Dacia Jogger DIY camping conversion for ~150€ by Chenguins.com

This is an easy, budget camping conversion by the Chenguins, who turned their Dacia Jogger into a camper for 150€. It is a very simple conversion that doesn’t require many DIY skills or tools. A perfect way to see if you’ll like sleeping in your Dacia Jogger – an entry-level conversion that might lead to a better one in the future.

Materials & tools

This might depend on how much you care about the finish of the build – you can choose to make a rougher test version to see if it’ll work or you can spend more time and use more tools to create a finely-finished, polished camping box for your Jogger. I’d suggest doing a rough test version first, as, in my experience, that one doesn’t last long. Not because it’s badly made, but because you will get new and better ideas very fast as soon as you start using it.

Materials

• Wooden boards and/or a wooden panel (1.6cm thick) – if you will make the exact same version the Chenguins did
  • or plywood (1cm thick) if you choose my alternative/improved version at the bottom
• wooden (or any light but solid material) blocks – to level up the seats
  • if you can’t get wooden blocks, you can glue together layers of plywood or any wooden boards
  • or you could just use one long wooden beam and lay it under all the rear seats legs
• a plastic/wooden crate to support the bed in the middle
• glue for wood
• screws

Tools

The creators don’t list what tools they used, so I’ll make a guess here:

• a drill + screwdriver (a combi drill)
• a jigsaw or a reciprocating saw
• sandpaper

Building the camping box

Their idea is that you create separate pieces that you put together gradually:

• blocks to level up the rear seats (as Jogger’s seats fold down tilted, not flat)
• legs for the sleeping platform (and a crate for middle support)
• the sleeping platform

See how they put it together & convert the car back to a family car in this video:

There are some improvements I would suggest that will save you time + will make the camping box more stable in the Jogger + less cumbersome to set up:

Dacia Jogger DIY camping box – NimbleCamper improved version:

As the Chenguins mention themselves – this was their first conversion and they are no van experts, so kudos for going for it and working out something that works well. If I was building this for myself, I would make these adjustments for an even better result:

• join the legs to the platform with steel brackets (even better, self-locking hinges, so the legs can fold away when not needed) – see images below
  • this will make the platform more stable (you can see that the legs in the video are quite wobbly and held in place only by the platform and the boot walls
  • or alternatively, you could build a frame instead of the legs – see this Toyota Rav4 camping conversion or this “flatpack furniture” style camping conversion for any hatchback (estate)
  • You could just do what I did with my first Sharan conversion – lay the sleeping platform on top of four crates that act as storage + support at the same time
• As for the blocks to put underneath the rear seats – the legs or the frame you’ll build could just extend underneath the seats, serving two purposes – levelling the seats out and the weight of the seats would hold the frame in place.