Steve's Radio Page the cat

If you ever want to deploy in an emergency to help either your local EOC, or perhaps for an incident in another state you need to be able to quickly and safely get yourself and your equipment to the incident location. A camper top for a pickup truck runs about $1400 new. Enclosed trailers start at about $2500. Even a lowboy trailer with a homemade box runs about $750. Teardrop trailers are making a comeback but I don't even want to think how expensive they are. I am fortunate to have an older pickup truck for my business that I have recently replaced with a small economy car. My idea was to build a heavy duty box for the bed of my truck that could contain everything I needed for an amateur radio deployment in an emergency. Security was a concern so I figured that if the box was big and heavy enough it would be too awkward to steal out of the bed of the pickup. This box is about 4 feet wide, 5 foot 6 inches long and about 2 feet high and weighs around 175 pounds unloaded. The beauty of this method is that depending on the vehicle, you can make the box any size you want. The total cost was about $300. I finally settled on 19/32 inch thick plywood (5/8 inch nominal) . (Three-quarter inch thick plywood would have been stiffer but heavier.) Three sheets cost me about $90. Also it needed to be easily buildable. I can not cut wide pieces of heavy plywood on a table saw so the number of cuts made needed to be minimized and I needed to develop a way to make straight cuts with simple tools. Also holding heavy pieces of plywood in position to nail together can be very awkward, so the assembly procedure had to be such that I could nail it all together square without any assistance.


In order to cut wood the blade must pass through the wood. These pieces of wood are placed to raise the wood being cut. The space between pieces is where the blade will cut.	Make the blade only deep enough to pass through the wood but not hit the ground (concrete).

The distance from the left edge of the guide of my old circular saw to the left side of the blade is about 4 inches. In this case the width of the wood after cutting was to be 66 inches. Therefore a line was drawn across the wood at 62 inches, and that is where the wood guide was temporarily nailed down to the piece of wood being cut.	Note how the circular saw is being held against the guide as it cuts the wood at the desired location.

Since the top and bottom of the box are 4'0"by 5'6", all three pieces of 4'x8' plywood were cut at the 5'6" mark. Two of the large pieces were kept for the top and bottom of the box. Two of the remaining 2'6" pieces were later trimmed down to 2'0" in width for the front and rear sides of the box. The last 4'0"x5'6" piece was cut down the middle long ways to make two 2'0" by 5'6" sides. This really reduced the amount of cutting required.	Here all the wood was stored for assembly the next day.

I pre-nailed the seams before assembly since I was going to have only two hands to work with during assembly.	Here I am spreading the water based carpenter's glue on the seams. Make sure you thoroughly wet both pieces of wood being joined.

Here I have just nailed the front side and the bottom piece together.	The spare piece of wood is used as an alignment tool to keep the pieces of wood square while the glue dries.

This is how the sides and the bottom piece are aligned. Try to keep the pieces as square as possible to reduce the amount of sanding and filling in later on. I used a piece of plywood beneath the bottom piece to help with alignment as I was nailing the two pieces together. Note that I did not use a rabbet joint here as it would be very difficult to do on a table saw with wood pieces this long. There are other ways of reinforcing the joint if needed.	Here the front and rear sides are nailed to the bottom piece. Note the piece of plywood used for alignment at the very bottom.

Once the two sides are thoroughly dry, they will stay aligned and you can attach the top with nails and glue.	Here one side has been glued and nailed.

Here the second side is about to be attached.	The plywood for the box is now assembled.

This is a detail of one of the corners. 6d finish nails were used throughout. Note this corner is fairly well aligned, and there are no gaps between the plywood pieces.	I cut one piece about 1/8 inch too short. This required patching with some epoxy putty.

Evening out the corners with a 40 grit sanding disk.	Rounding the corners with a sanding disk and then the orbital sander.

Laying out the fiber glass cloth. This is the bottom of the box. Since the bottom of the box can get wet sitting in the truck bed, I am attempting to seal it with the glass and polyester resin.	Ready to glass.

The bottom glass job is almost finished - all 20 square feet. Doing this much glassing with polyester resin is a pain in 100 degree heat. The set time is only about 7 minutes. Next time I need to figure out a better way.	Here the bottom is fully glassed. I then flipped it over and glassed all the remaining corners with 5 inch wide fiberglass cloth.

The wood not glassed was given one coat of resin. In order to cut the top off to make the lid, I needed a guide. I used quarter round trim.	The quarter round trim goes all around the box.

Here I am in the process of cutting with the circular saw. As I completed the cut on one side, I removed the quarter round and nailed it vertical to keep the gap at the saw cut constant. Without this the lid will eventually collapse onto the saw blade.	The lid is now separate from the box.

Here I had just resined the cut edge of the lid.	I made a lip for the box to keep water from penetrating the box. I made all four sides from one piece of fir siding.

Here the lip has been sanded and resined. The lip is recessed 1/16th of an inch to clear the lid.	Three heavy duty hinges have been installed and the interior is primed.

Interior is primed. Subject vehicle is in the background.	Interior is painted...... same color as house.

Exterior is primed and painted and the four side handles installed. Forty-four cubic feet of storage.	Here the box has been placed in the bed. You can see I added two handles to the front of the lid for easier lifting, and a security latch for a padlock. I also added light weather stripping all around the opening. Note the heavy duty fiberglass 50 foot push up pole. (That's another subject.)

With the lid down it almost looks like a bed cover. Well...not quite, but it doesn't look as ugly as I thought it would be.	I will have a picture here of the box filled with all my gear, including my Honda 2000i generator, my oversized Tent-Cot, two 4 foot folding tables, 2 folding chairs, a heavy duty pop up canopy, and many water proof utility boxes with radio gear.