Cooking canopy

This is really off topic for this group but someone may have an idea. I am looking for a cooking canopy or awning for the back of my pickup truck with a topper cap. I want a place to cook etc which would give a sheltered area of about 5 ft x 5 ft off the back of the truck. It could be just an awning of two or three sided. There are a lot of large full tents 10 x 10 etc but nothing simple. Anything available or am I in the do it yourself area, either fancy or rig a blue tarp. I would use the bed of the truck for sleeping at a base camp. This would be mostly a one night situation so I do not want to get into one hour setup.

Seems to me it should be pretty easy to just rig a tarp up with a couple of poles and guyline to provide a sheltered cooking area.

I had an awning something like what you are describing on a small camper I used to own but mine may have been a bit larger. I'm sure an RV store could set you up and or at least refer you to someone who could.

5.0 foot Truck Awning

Another option is a simple pop-up canopy.

Doing a search brings up all kinds of elaborate tents which fit on the back of a truck but they have pretty involved setup and are expensive. Actually a friend of mine has been trying to sell me one which his wife got with her Jeep but it is much more than than what I want.

The closest I have been able to find is not available in US and not designed for a truck with a cap:

https://www.reimo.com/en/93792-rear_tent_vertic_for_caddy_floor_space_w135xl135/

I think that my options are to contact a canvas shop for something custom, sew my own which is far beyond my sewing ability or go the blue tarp bungee cord PVC pipe pole route. For the few times I will use it the blue tarp is probably the best.

This all started when I sold my camper because my wife did not really care to go along and I figured that if I am alone I can just sleep in the back of the truck. I have used the camper as a base camp on state forest land or campgrounds and do day hikes for a couple of days of laid back relaxing.

Plain old plastic tarp. I drive a Toyota Tacoma with bed racks...for kayaks. A tarp, pretty much any size, can be a tent, a shade awning,
whatever. I attach it with big spring clamps and guy it out to two poles. Tailgate becomes my table or a seat. With a 12x12 tarp I cover the entire bed and have a shade awning as well.
I used to drive a full sized window van and attached a tarp to the rain gutter with tiny C-clamps, guyed out to two telescoping poles.

For your situation, you could attach a tarp any number of ways, similar to what I do with my kayak racks. Easy and cheap.

I guess that I am over thinking this. I think that you are right that the cheap easy solution is the right one. Not particularly elegant but cheap and easy. I have a Toyota Tacoma with a fiberglass cap so the only real problem is how to attach it to the smooth cap.

There was a similar discussion here:

http://www.canoetripping.net/forums/forum/gear/tents-tarps-and-hammocks/64398-%E2%80%8Btripping-truck-tarp-solution

Granted, you may not have the canoes for the structure, but the reflective tarp might be worth considering. I don't know what material it is made of, but it does have a silvered side.

Easy....use the wheels. I've got a friend with the same type of cap on his truck. He simply stretches the tarp over the top, and secures the corners to the wheels using truckers hitches. Works well enough with the right size tarp.

Exactly like this, Grumpy...

Thanks for the input. I remembered that I have a Campmor nylon tarp which I never used because it was to heavy so I got that out and now I will do some experimenting in the back yard. Looks like I can make it work.

You can get some tie down anchors and use epoxy to attach them to your shell.

And you can get a grommet kit to add grommets to your tarp for a custom fit.

I've been thinking about making one of these too so I can camp out of the back of my little beater Chevy Tracker. It's not long enough to sleep in so I'd have to make a bench to extend it for that, but that's pretty easy to rig up.

Just a note....adding grommets to tarps....try the pebble tie out trick or buy a pack of those commercial thingies that do the same thing. They don't tear out and you can move them around for a true custom fit. There are many versions out there....these come from Northern Tool.

Those are pretty cool!!

Thanks for sharing this!

This is what I finally came up with. Pretty simple as compared to my A Frame camper.

Very cool! Almost exactly what I do as well. The slick thing is, you can use an even wider tarp and have a bit of a wind break if you want. Kinda creates a "tunnel" where it attaches to the truck shell.

I'm planning a similar setup with my mini-station wagon (Toyota Matrix). I have the tarp, guylines, and stakes, but what do you use for poles? Because of the small car, I need something that telescopes or folds up to about 3 feet and extends to between 6 and 7 feet. I don't want to spend a lot of money! The cheap poles (not so cheap at $40/pair) are far too long when telescoped, and the ones that do fold up (like the Kelty Noah's Tarp poles) are hideously expensive (about $50 apiece).

