any questions please leave them down below! Share this project with a friend who might enjoy it.

If you enjoyed the video and the article be sure to subscribe! You can also find me on Instagram where I post all sorts of build stuff. Thank you!

Take care

Andu

I am absolutely astonished to see that my tent build has already inspired so many people. My design is being built all over the world - from India to Brazil! Here are some photos I have received of DIY tents!

Here are links to my Instagram posts about this build/ adventure: link 1, link 2, link 3, link 4

I also invite you to join the DIY Rooftop Tent Community on Facebook. It is a group of almost 30k members with a common interest - DIY tents. Great stuff!

If you build my tent please share photos with me. I would like to include them in this step. You guys are awesome!