HOW TO SET-UP A UTE CANOPY FOR TRAVELLING AUSTRALIA

Far out mate, and I'm bloody excited. Check this thing out. It's been a huge day and a half here at Norweld. It's been a few months going back and forth. We've teamed up with Caleb, who's behind the camera. Absolute legend. He runs Pro Touring Concepts. And Isaac inside, he runs Norweld Australia with his mate Jamie. So they build the best trays in Australia and canopies, and we've got one on our ute. And Caleb is the man who wires them up. And also, you can't forget EnerDrive. We've geared it up with a heap of EnerDrive products inside. Caleb works a lot with them, and his work is tidy as. And mate, set up for touring. Come and check it out. Might sound a bit excited, because I am. I can't help myself. I've been frothing on this all day. Got all this new gear in there, and I've still got so much space. So check it out, hey. All decked out. We'll quickly run around the outside. This is what she looks like. Underbody toolboxes, big gull wing doors, multi-rack on top. Got a RhinoRack back wing awning on top, so that'll swing right around and give us heaps of shade. We've opted to have one jerry can on the back, because we're going to get a long-range tank underneath soon. We could load it here, so we've got heaps easy access to climb up on top, because we'll still be running double swags up there. This thing here, holy hell, look at this. Look how much gear I've got in that drawer. Wowee. And that's only half full. I reckon I could load that up even more. So much space, hey. Just functional storage for traveling and touring. It's insane. Spare tyre here. We've got another one. CSA have given us another rim, because we run the Raptors and they look schmick. So we'll put one on here, because mate, I don't want to ruin the back of this with a steel wheel. That is, mate, that is so good. Another new addition here. We've swapped out the standard factory Mazda bar for a new Hayman Race X bar, for a couple of reasons. Major one, honestly, how bloody good does it look? It matches up with this thing so well, but a cool, like a few cool functional issues, is that it actually sits about six to eight inches higher than the standard one. So you increase your departure angle, which is better for off-road. It comes standard with these recovery points. The center one's rated to eight tonne, so you don't have to carry an extra recovery sort of accessory to put in your tow hitch. It's good to go. Comes with a standard drop hitch, so it'll line up where your old pin used to be when you're towing a van like we do. So you're not going to be driving along like this. Pretty damn sick. That's unreal. Come around this side, another underbody toolbox. And then as we get up the front here, you'll see we've got a little tap here, right? Underneath, there's a 40 litre water tank under there. Filler up here, tank down here, gravity fed, works a treat. But it saves me so much inside. I used to carry two 20 litre water jerrys, right, that had to live in the canopy, so there's so much space now. It's all under there, all done. Mate, unreal. Come back around, we'll start at the fridge. And in this side, look at that. Far out, mate. So we've kept our same fridge. We run the 60 litre Hellmann's fridge from ARB. It's a ripper. What we have changed, we've gone from an MSA drop slide to a Clearview drop slide. They're better, they're better use, they're easier to use for the missers, a lot smoother and that. So we're stoked with that. Come, get this out of here, stuff inside. This one here, right, we've got a 200 amp hour EnerDrive lithium battery. So if you look in behind here, it's tucked in beside the offside there. 200 amp hour lithium, right? In here, EnerDrive, 2000 watt inverter. So we can run coffee machines, kettle, we can even put a microwave in here if we want. It'll charge all my camera batteries, no dramas. It's got plenty of power and it'll do it, no worries. A good safety feature is it's actually got a breaker on it, so a safety breaker. So it is 240 volt power. We've got young kids, I don't want anything going wrong in here and they get zapped. So great RCD safety feature. This is all the breakers for everything we've got. We've got input, charge, solar, accessories, everything's fused left and right. This is all part of the EnerDrive system. And then this EPRO battery monitor, we've got one in the van. They're a brilliant thing to know your battery health. So it tells you the state of charge. It also tells you how many amps solar going in, how many amps you're drawing if you're using your inverter and all that sort of stuff. So it's really good. Just check it out. You look at it, you know what's going on, you know what you can use and you know you're not going to drain your battery. Also got a battery guard on the other side. So that's set to cut out at what voltage, Caleb? 