1937 Chevy 1½-Ton Flatbed Housetruck for Family of 5

By Lloyd Kahn on September 12, 2019

Bob Easton did this drawing based on Joaquin’s input.

In the late ’60s, Joaquin de la Luz traded his 1948 Triumph motorcycle for this vintage Chevy flatbed and converted it into a housetruck. Joaquin, his wife Gypsy, and their three kids lived in it for five years while moving around the country and eventually settling in Yreka, California. It had a woodstove and a sewing machine, in addition to beds for all family members, and was built with scrounged materials. There are about a dozen pictures of the rig in our book Shelter.

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:
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