An ongoing mystery as to why such sellers label aftermarket 4Wheel brand slide-in camper units as "factory", meaning GM factory, or "Chalets" ....
CK5
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Somebody here is tracking Chalets...not sure if this one is accounted for?
- Thread starter Chief Brody
- Start date
An ongoing mystery as to why such sellers label aftermarket 4Wheel brand slide-in camper units as "factory", meaning GM factory, or "Chalets" ....
Mine gets called a Chalet more than anything from people that don't know. It's usually preceded by the statement "isn't that one of those factory camper jobs, what was the name?".
Most of those that call it that are at least old enough to have been around when the Chalet was originally offered. The younger crowd don't have a clue as they didn't know the Chalet or FWC campers were available.
But it usually strikes a conversation with the older people who remember their parents had something similar or one of these and how they used to camp out with it. Brings a smile to their face.
Moody Bricker
1/2 ton status
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Then again, 8 pix none of the inside,
https://www.facebook.com/marketplace/item/625722018226523/ Shame they let this one get so far gone
rampage
3/4 ton status
And he wants $3500.
I sold mine a California clean truck perfectly running chalet with 90k miles for $2500
Moody Bricker
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Just think what ryoken would do whit this,ok find a 91 like 1009 oil burner and power wash the glass and then see how it looks
That's pretty rough. The rust holes in the roof are indicative of a chalet with leaky forward windows and the camper rubbing a hole in the roof to let the water leak into.
Eek. Thanks for spotting that one, it would not have appeared in my standard FB search link since the seller misspells the word "Chalet." One more for the mega-speadsheet pile tracking list.
Speaking of...how many were made, and how many do you have in your spreadsheet?
A solitary uncorroborated source (this writer's 2nd paragraph claim here) puts total production at 1,780. Would love to know how he arrived at that number, but the writer is dead. My spreadsheet is up to around 535, where I can put at least some kind of individual identifier to each rig, either with photographs, or text from old classified ads, and of those I can put serial numbers straight to around 300 of 'em. Probably have a few overlaps here and there, and I average around 40 'new' rigs added to the spreadsheet per year, like the #0281 a few posts above. I like to say that keeping track of the status of the owners / sellers and where their rigs end up is like herding cats, so who knows how many have since been scrapped or split up, and who knows how many are disappearing with nobody noticing, such as this most recent Instagram sighting of a junkyard one somewhere in Montana. One of these days I'll join Instagram and some of those other photosharing sites to track down more of these.
H20 Toie
1/2 ton status
Holy cow how about this project?
https://lasvegas.craigslist.org/cto/d/las-vegas-1976-gmc-jimmy-casa-grande-k5/7067450205.html
https://lasvegas.craigslist.org/cto/d/las-vegas-1976-gmc-jimmy-casa-grande-k5/7067450205.html
Thanks for the heads-up on it, my bookmarked CR search hadn't picked it up yet. But go back to my post #78 in this thread (linky) -- same rig from 2018, Casa Grande #0687. The seller has not been able to unload it all this time because he's asking around $3½ grand more than this junk pile is worth.
H20 Toie
1/2 ton status
Here is another JEM
a lot of money for a POS
https://bakersfield.craigslist.org/cto/d/tehachapi-1977-blazer-k5-chalet-trade-4/7116383960.html
a lot of money for a POS
https://bakersfield.craigslist.org/cto/d/tehachapi-1977-blazer-k5-chalet-trade-4/7116383960.html
Many, many thanks for that! I curse at Craigslist for the way it knocks itself out to thwart nationwide searches of its site - my bookmarked Google / DuckDuck search links still don't pick this one up.
It's Chalet #1539, and maybe this time the seller will tell me what its build date is, which I've never gotten previous sellers to tell me going all the way back to January 2008 when I first saw it in a Craigslist ad. Poor rig, looks like it is now on its 3rd set of wheels, was first seen on rallys, then for a long time with full wheelcovers like what's shown in this still-functioning OfferUp page for it by apparently a prior seller back in February. I feel sorry for the current seller if he actually paid $8700 for it, it's a barnfind probably not worth a dime over $2500 at best.
(*Edit: and to illustrate how obtuse Google is about providing CL search results, I found this '79 Jimmy with a gutted camper shell on it via Facebook Marketplace's idiotic system a few days ago, but it only just now shows up in a Google Craigslist search result when it didn't yesterday. Evil Google gives you results based on what it spies you looking at, while DuckDuck still hasn't fully perfected their non-user targeted search engine.)
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rampage
3/4 ton status
Can't you get a really good idea of the build date by serial numbers that you know before and after this one? Aren't the serial numbers sequential according to when they were built?
If I was running the Chinook factory, it would be mandated that serial numbers be assigned in order by mfg date, and Chinook actually started out that way in early- mid-'76 with just a couple of month-off examples. However, things got weirder around 9/76 when the serial numbers got over the 890s. Chalet #0896 has a build date of 12/76, while #0901 is 9/76. #1009 is 1/77 while #1004 is 10/76. #1686 is 1/77, but #1687 just one number later is 11/76. Regarding this #1539 Chalet above, the two prior I have in my mega-spreadsheet are #s 1521 - 1/77 & 1522 - 11/76, and the two after are #s 1542 - 1/77 & 1544 - 11/76. Would be funny if a brilliant mathematician could work out the formula for predicting the numbers, but there's probably some other explanation that likely involves random laziness of the Chinook workers and administrators.
RV business was screwy and still is. In my Workhorse days we'd have the RV manufacturers buy up a bunch of chassis from us and some would have coaches built on them the same model year and some leftovers got a coach built on them the following model year. So it was possible to have a '04 chassis with a '05 coach. Talk about confusion when someone starts asking for parts. Most RV customers go by the year of the coach.
I'm not surprised Chinook was scatterbrained on serial numbers at all.
I'm not surprised Chinook was scatterbrained on serial numbers at all.
Chinook did that, too. Among the rarest of the rigs are the 3 or so (that I'm aware of, anyway) that were mixed year rigs. Chalet #0661 was a '77 model year Blazer with the really rare pastel orange / tan paint combo that had a '76 camper unit. The current owner has a build thread on it at 67-72Chev. The tragedy of that one is the prior owner was apparently a nutcase hoarding 12 other Chalets (including mine after I sold it to him via his broker) and Toyota Landcruisers. For some idiotic reason, that guy tore off the more or less perfectly fine camper stripes and repainted the camper to make it start to look like a '77.
