Mitsubishi Canter Expedition Build

This 4x4 Mitsubishi Fuso Canter was selected by our customer as it had a decent sized chassis, was good on diesel and quiet and comfortable to drive. We built a neat 4.8m box on a torsion free subframe and added some off the shelf toolboxes and a long range diesel tank to give a great base for the owner to kit out internally.

CAD Design

The build was fully designed on CAD which helps us massively when discussing requirements with the customer, especially positions for the windows and doors.

Subframe Design

From carrying out a torsion test on the truck we analysed where the torsional centre of the chassis was and mounted the subframe at this point using flexible bushes to create a torsion free subframe that doesn't restrict the truck's articulation or pass any forces through into the habitation box.

Passthrough Work

To add a passthrough into the cab we cut the corresponding hole size into the rear of the cab and welded in a strengthening frame that adds the stiffness back in the cab and gives a rigid mounting for the passthrough bellow frame.

Tidied Up

The truck was sent up to the paint shop and got a fresh coat of paint on the cab and chassis.

Subframe and Box

The 4x4 Canter has a step in the chassis so the subframe was designed to accommodate this and maximise the available box space.

The subframe is made from S355 steel and hot dip galvanised for corrosion protection.

Box Coming Together

The Outbound doors, windows and hatches are added, as are the edge and corner cappings to create a watertight box.

Note this customer didn't want to have the step profile in the side of the box so we kept the side walls full height along the box. This helped to give the finished build a much more integrated look.