HITCH CARRIER EXPANSION FOR THE AIRSTREAM INTERSTATE

Last year, I published a post trilogy (Parts One, Two, and Three) describing our EPIC struggle to obtain a hitch carrier that met our specific travel and family needs.  We ended up custom DIYing the best carrier that either of us have ever seen, bar none.

And our dog agreed. 

Fast forward a year and a nagging voice in my head kept saying, "Lady, yer gonna need a chain saw where yer goin' next!"  And the chain saw we picked requires a gas can.  And a gas can presents a serious challenge for carriage in a Class B camper van.

It was just a small gas can, a Wavian 2.5 gallon military spec steel jerry can, but still, it presented a big challenge.

I wanted to do something as simple as possible - maybe bolt it temporarily to the back of our existing hitch carrier, because it will only need to live there briefly during local trips when we were actually hauling a couple of gallons of gasoline to our property.  But my husband had other ideas, and due to the cuteness factor of this project, I could not find it within myself to object to his plan.

Basically, he built a custom bracket that bolts onto our existing carrier.

The secret to retrofitting this device, the need for which we had not foreseen when we designed the original hitch carrier, was to "hang" the bracket off that main structural member, and extend it out to the driver's side.

Close-up of those two main bolts.

The Wavian frame could therefore be bolted, in turn, directly to that bracket.

View from above, without the gas can in place. 

The result was just too precious for words.

The Yeti cooler had a baby!  And it looks like it was a mixed marriage because coolers don't typically give birth to jerry cans!

Of course I made a matching sun shield / modesty cover out of silver tarp for the gas can.

I used the same approach as for the Yeti cooler, described in Part 3 of that trilogy linked above.
#vansizedsewing

You'd almost think that we designed the hitch carrier this way, given the fit in the remaining space and the fact that the gas can does not extend one millimeter beyond the body of the Sprinter.

Couldn'ta planned it better if we'd tried.  

Anyway, mother and baby are doing fine, and I'm dying from the cuteness factor here.

Awwwww!!!  It's not often that I get to use the word 'cute' in a Class B context!

No, ours is way cuter than that.