All gone!

It was both a stressful and fun adventure to own this little gem. Buying a camper sight unseen might be okay as far as the engine, but validating the condition of the interior is a whole other story. As far as ratings go, don't go for anything less than a 4, in my opinion. It's just too risky unless you plan to have the resources and wherewithal to renovate the interior entirely!

As such, I sold this little camper only 6 months after I got it (and yes, it's been a few years since I updated this blog). I also learned a few other lessons which my naivete seemed to get in the way of realizing ahead of time.

A turbo is really important for the fast roads of America. Even regular highways that have a speed limit of 60mph illustrate the drawbacks of a naturally aspirated diesel. Perhaps one of those Isuzu ELFs with the 4.0L+ NA engine could handle it, but I also had to grin and bear the inevitable belch of smoke from a engine that doesn't know the current day definition of "emissions".

I would also advise that if you live in the midwest...consider NOT importing one yourself unless you know a person with a really nice flat deck trailer who can tow it from the east or west coast.

I hope this blog is still helpful to anyone planning to import their own camper! 

Up and Running

The mechanic replaced a number of other things when he did the timing belt. Since he was in there, it made sense to also do the:

• Water pump
• Front seals (camshaft, crankshaft, oil pump)
• Power steering belt
• Fan/accessory belt of some sort
• Valve cover gasket
• Valve cover half-moon seal at the rear (this was a last minute thing that I was able to get from Rock Auto, surprisingly, after cross-reffing Isuzu P'up parts)
• Coolant hoses (whatever I had basically)
• Tensioner pulley
• Idler pulley
• Thermostat gasket (I think? I should check...)
• Power steering pump

Maybe some other stuff, too? It's been too long.

I can't forget the huge difference made in getting power steering back, of course. I remember being super thrilled that the used pump I bought from some guy in Greece actually worked! It was 95% identical but one of the hose flanges needed to be modified a bit. Interesting that even though it really seemed identical, there was a small difference. I'm glad it worked out!

I really should have had him do the fuel filter. That thing is hard to get to without removing the driver-side seat. Ugh.

Speaking of removing seats, I managed to swing by at once point and get a shot of the engine bay while it was disassembled for access. Both the center console "hood", driver and passenger seats were removed for better access. It's really quite impossible to do anything beyond an oil change with that stuff still installed.

The lighting was really bad...you get the idea

At this point it became a kind of back and forth waiting game. Admittedly I wish I pushed harder to get the work completed so I could start messing with other aspects of it. Weeks went by with intermittent progress. And then Covid-19 hit!

At that point, I didn't really want to push my mechanic to work faster on something I could genuinely wait for. He was dealing with his own issues relating to the pandemic. So I tried to take it easy and let him work at the pace he needed. I think it was for the better. We seem to be on pretty good terms and I think he was able to do the work on the engine in a methodical manner.

During the waiting period, I spent a lot of time researching this and that about the camper. I probably bought a few too many things in anticipation.

When the week of finally getting the camper back arrived, I made a beeline to the Interstate Battery store in town to get two brand new deep-cycle RV batteries. I needed a pair of batteries which didn't cost an arm and a leg, and would offer a good middle ground between starter battery and house battery. I didn't want to (nor have the patience for) finding some ultimate battery pairing that was meant for boondocking for a zillion years. I just needed a new battery to start the vehicle, and a battery which could handle a day or two of camping without charging. Thus, the Interstate SRM-24 was my pick. 

Oh, and I also needed to fit two of them into a tiny storage space! If you'll recall from other photos (or the ones below), there was minimal space for big fancy American batteries. I took some measurement and while I haven't actually tried to get both in there yet, I think it will fit into the space.

The two batteries are stored at the base of this cabinet.

The old batteries, very snug

One drawback to these batteries which I do wish I could have gotten around is that they require some amount of venting. The storage space does have some little vent holes that lead outside the van. And the cabinet itself can be pretty airtight otherwise. Maybe I'll add a dinky fan to the vent hole and run it off DC power?

