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Every week I receive mail from readers asking me to write more about weird RVs and buses. The world is full of wacky RV builds and this one is a doozy. I’m talking about the Dobbertin Surface Orbiter; an amphibious RV capable of sailing around the world.

You read that right, this thing isn’t just a vehicle that can travel around the country, it can sail around the world, too!

To fully embrace this wonderful creation, you should know a little about its builder, Rick Dobbertin. Before building a spaceship for the sea, Dobbertin made his mark building beautiful hot rods. His Pontiac J2000 Pro Street car featured a Chevy 350 V8 with a shocking number of go-fast parts, reports Hot Rod. We’re talking dual superchargers and dual turbos. The whole thing was dolled up in striking paint, polished aluminum, and stainless steel.

While his award-winning car builds are awesome enough, Dobbertin and his wife, Karen, wanted to build something even more ambitious.

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According to Dobbertin’s site on the build, they started with a 1959 Heil stainless steel milk tanker. Using a milk tanker for the platform meant the Dobbertins would benefit from strong double walls filled with 2.5-inch foam insulation.

The tanker’s size and shape were perfect for the application of a seafaring vehicle with a living space inside. Dobbertin grafted a cockpit to the front of the tanker, giving it major spaceship vibes. A story from Syracuse reported that, at 32.5 feet, the vehicle was so long that the Dobbertins had to extend their garage to fit it inside.

The Surface Orbiter is put together using 910 pieces of stainless steel. Inside, there are living quarters, a toilet and a kitchen. There are some additional creature comforts too, like heating and air conditioning. Loaded, the massive vessel weighs in at 18,000 pounds.

All of that weight is carried along by a 6.5-liter GM turbodiesel converted for marine use. That engine drives the wheels through a four-speed automatic connected to a 4×4 transfer case and Dana axles. That’s right, this baby is four-wheel drive!

The engine can also sail the rig through the sea via a single 22-inch propeller. It can go 70 mph on land and 10 knots on the water. If you were curious how much fuel it drinks, the quantity is equally massive. It gets up to 12 mpg on land and only 2 on the water. No surprise, then, that it can carry a fuel load of 340 gallons.

The rig is piloted through a unique cockpit upfront. The left side features all the controls and instrumentation for land travel while the right side is for sailing.

When all was said and done, the Dobbertin couple spent four-and-a-half years and 14,000 hours turning a dream into a reality. The team then departed on an impressive trek. Their goal? Circumnavigate the world in one go, entirely by this amphibious vehicle.

Over the course of a couple years, the two took the Surface Orbiter to 30 countries and multiple continents. Dobbertin’s site notes that they racked up 33,000 miles on the odometer and traveled an additional 3,000 miles by sea, including through the Panama Canal.

However, not everything was cherry. The beast encountered many issues — including a capsizing while docked — and the project strained the couple’s relationship to the breaking point. Eventually, the Dobbertins ran out of money and worse, they split up. The journey came to an end, short of its goal.

That didn’t stop Rick Dobbertin, however. Years later he sold the Surface Orbiter to fund his next project. He wanted to try his hand at amphibious vehicles again with his Dobbertin HydroCar. This one was never finished, but Dobbertin had the goal of making an amphibious car that could top out at 60 miles-per-hour on water. The vehicle would do so with deployable pontoons, however, Dobbertin was never able to get it to work correctly. We reported that it came up for sale years ago. However, it’s since disappeared.

Builds like these always excite me. I love to see builders repurpose existing vehicles into something entirely different. Who knew you could turn a milk tanker into a 4×4 RV that can travel the world.

Find out more about the Surface Orbiter at Dobbertin’s site dedicated to his builds!

Illustration for article titled Someone Found And Restored That Amazing Beetle Camping Trailer That You Saw All Over The Internet

A while back I feel like I was being sent one particular internet-found video far more often than any other. And, it was easy to understand why, as the video was remarkable, especially for a Volkswagen Beetle geek like myself. It was that video that I’ve bet you’ve seen before, of a Beetle towing a camper via a roof-mounted gooseneck hitch, allowing it all kinds of bonkers maneuverability. We’d written about it long ago, but more recently one of these has been found and restored, likely the only one in the world.

Here’s that original video, a segment from a deep-Malaise-era car TV show called, imaginatively, Car and Track. I guess Road & Driver was taken:

Okay, while, sure it would have been slow and a nightmare in crosswinds, you have to admit that setup is pretty cool. No need to attempt the painful cerebro-physical gymnastics of backing up a trailer when you can just turn around and shove it wherever it needs to go! It almost looks fun!

The trailer was built by a company called International Travel Trailer, and the model was the El Chico, and was intended for use with a number of small cars of the era; I suspect they tested it with Beetles and Pintos and probably Civics and maybe some Datsuns, too.

The son of the man driving in the famous video, Joe Bostian, wrote about it earlier this year, marveling at the continuing popularity of the video, knowing that his dad would have been delighted were he still alive.

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He also suggests that very few seem to have actually been built, but actual numbers are still unknown. In the actual world, they seem all but extinct.

In 2014 one was found, the first time one had actually been even seen in the wild:

Incredibly, a few years after this one was found, another was discovered in Colorado, and this one was fully restored and paired with a lovely matching yellow 1971 Super Beetle. A full video of that one, with never before seen interior shots, came out last March on the Volkswear YouTube channel:

It’s pretty incredible to see this in all its restored glory. I’m impressed it has a bathroom with a toilet, though I think the position of the kitchen and stove right under the bedroom area is an invitation to put your foot into a pan of cooking bacon or something equally miserable.

Campers aren’t as common a target for full restorations as cars are, for a number of reasons including the presence of toilets and old bedding, but when it’s something as rare and striking as this, I’m delighted there’s people around with the time, resources, and will to make it happen.

(thanks, Michael!)

Tag: rv

This Wild Amphibious RV Started Life As A Milk Tanker

Someone Found And Restored That Amazing Beetle Camping Trailer That You Saw All Over The Internet