I found some stuff on Amazon by searching for Aluminum Poles:

https://www.amazon.com/HYOUT-Adjustable-...69PKG5CMHQRXF77

or

https://www.amazon.com/Stansport-254-Tel...R78QY3JNSZ01RQ8

I used Walmart #: 552126019 but they were too long and the end would not fit in the tarp grommet so I ended up cutting a foot off from each section and machining a new end. Probably not an option for folks who do not own a machine shop.As it ended up it worked out well because I attached the new end with a small eye bolt which permitted me to run the guy lines through the eye bolt and over the top of the tarp so that it could not blow off.

At this point I will not even be able to field test it because my daughter, son in law and grandkids borrowed my truck mattress, my two burner stove, water jug, coffee pot etc so that they could go camping on an extended trip out west. Maybe they thought that we are even because they parked their 20 ft trailer in my yard but my four cylinder Toyota cannot even move it.

"I have the tarp, guylines, and stakes, but what do you use for poles?"

I used two different sizes of PVC pipe from Home Depot, sliding one into the other. Drilled a few holes so that I could use a pin to adjust the height to multiple heights. Very cheap and quite sturdy!

Telescoping poles! Do it the ham radio way....we make our own telescoping masts all the time. For something like a tarp support you'll need two sections of electrical conduit pipe called "EMT". These are 8ft long. Get a 1/2" diameter and a 3/4" diameter pipe. You'll note, after you cut them each in half, giving you 4, 4ft sections, that they slide into each other (check at Home Depot before buying to make sure). Radiator hose clamps are used as stops....slide your upper pipe to the height you want and tighten the clamp. Buy the clamps with the plastic wing nut thingies so you won't need any tools.
You'll need to put a stick or something in the end to go through the tarp grommet, and tie your guy rope to that so it can't blow off. I've used screw drivers jammed in the ends for that, in a pinch.
Easy!

I recently bought a $4 extension pole from Walmart. I had a different purpose but it might meet your needs also.

Thank you all for the ideas! While I am the original klutz with tools (and, as a result, have very few), I'm at least going to look at Dryer's electrical conduit pipe. However, 4 feet per section is longer than I want, and will work only if I don't have a back seat passenger.

A second possibility is at Cabela's. $20 for two poles; $25 if I have them shipped. Since their store is way the other side of Portland for me, through lots of stop-and-go traffic, I suspect that the $5 for shipping is worth it. These poles fold down to exactly the length I want!

4 feet is just a guess. If you need only 5-6 feet of pole height, then cut them at 3 feet. The Home Depot guys/gals will probably cut them for you.

That is simple yet pretty good set up. That wider set up even better especially when it rains. We will just finish installing new tires and some LED lights on the truck and will do the same canopy.

I want to do the same setup. Nice!

I recently upgraded a little to allow basecamp in the truck for day hikes. Bought this for $60 on Craigslist. Works well and keeps the bugs out. Setup is about 10 minutes.

GrumpyGord, your pics aren't showing up. Photobucket no longer allows hotlinking unless you pony up a large sum of money for the privilege. All I am seeing are boilerplate graphics from Photobucket demanding its ransom money.

That is strange. They were showing when I posted it and now even the previous pictures are not showing. It cannot be because I have too many. I only have six pictures in the account and I thought that it was only a problem when you had a lot of pictures. I guess that you will have to take my word for it that it is a nice setup.

That is strange. I saw the pics you posted shortly after you posted them.

'Twas (is) a nice setup.

I saw them too, but they're gone now.

Are there other hosting sites available or any other way to post pictures? Obviously photobucket is not an option.

OK Lets see if this works. I think that it will share the photo but it requires clicking on the link. Let me know what happens. Any other options?

https://photos.app.goo.gl/4V7e4HLCz243bvV53

It opened a new tab to Google photos showing one picture (using Chrome for Android).

Clicking the link worked for me. I could see your rig and the canopy setup.

So it works. It would be nice if the image would show without clicking on the link like it did with photobucket.

Photobucket sucks. I have been using Google Photos too for pictures.

Wow, that seems odd that neither of those services let you display photos with a url.