Okay, van acquired and battery swapped in! The only remaining thing was to affix the super awesome collector license plates! I don't want to revisit that whole thing but basically just know that if you're importing a car from Japan, just go for the collector plates! I tried to do the whole motorhome plate thing, but it got rejected for "reasons" and the nice person at the DMV said to give the collector plate option a go. So I did, and to my utter relief the plates showed up not that long after! It's hard to convey how happy I was to have them!

Super cool blue and red color scheme!

One of the nicest things about these plates is that they don't need to be renewed. One and done! The unfortunate thing is that you're not supposed to drive a "Collector" vehicle in January. So...I won't be doing that I guess!

Having brought the plates, I knew beforehand that just affixing an American license plate to a foreign vehicle was probably not straightforward. Fortunately, I was able to get the rear plate on with a single screw that would last for the 5 mile drive. Good enough!

I said goodbye to the mechanic, hopped in and starting driving home. Not 5 minutes after leaving did a middle-aged guy yell out his window at a stop light that the camper was indeed "fucking awesome". Yes, a trend would soon be established in which middle-aged men would do a double take and stare, thumbs up, or yell in excitement upon seeing this small camper. The attention is kind of fun, I'll admit.

The fun begins

Present day circumstances aside, at the time of receiving the camper back in March I was pretty excited.

Right as I was about to drop off the camper with the mechanic, I snagged a hasty walk-through video. As I mentioned in the last post...snowstorm! Plus, I had to get to work :(

What I definitely did not have time for was any sort of quick joy ride.

To my benefit, the mechanic was enthusiastic enough about the camper himself that after I returned from a rather brief work day, he urged me to take it for a test drive. My wife was able to meet me at the mechanic, so together her and I hopped in and went for a quick spin.

I was nervous about not having any sort of license or registration. I did have insurance, however! I think that would have been enough to sway the police officer to let me off with a warning. I heard various stories about getting insurance for Japanese imports. A few weeks before the camper arrived, I was able to set up insurance through SafeCo, which is part of Liberty Mutual. They didn't blink when I explained the situation and didn't seem to care that my vehicle didn't have the typical 16-digit VIN number. And because it was insured as a motorhome, the overall price per year was quite inexpensive.

Once on the road, we quickly noticed that the fuel gauge was reading alarmingly low. Running out of fuel in a diesel vehicle is problematic if they don't have the right fuel pump setup that can push air out of the lines. Even on my Sprinter that I used to have, getting air in the fuel lines meant you had to screw around for a bit in order to get it going again. For our first outing, the last thing we wanted to do was run out of fuel and get stranded. So we made a beeline for a gas station, hoping it would sell diesel.

Approaching the gas station, we saw it was also a truck stop. That meant diesel for sure. But unfortunately it only carried diesel on the pumps meant for semi trucks. That 

it was very obvious that this was not going to be a fast vehicle. Granted, we didn't take the chance of running it on a freeway or anything. We only had a short loop planned. But I wanted to see how quickly it might accelerate. Could it even get out of its own way?

This video my wife took speaks to that a bit...

Yeah...about that acceleration. Not too quick! Okay, so maybe getting up to speed takes a while. But what I wanted to know (and still don't, as of writing!) is how fast it will go and what speed I can hope to maintain. Are we destined to take backroads everywhere we go? Maybe that's the more relaxing way to travel anyway. Doing 80mph on a Wisconsin freeway has never been overly pleasant. But if we want to go cross-country in this, we might have to budget some extra time.

Delivery!

Radio silence, I know! Well, unless you follow us on Instagram! But yes, the camper did arrive! Awesome! Here it is showing up on the flat deck. This was back in February, I think?

That is a lot of tongue weight on that trailer!

It arrived right before a sudden snowstorm!

Fortunately we were able to offload it before it really started coming down. I must say that the towing setup it arrived on left a lot to be desired. I think this is what you get when you try and cheap out a bit on car hauling. I really think a lot of weight must have been on that hitch! It probably ought to have at least been a gooseneck trailer.

