How We Installed Our Bundutop Roof Top Tent to Our Camper Trailer
In this post we show you how we installed our Bundutec Bundutop roof top tent to our camper trailer DOT373. If you would like to read our review of the Bundutop roof top tent on our camper trailer after more than 12 months of use, you can read it here.
If you have read our review of the Bundutop roof top tent you will know that this tent is made in South Africa. In true South African style, there is an expectation that you will be handy with a few tools at your disposal. Fitting the Bundutop roof top tent is straightforward but you will need a drill, 6-7mm drill bit, 10mm ratchet or spanner, 5mm allen hex key, and silicon. If fitting the Added Room and ladder bracket, you will also need a pop rivet gun, and pop rivets. You will also need the help of at least two people, four in total will make it easier getting the Bundutop roof top tent into place.
Mounting Points Are Flexible
The Bundutop roof top tent does not come with any predefined mounting points. Where you choose to secure the Bundutop to your 4WD or camper trailer is flexible within reason. For us this is a positive to the design of the Bundutop as you are not trying to modify your setup to work with the mounting points already fitted to the roof top tent.
Underneath the Bundutop roof top tent, there are several aluminium tubes running down the length of the Bundutop. When mounting the roof top tent, you need to ensure that the supplied M6 bolts run through these aluminium tubes to whatever you are mounting to on your 4WD or camper trailer. Bundutec advise that you should try and use the six supplied M6 bolts when securing the roof top tent, however you can get away with only using four. We used all six for more security, and we would recommend doing the same.
Minimum Requirements
As per the Bundutec Bundutop fitting instructions, there are a few minimum requirements you need to consider when fitting the roof top tent.
The first requirement is ensuring that there is no more than 50 centimetres of unsupported overhang with the hard shell of the roof top tent. Therefore, you need to ensure that your load bars or cross supports you are mounting to, are spaced out at least 1.1 metres however, we would recommend a larger spacing to minimise the overhang as much as possible. Using at least three load bars or cross supports would be best to evenly spread the load.
The next requirement is that your roof rack or load bars are a minimum of 1.27 metres wide. For most 4WDs and camper trailers, this will not be a problem. When mounting the roof top tent to your setup, it is best to have three supports to which you can secure the tent. It is recommended to use all six M6 bolts and have two bolts secured to each cross support. Bundutec do say that you can get away with four bolts however it would be best, especially with the larger King size Bundutop to use all six and evenly space them out as best as you can.
Fitting the Bundutop to Our Camper Trailer
When it came to fitting the Bundutop King roof top tent to our camper trailer we had to make a few custom brackets for this to work. Due to the canopy or storage compartments that suit on top of our trailer and just below our steel frame, we had limited space to the underside of the cross supports to be able to access any bolts underneath.
Rather than drilling through our canopy and having an issue with trying to seal this, we decided to use three angled steel pieces on the front and back of the trailer to mount the Bundutop to. We cut these to size, painted, and then bolted these to the existing steel frame of the trailer. These brackets then allowed us to access the bolts and secure the Bundutop to our camper trailer. You should be able to see how we did this in the pictures below.
Unfortunately, we were unable to bolt the Bundutop down to the middle of our camper trailer due to access, but we have not found there to be any issues from this after thousands of kilometres driven on some harsh outback roads. We used three M6 bolts on each side to secure the Bundutop down to our trailer. When determining where the bolts need to go, you need to remove the mattress from the roof top tent. We opened the tent by connecting an anderson plug to the anderson plug on the rear of our 4WD that usually connects to our trailer battery. Get a strap of some sort, then get into the tent, fold the mattress in half and then tie the mattress in place with the strap. This makes it easy to remove the mattress through one of the small four windows or doors.
Place the Bundutop roof top tent onto your load bars and get it into the correct position. The Bundutop is not too heavy, so with 3 or 4 people you will get this into place easily. Once you have worked out exactly where you want the tent to sit, then work out where the bolts will go to secure the tent in position. Remembering that the bolts need to go through the centre of the square aluminium tubes that run along the floor of the roof top tent. Once you have determined where you are going to secure the bolts, work out which aluminium tubes you will be drilling through, measure these from the side tube. Then measure from the back or front of the roof top tent frame to where you want the centre of the bolt to go or the centre of the load bar. Inside the tent, you will see pop rivets along the sides that provide a guide as to where the aluminium tubes are located. Take your measurements from these pop rivets and the back or front of the tent frame. Once you have done these measurements, drill your holes through the tent frame supports and your load bars. Then use the supplied M6 bolts, washers, and lock nuts to secure the tent in place. Make sure you add a bit of silicon to the holes before securing the bolts to provide a good seal from dust and water ingress. The M6 bolts will most likely need to be cut to size as they are supplied rather long.
As we made our own custom brackets, we were able to drill from the bottom rather than the top, making it much easier to work out where the holes needed to be drilled through the tent frame aluminium supports.
12V Wiring for Power & Solar
The Bundutop roof top tent comes already prewired for the 12V setup and solar. You only need to connect power from your 4WD or camper trailer to the one grey anderson plug on the side of the roof top tent. This anderson plug connection will provide power to the Bundutop roof top tent winch to open and close, as well as power to the light, two fans, and 12V output. If you are going to install a fixed solar panel to the roof, you will need to connect the solar panel to the one red anderson plug on the top roof section, and then run a cable from the second red anderson plug to your solar regulator connected to your battery.
