How The Toaster Got Its Look & Name
We frequently get compliments on the Toaster’s silver looks. Except for Tom M., who recently emailed us and told us that our rig “is in the top 50 ugliest campers [he’s] ever seen”. That made me laugh out loud. You’ve got to love brutal honesty sometimes. He was extremely kind and followed that sentence with, “…it also seems to be one of the top ten best built”.
But back to the point of this post. People are always curious why we chose the silver siding and what the material is.
The Toaster is covered in vertical aluminum sheet stock. We initially wanted to get standard RV corrugated aluminum siding so it would look like a regular (and kind of old school) RV again (but without the typical swirls or leaping panther that our rig originally had). But we didn’t realize how expensive RV aluminum siding would be. The sidings come in long narrow sheets that go on RVs horizontally. The longest pieces are the entire length of the rig (the Toaster is 25 ft. long from end to end). Because of the length, it would’ve required LTL (a dedicated truck) to ship it to us. So that option was out the window.
Luckily Jerud found a local fabrication shop that sold 4 ft. x 10 ft. aluminum sheets ($45/sheet). It was a perfect size for the rig and we could pick it up ourselves. The other option was to get steel sheets that were available in a few different solid colors. But it turned out that straight silver aluminum was the cheapest. So that’s how the Toaster ended up silver.
We picked the aluminum sheets up ourselves.
We used handles with heavy duty suction cups to hold up the sheets.
Unlike what most people think, it’s not because we knew how cool the rig would look in all silver and it’s not because we wanted to resemble an Airstream (I actually didn’t know what an Airstream was until we hit the road). But now, we love the Toaster’s silver look. It definitely stands out (which is good and bad) and we never have to worry about drunkenly stumbling home only to find out we went into someone’s else rig that looks like ours (don’t Airstream owners have that problem all the time?!).
Some people think that our siding is pretty durable. It’s actually not that great. The aluminum sheets are around 0.032 inches thick (20 gauge). If you look closely at it you’ll see dents and scratches of all sorts. It doesn’t help that we take it down all kinds of narrow backroads. But so far it’s only cosmetic damage; the siding hasn’t punctured or cracked.
The next question we get is why is the Toaster called “the Toaster”? Well, look at it! It’s square and silver. It sure looks like a toaster to me! (Sorry, no cool name origination story here.)