Without going into the the painful details too much, one cause of delay is the driver's truck breaking down somewhere in Ohio. I guess his DEF heater failed and put the truck into a limp mode! And then he had to wait for parts, etc. At the time I couldn't believe my luck. This delay came right after I had spend so long waiting for a driver to even pick the vehicle up.

Because I was about to head off to work for a very important meeting, I just had a few moments to look inside the camper after it was unloaded. The driver had to jump start it, because the batteries were old and dead. It has two batteries and so it was good to get a quick idea of which battery to jump in order to start the vehicle.

I had arranged to have the camper delivered at the mechanic's. So once said mechanic showed up, I basically rapid fired an explanation of who I was and what the vehicle even was. I think it took him a second to realize that it was indeed THE JAPANESE CAMPER which I had been telling him about for the past month and which had failed to materialize until now.

Now we were on the same page, but I needed to make haste and get out of there. The mechanic gave me the go ahead to park it inside of his shop. Because he works only on diesels, the vehicles he works with are usually pretty sizable and his bay doors are pretty big. This was good because I needed to quickly figure out how to drive this incredibly peculiar vehicle.

I'm pretty sure I immediately tried to enter the cab from the left side of the vehicle, because I'm completely used to American cars that of course have the steering wheel on the left. It was kind of enjoyable to make that sort of mistake. It definitely confirmed that this was not a normal vehicle.

Running over to the other side, I hopped in. I knew I was dealing with a 5-speed but I honestly knew little else. I played around with the shifter a bit, felt the clutch pedal, and just tried to establish myself in space. It felt pretty funny, and quite tiny in there. The vehicle was already running because the driver hadn't shut it off after unloading it from the trailer. If I stalled it...I'd have to jump start it again!

I tried to be overly cautious with everything, making sure I was in the proper gear so I could maneuver the incredibly short distance into the shop. Even with such a short distance to go, I realized that the visibility behind isn't too great. Complementing this short challenge was a lack of power steering (mentioned in prior blog posts). Still, the overall lightness of the vehicle meant I could, even with a little bit of fore or aft movement, turn the wheel easily enough.

My curiosity got the better of me when I started fiddling with the transfer case lever. I recall noticing that the front hubs were in the "locked" position for some reason. I put them to unlocked, and also tried to make sure the transfer case was in 2WD. Of course, that meant popping into 4WD first. A bit of a mistake, because I had a heck of a time getting back to 2WD. There's a small light on the dash that indicates 4WD, and I had a heck of a time getting it to go away.

After much fiddling, the light shut off, and I could tell the shift lever was in 2WD. This meant I could reverse a bit to ensure the system was fully uncoupled. I recalled from my childhood that older '90s 4WD vehicles needed to be reversed a bit after coming out of 4WD. Not sure if that was actually needed, but I wanted to be safe!

Right, so I then proceeded to make a multi-point turn to get the camper into the shop. Phew!

Safe and sound in the shop

From there, I handed the mechanic the keys and ran off to work. I knew I'd return in a handful of hours. I couldn't possibly stay at work all day and miss an opportunity to start looking over our camper.

Delays on delays

It's been a while since the last update, and fortunately I can say with a lot of relief that our camper has finally made it to the USA, and also cleared customs! It's now legally in the country!

I really need to reflect back on that positive note a lot more than I have been. Because prior and after that big event, I probably got way more involved in the process than was needed.

From a "how-to" perspective I would say that if your import broker is capable, you shouldn't really have to do much of anything after the vehicle has been exported. There is a bit of a hand off between the auction broker and import broker that you need to be involved in, if only to make sure things are going smoothly.

One key thing to pay attention to at this stage is the contents of the bill of lading. You want to make sure that the "Manufacture Year", if it's at all captured on there, is very much correct!