For the 12V power input, the Bundutec manual indicated using a 15Amp inline fuse, but the fitting instructions say a 20Amp inline fuse. We are not sure which one is correct, but we used a 15Amp inline fuse and have not had any issues with this. Basically, you need to run a power cable from your main battery, or second battery, and this must be fused. Bundutec recommend using 6mm2 cable. We ran power from our trailer Enerdrive lithium battery by connecting to the existing Narva fuse box and negative bus bar that was already connected to the trailer battery. For the cable from the fuse box, we chose to add another anderson plug and mount this beside the fuse box. We did this so we can disconnect power to the rear for security, however we could simply pull out the fuse, but we preferred to fit an anderson plug so we do not need to worry about a loose fuse lying about the place. As we were going to fit a fixed Enerdrive 180W solar panel to the roof, we ran this cable at the same time. If fitting a fixed solar panel this is not as easy as just bolting one down to the roof of the Bundutop, there is a bit more involved, so we have written a post explaining how to do this here. The solar panel must be connected to a solar regulator between the solar panel and the battery. As we have a Redarc Manager30 battery management system in our trailer, this already comes with an inbuilt solar regulator. Most good quality DCDC chargers should have solar input with a solar regulator. We connected the positive cable to the Redarc BMS Manager30 and the negative to the negative bus bar. We then ran both the solar and power cables through the front storage box and into the trailer canopy (see the pictures above and below). These cables where then run neatly inside the canopy to the rear, where we drilled a hole and added a rubber grommet. We pushed these cables through and sealed with silicon.
On the outside of the canopy, we secured the cables to two anderson plugs and mounted to the side out of the way. For the solar connection, we made a shorter cable with two anderson plugs and ran this cable permanently to connect the solar panel connection on the Bundutop to the Redarc BMS Manager 30. For the power connection, we made a short cable with two anderson plugs that we store inside the trailer when not in use. We did not want to keep this connected permanently to stop someone push the up button when the roof top tent was latched closed and blowing a fuse. Running these two wires was rather time consuming as we wanted a neat and tidy finish, with easy access to connecting power to the Bundutop. If you are not mounting a solar panel and this is fitted to your 4WD, you should not need to run many cables and can just have one long anderson plug that you connect when ready to setup at camp.
Remember if running a solar panel, you will need to purchase red anderson plugs as they do have a different plug connection to grey anderson plugs.
Fitting the Added Room
Usually, we are pretty good at taking photos while fitting things, but we completely forgot to take any when we mounted the Added Room to the Bundutop. Anyway, we will explain how this is done as it is not complicated.
When purchasing the Added Room accessory, you will be supplied everything you need to mount this. You will however need a drill and pop rivet gun. The first step with fitting the Added Room is to line up the aluminium sail track on top of the roof. We chose to pain the sail track black before fitting so it matched the black section of the Bundutop roof. The sail track already comes predrilled with all the holes for mounting. The sail track needs to be mounted 10mm from the raw aluminium sheet of the roof. To make this easier we added thin double-sided tape to the bottom of the sail track as this allowed us to line this up perfectly and keep it in place.
Once the sail track is lined up, you will then need to drill into the roof. In this part of the install, you need to take extra care as you do not want to be pushing the drill bit through the roof lining inside the tent. We placed a socket on top of the sail track and used this as a guide to stop the drill once it had just drilled through the roof. We started by drilling one hole one the edge of the sail track, filled the hole with silicon, and then added a pop rivet. We then did the centre hole, and then the opposite end. Once three pop rivets were in place, we drilled holes for all the others, added silicon, and pop riveted. Now that the sail track was secured in place, we then slid the added room into the sail track using the rope. Once the added room was centred, we then cut the end of the rope and used short self-taping screws to drill through the end of the sail track and the rope to keep in place. Bundutec, recommend you tie a knot in each end of the rope to stop it sliding out, however this looked horrible with a large knot, so drilling a self-taping screw through it to keep in place looked much neater.
The final steps are to mount the two small sail track pieces on the sides of the Bundutop shell. The two small sail track pieces are mounted in the centre of the tent shell. You need to drill holes, seal with silicon, and pop rivet as before. Once these sail track pieces are mounted on the side, you need to then pop rivet a flange rivet with a nut spacer above the centre rivet on each side. This rivet is where you secure the sides of the added room awning in place as per the photos below.
Straightforward But Time Consuming
Overall, fitting the Bundutec Bundutop roof top tent is straightforward it just takes some time to get everything done right. As you are drilling holes through the base of the roof top tent you want to take your time to ensure you line everything up just right. If you are fitting the Bundutop on your 4WD you will also need to mount the ladder brackets to the side of the Bundutop shell. To do this you will need to pop rivet the brackets to the location where you want the ladder to sit. We did not need to do this as we do not need a ladder as we walk up the front of our camper trailer to get into the tent.
Running the cables will also be time consuming but will depend on your setup and how you want this to work. The wiring is simple to do, it was just a bit fiddly for us due to where our trailer battery is stored and where the cables needed to run to get to the rear of the trailer.
To read the Bundutop roof top tent user manual you can find it here. For the Bundutop roof top tent fitting instructions, you can find them here.
For more information on the Bundutec Added Room, look at them on their website here. To read the Bundutec Added Room manual you can find it here. To read the Bundutec Added Room fitting instructions you can read them here.
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The thoughts of Peter.