I dinked around with the google link and it doesn't provide a way to do that. It will let me download it, and copy it, and share a link, but not embed the image with an html tag that points to their site.

One reason would be that they don't want to pay for the bandwidth to deliver it to a 3rd party site, but it seems like they could attach a small ad easy enough to make a profit on that so I really don't get it unless it's because they make more on tracking who's viewing it than they do on advertising on it and that has some suspicious connotations connected with it.

Yup. It's been a decade or more since I last heard anyone reference Google's original 'motto': Don't be evil. Seems like they tossed that idea overboard back when they discovered the enormous profits to be made by doing evil.

None of my photobucket stuff works. So....I'll be moving everything.

So. Any ideas on what will display images instead of just a link? Photos are not a big thing for me but it would be nice to actually see an image. Most folks just won't bother.

How much to do they charge?

From Photobucket:



Holy Moly!!!

I know I can make an app as good or maybe even better than theirs and charge half of what they're charging, and let you link your images to display here and on other sites (like Facebook).

I've written almost all the code to do it already. It'd probably only take me a few weeks to get it up and running.

I ran some numbers on my costs. If I can get 5 people to sign up for $30 a year I can give you each 50GB of storage and 200,000 MB of downloads per month (uploads are free). I seriously doubt anyone here will hit anything close to 200,000 MB of downloads, but I get 1TB per month with each 250GB block of storage I buy so that's we have to work with.

I can buy storage in blocks now (this is new), and I'll know soon if I get any discount on larger blocks, but that's already a pretty great deal and I'll pass on any discounts on larger blocks. There are other costs involved (app server, database server, email server, etc) but I already built and pay for those to run and won't incur any additional cost to use them with this app.

If you don't find anything better let me know and I'll build the app.

I used to use SmugMug. They charge $6/month ($4/mth if billed annually) for their basic plan, and you can share on other sites at no additional cost. Never had an issue with them at all, I could easily recommend them (I have no relationship with SmugMug, just a once happy customer).

That looks like a pretty good deal, especially in comparison to Photobucket.

I have been using pbase.com for some years. My account is $23 per year for 2GB of storage and includes linking. I usually resize my images to around 1000 pixels on the long side before uploading. I think that one of the reasons that Photobucket dropped free linking is the size of the image files. Pbase offers linking to different image sizes. I haven't paid much attention to what those different sizes are.

Yeah, the newer cameras take some pretty fat file size photos. There's server side software you can use to resize them after they're uploaded, and you can compressed them too. You obviously lose quality when you downsize/compress the image, but you can do it 'on the fly" so you don't need to store all the different sizes.

You can't really compress images the same as you do text files, i.e, with "zip" compression. You can either make them smaller in dimensions (take an 8"X10" and make it 4"x5"), or lower the quality of the image (which blurs it up).

I'm still interested in looking into this some more. I'll keep looking into the numbers and if I can do significantly better on pricing I might rough out an app just to get a feel for what's needed.

I generally use Photoshop or Irfanview to resize images and I work in the number of pixels along the edge. When I resize an image of 4000 X 3000 pixels to 1000 X 750 pixels, the number of pixels is reduced from 12,000,000 to 750,000 or 1/16 of the original number. The image quality is not degraded to the point where it can be seen on most computer displays. The screen that I am looking at right now has a resolution of 1280 X 800 pixels, so a file with 1000 pixels on the long edge could be around 3/4 of the display size without degradation. The file size is considerably smaller even with .jpg, which is compressed anyway. The biggest problem with resizing images is the time and effort that it takes to do it. I would expect that there is batch software that can do this, but I usually like to crop and correct contrast and brightness before resizing. I don't think of image size in inches until I print one. This was true even with film. The grain on film was usually fine enough to allow considerable enlargement without noticeable loss of quality. Another advantage of resizing is that if someone steals your image, the quality will never be as good as your original. Image theft isn't a big deal for most people, but it can be.

Ironically, Dryer, your avatar is now the stock "...update your account..." image.

I'm pretty sure you can still do this with Flickr. It used to be easier, but now it's kind of hidden to discourage it. I have to remind myself how every time.

I tried it with Flickr but it just gave a link. Maybe I did not try the correct method. I very seldom take photos so it is not a big deal. Occasionally I want to post a photo to a group like this. A couple of other groups I am a member of permit direct posting so that is not a problem.