For our camper, which was indeed manufactured November 1994, the bill of lading mistakenly had listed "1995". The vehicle is technically a 1995, but it's not helpful to advance the manufacture year by a whole year! This could have proved disastrous if US customs decided to play hardball. The camper was slated to arrive at port in February, 2020. This at the very least put it in the right year if "1995" was taken as the gospel.

In conjunction with that, the export certificate (the very official document that's basically the next best thing to a title) showed the first date of registration as March 1995. With that in mind, it really meant that there was only a single month of "grey area". The vehicle could not be any newer than March 1995, and I was importing in February 2020. Meaning that one might suggest it could have been manufactured in February 1995 and there would not be any proof otherwise.

This leads into a broader discussion of how all US ports are different. The same set of laws govern all of them I suppose. But how they are all interpreted, and to the severity of which they are interpreted, varies from port to port.

My broker is used to working with the Port of Tacoma. Apparently they are quite notorious for cracking down on importers of Japanese vehicles. It makes sense given that they are a thoroughfare for them, being one of the quickest ports to receive vehicles from Japan. So it was very reasonable then for my broker to raise issue with the date mismatch. They didn't want the vehicle to get caught up in customs purgatory.

Unfortunately, after the vehicle has departed Japan there is nothing which can be done. I attempted to have the bill of lading corrected, but I could not do so. At this point, I had a limited number of days to get all of my evidence in order. The only real counter-action to this issue was trying to produce some convincing paperwork which illustrated the date of manufacture.

There are a few services for that, but they really only produce some PDF document which doesn't hold much weight. I opted to use one since it was only $40, and it honestly made me feel better to have regardless. According to my auction broker, there are more official services in Japan which cost a lot and can dig into vehicle history to produce official documents.

There are also another "option" of looking at the seat belt tag. I haven't confirmed this myself, but some Japanese vehicles have a tag on the belt which is date coded. It is usually only off by a month or two. So it could have helped convince customs that the vehicle was nearer the intended November 1994.

Right, so with the resolution of that on the backburner until it did arrive at port, I spent my remaining time buying parts (of course) and tracking the movement of the camper on marinetraffic.com. I learned a bit after it left Japan that the location beacon (as I called it) only functioned when near land. Otherwise it was up to GPS. But for GPS location of certain ships you have to pay a fee. Not needing to do that, I checked in every day or so until I saw a new position.

I believe it was Hoegh's own website which indicated an arrival date of January 19. That wasn't accurate as far as arrival in the US, but actually indicated when it would show up at the first port of destination. In this case it was the Panama Canal!

Because it was literally up against land during this transitional period, I was able to watch it for a few days in a row. Eventually it made it through and sailed on. I expected it to carry on to the US, but it made an unexpected (to me) stop in Jamaica of all places.

From there, it traveled north and I wondered if it would stop again. Certainly it did, in Florida, and possibly even elsewhere. I sort of stopped watching after a point.

Finally, it had completed its lengthy journey and arrived at the Port of Baltimore.

Here is where some more learning occurred!

As I was saying earlier, all ports are different. There was much insistence from my import broker on the arrival packet of documents being physically presented and stamped by the customs authority during vehicle retrieval. This is true at some ports, but not all. As it turns out, the Port of Baltimore opts to electronically process the whole document packet. There is no physical stamping of the packet as you'd find in Long Beach or Tacoma. That certainly made things easier albeit the amount of angst I underwent was a bit much.

I don't have all the details of what went down, but I think the overall process was something like:

1. Import broker compiles all the needed documents, with signature (recall they had power of attorney).
2. Document package and pickup order is submitted to the driver doing the pickup.
3. Driver gets vehicle, shows the packet to the customs folk, and drives away!

Simple! If I had known it was this way, I would have kept my mouth shut and not gotten involved.

Getting a driver to pull the vehicle from the port was another effort unto itself. I had the help of a shipping company to find said driver. We were up against the "free storage" clock, which was a total of 5 days, not including days the port was closed (Sat/Sun). 5 days wasn't a lot, but we couldn't plan pickup earlier because you don't really know when the vehicle is ready for pickup until after customs releases it. It's just hard to time.