12 volt. 12 volt. So it's a safety device. It's going to stop you discharging your lithium below a safe level. So it's always going to be remain like healthy, you know. So check this out. Look at the storage up the top here. So we've got, this is a 2019 model, a brand new canopy, heaping new ideas in here. And we've had some input into it because of what we need and our storage sort of issues on the road. We live full time on the road, so we need this stuff. Like when we go away and we leave the van, we need every nook and cranny to have a space and for something to go in there. And this has done the job. This here is wicked. Got a table and a drawer combo. So that comes out. Nice big feature section at the back of it. It's a huge drawer. And then also you pull this out. Look at that for food prep, hey. I could put a cooker on there, a barbecue, whatever. Make sangas. Hey, kids can even sit on that. I reckon it's bloody strong. And that, look at that. It's just, it opens up and it's insane. There's another, tucked up the top there, there's another table that you can pull out and chuck in the side, and also a step you can hook up some overlay footage in so you can see that. Hey, look at this. Easy to use, drop-down, alley ladder. I can climb up here and grab the swags, whatever I want on the multi-rack, no dramas. Heaps easy to tie everything down. Plenty of tie-down points. It's strong, looks schmick. Hey, stoked. Keep coming around here on this side, right? Look at this. Massive bulk storage, right? So I've got a massive drawer here. I haven't even got anything in this one yet. It's still my heading. I've got so much space, I don't know where to start. And then this one is a bit shorter because you'll see behind it is the 200-amp lithium. So it's tucked away in there. It's tidy, it's hidden away, it's safe, easy to get your battery cables through to everything. And you still don't lose any storage because now this drawer here, schmick. What we've got on this side, this is a DC-to-DC charger. We've got one in the van as well. This will pick up alternator power when you're driving and it turns your DC-to-DC. So it'll turn that current into 40 amps plus of charge into your battery. We started ours up just sitting at idle, we get 39 amps. So make sure you cable up properly, get some good cable to that to get the most amps into your battery. It's also a solar input too. So Caleb's wired a solar input to the roof so I can put a fixed panel up there if I want. And I've also got an extra one here. So I've got a 200-watt blanket sitting up there. I can drag that out, plug it in, that'll charge that battery up, no dramas. A spare anode there so I can plug in an air compressor or another 12-volt appliance, another fridge if I want to. And then on the inside is our AC charger. So if we pull up somewhere for a while and we're on a powered site, I can run a lead into this, leave it plugged in and that'll just give the battery a full charge right up to the top of its level in about three or four hours because it's a 40-amp charger. So it won't take too long to boost that 200 amp up right back to full state of charge. So one more thing, check this out. I've got outlets on either side, 12-volt and USBs. And also look at this, can't have a canopy without lighting. Turn this bad boy on. Look at this, colour-changing dimmable LEDs. There's a switch here, I can do them up, down, if I press the button they go orange. Stop the bugs coming around at night time, flick it back on. There's one either side so you can use either or. Mate, epic. What else? Oh man, I'm losing it. I've already talked about this. Yeah. Yeah, oh mate, that's it. Look at it. Look at it, look at how much space I've got. Oh this shelf, this is brand new. You can get a full-length one like this or you can get a half one. On the roof there's like unistrut channels. All you have to do is loosen the bolts and you can slide this back and forth. So I've slid it all the way to the front, so my toilet fits in there perfectly. We got young kids so we carry this everywhere and we do a lot of camping away from the van so it's easier to use a port-a-potty and a lot nicer for everyone else camping than digging a hole and leaving landmines everywhere. So mate, we've got so much space, so much storage, it's going to be so good. It's a game changer for us. You stoked? I'm stoked. It looks absolutely brilliant. It's the standout now, like it's changed the whole vehicle. It's going to be great to photograph and video from every bloody angle because every corner you look at the car now is dead set unreal. It's actually really satisfying going through and giving your car a whole freshen up. Everything's re-loomed, cleaned under there. Mate, it's brilliant. I can't thank these boys enough. So teaming up with Prone Touring Concepts and Norweld and Enerdrive, we work with those guys with the caravan. Brilliant companies, brilliant blokes. Aussies, absolutely great to work with them. So I'll show you those guys. I'll have a bit of a chat with them and you can get to meet them. But anyway, that's our new canopy. Far out. How good does it look? How awesome is it? I want to hear your thoughts. Let me know. Have you got one? Do you need one? Any questions, comments, hit us up. I'll answer them the best I can. Cheers.