So with 5 days on the clock, we soon found that getting a driver who:

1. ...could drive stick (!?!?)
2. ...had a TWIC card and understood basic port pickup procedure
3. ...had a transport that could load our camper 

...was unlikely. Therefore my shipper opted to split up the responsibility. We just wanted the thing out of port before it started racking up storage fees.

Apparently my shipper had a guy with a TWIC card who could easily move it from the port to a separate storage facility (at $10/day). Some communication snafus meant we'd be running a few days late, but they managed to get it out of the port and into storage. Great! It was nice of them to also shoot me a few photos of it resting in the storage facility (though honestly it just looks like a parking lot with a fence?).

So close...but so far...

Someone wrote all over the windshield! :)

From there, we needed to get the long-haul driver set up. The challenge there was still to find a carrier who would drive so far and also have a trailer able to load the camper. Most long-haul car transports are only meant for regular sized vehicles, being those standard double-decker trailers you see on the road.

At the time of writing this, our current driver proved to be unreliable and never picked up the vehicle. Now the hunt is on for another. I hope the transport price will be a bit less as well because we aren't rushing necessarily to get a driver to move it.

Exported!

Over the past month I've been ordering parts and trying to learn what I can about our tiny camper. But until just recently there hasn't been much movement on the other side of the globe. The export broker arranged for shipping and moved the Fargo to port. From there the vehicle just waits for its spot in line to get shipped. The shipping line used by my broker is Hoegh, and depending on what port the vehicle is destined for determines which specific cargo ship it will have to get on.

Exactly what ship our Fargo would get on was a bit murky. If this wasn't our first import maybe we could have predicted it. In the past week I've been able to finally get some more clarity. This is specifically due to receiving the bill of lading from my export broker. Among the information on the BL are these items:

1. The contents of the shipment (our vehicle).
2. Who's shipping it (our auction broker).
3. From where (port of Kawasaki)
4. To where (port of Baltimore).
5. To whom (our home address).
6. The size and weight of the shipment.
7. The departure date (28-Dec)
8. The shipping vessel (Hoegh Africa).

Item 3 I am reasonably certain on, though it conflicts with what I've been saying about it coming from the port of Yokohama. Granted, both are in the Bay of Tokyo. It's not important for me to know but is still interesting either way. There's also mention of Osaka on the BL which further confuses me.

Port of Kawasaki

Tokyo Bay

Item 4, the destination port, is lacking in specificity because there are a handful of places in the Port of Baltimore that the vehicle could be dumped. My import broker (more on that later) has assured me that I'll get clarity on this as the vehicle nears said destination.

Item 7 was nice to finally see. I could finally grasp when the vehicle would leave Japan. Long story short, it did depart on the 28th of December! That means it's currently a few days into its journey down to the Panama Canal and eventually up to the east coast of the US.

Item 8 is a fun piece of information. It's the shipping vessel that the vehicle will travel on. Based on my location and possibly time of year, it found a home on the Hoegh Africa. Hoegh is a Norwegian shipping company that specializes in auto transport. Their carriers are great because they are fully enclosed. This means minimal salty, corroding air will reach the vehicles on board. I know it's still going to get a bit dirty and gross, but it surely beats a vehicle sitting outside on a ship, rusting away for a month! That's not to say there aren't a zillion videos of enclosed ships capsizing or sinking or tossing around their contents...and some of them are Hoegh ships!

Hoegh Africa

One cool part of Hoegh, and just knowing the ship in general is that I can get an at-a-glance update on the status of the ship. There are two websites. One is marinetraffic.com which basically provides GPS coordinates for all shipping traffic. Oddly, and for reasons I don't understand, Hoegh Africa is "out of range". Here's its last location that I could find:

Last known (to me) location

Of course, I assume it hasn't sunk. I'll keep checking back to see if it pops up again. There are plenty of other ships that publish their location when they're in the open ocean. Why this one isn't right now, I have no idea.

Right. So, the BL is indeed not that complicated but it's super critical to have it before the shipment of the vehicle. Not so much because it's needed to ship the vehicle (which is true) but because one needs to file a second piece of paperwork before the vehicle disembarks from the origin port. And that second piece of paperwork, called the ISF (import security filing), requires information contained within the bill of lading.

Allegedly, people can easily get into some hot water if they don't file the ISF before the vehicle disembarks. I hear that it's not the end of the world to file the ISF a few days after the vehicle leaves the origin port but generally this is frowned upon.

I opted, as do many, to solicit the services of an import brokerage company. This is a stateside company which specializes in doing a bunch of paperwork to make US Customs happy with what you're bringing in. That includes the ISF!

The benefit of using an import broker is that you're just not responsible for having to file so many different documents with different entities. An import broker is very much recommended if you're never done this before or even if you do it semi-regularly. There are many ways it can go wrong and the worst thing that can happen is having the CBP quarantine your vehicle and impose fines and fees while to try to figure everything out.

The import broker takes power of attorney (PoA) which means they can act as you for much of the import process. You still have to be on your toes a bit. They need certain pieces of information that aren't communicated in the BL.

For example, it's worthwhile to explain to them what your vehicle actually is. It's not reasonable to assume they are huge car nerds and can decipher what you're buying from the BL. Since our camper was based on a truck chassis, it was important to clarify with them that it should NOT be classed as a truck.

When importing a truck, CBP imposes a 25% duty fee! For most other vehicles it's only 2.5%. Since campers typically "seat" 4 passengers, they are then classifiable as a passenger vehicle. Yes, the Fargo was built on a truck chassis, but it's not a two-seater truck anymore. But again, that's not necessarily clear even from the auction listing which stated "Isuzu Fargo Truck". It doesn't even say "camper" or anything like other campers tend to have on their description.

A stock Isuzu Elf truck. This would get a 25% import duty applied.
But when converted to a typical camper, it should only receive a 2.5% duty! 

With the classification sorted, and all the other BL info transcribed over to the ISF form, my import broker was able to file said ISF. Great!

From there, we enter another phase of waiting. It won't be until Hoegh Africa gets closer to the destination that Hoegh sends an email with confirmation of the arrival date. Per the BL, it's around the 1st of February. But that can easily change by a few days as I understand.

Before that happens, there will be two additional documents to file. One is for the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) and the other is for the DOT (Department of Transportation). Apparently I play some part in completing them. So I have that to look forward to. But fortunately the import broker will help walk me through it!

Beyond that, I have to organize inland transport. Fortunately I have both done this before with another vehicle purchase (just within the US), and I received a recommendation for an inland transport company that has worked with imported vehicles.

The benefit of the latter is that there's some extra finesse needed on part of the inland transport company when fetching a vehicle from a port. The instructions from the import broker tell me that a visit to a customer service office in the port, and to the CBP office in or near the receiving port is required during pickup of the vehicle. At the last destination, the CBP office, seemingly four things must be on hand:

1. Delivery order (from the import broker)
2. Entry packet (from the import broker)
3. Release paperwork (from the port customer service office)
4. All original documentation provided by the seller (via the auction broker)

I'm a little murky on the specifics of each of those things. Items 1, 2 and 4 will be mailed to me. I can't visit my import broker's office very easily to pick them up otherwise. They're over in Seattle at the Port of Tacoma.

Item 3 is something I also have to rely on the inland transporter to do for me I think. But really I'm not sure about that either.

Item 4 is possibly the export certificate and/or some sort of pink slip. I really don't know actually. When I find out I'll write about it here!

So for now, I have to wait a few weeks until it's time for the next significant round of communication!

Power steering pumps have arrived! New YouTube video!

Awesome! We received both power steering pumps. Here is a quick (maybe not...) video comparing the two. I'm excited to install one of them ;)