This Glorious All Aluminum And Stainless Steel 4×4 Motorhome Is Like A Tank You Can Sleep In

For the past several years, America has been obsessed with driving motorhomes out into the wilderness, leading to all sorts of interesting 4×4 RVs for that purpose. Many of today’s modern rigs are converted vans or commercial trucks, and perhaps none of them are as wild as what you’re going to see today. This is the 1975 Champion Woodsman, a crazy motorhome constructed entirely out of aluminum and stainless steel and meant to be both your daily driver and your go-anywhere. It’s like a tank with a bed and a toilet.

The Champion Woodsman is almost unfathomably rare. Depending on who you ask, somewhere between 8 and 500 of these were ever built and it’s believed only a handful have made it into the modern day. The last time I saw one of these for sale was over a year ago and that Woodsman (below) was a sad and gutted shell of its former self. I honestly began to think that I would never see one in complete shape.

The rarity of the Champion Woodsman is matched only by how little anyone knew of it. You can figure out there is a Dodge underneath and the body is all-metal, but that’s it. As many of our readers know, I hate finding something cool and leaving without any information on it, so I started digging around. I finally solved the mystery of who built this motorhome, why they built it, and for whom.

Oh, and you can buy this rare beast, which you should do before I figure out a way to add it to my fleet.

Built By A Forgotten RV Innovator

If the name “Champion” is one that sounds familiar to you, I’m proud of you. Either you know your Autopian lore or you’re just as obsessed as I am. The Woodsman was the work of Champion Home Builders, Inc., a company that for most Americans, is known for its mobile, manufactured, and modular homes.

Champion was founded in 1953 as a builder of mobile homes. In the early 1970s, the company decided to use its experience in building mobile homes to construct travel trailers and motorhomes like it built mobile homes. My retrospective continues:

The company further expanded its line of campers in the 1980s and they were joined by commercial buses. Champion Home Builders eventually splintered the commercial bus line and the RV line into Champion Motor Coach, which continued to build buses and campers until the mid-1990s. By that point, Champion stopped building RVs and in 1998, Thor Industries acquired the bus division. Thor renamed the bus division to Champion Bus, and today, Champion Bus is a part of Forest River. Though, it was reported that the Champion Bus plant shuttered in 2021.

What made Champion stand out was its willingness to try out ideas most RV builders avoided. The company didn’t bother with typical wood framing and instead built its RVs with steel skeletons for strength and longevity. Champion also wasn’t fond of corrugated RV siding or how blocky the competition was, so it built RVs using smooth aluminum siding that was about as aerodynamic as the company could make it.

Champion brochures mentioned that the company then used urethane foam on the inside of the aluminum skin to bond the aluminum, the steel, and the ample insulation to create one huge cohesive unit. The company was so proud of this construction that it boasted that no wood-framed or even aluminum-framed RV had the strength or the beauty of a Champion.

Later, Champion would also try to solve the problem of motorhomes being too tall, too top-heavy, poor-handling, and too inaccessible to people with limited mobility. That rad coach was the Ultrastar. Along the way, Champion sold motorhomes in a variety of sizes from little 17-footers to large 35-foot buses.

Sadly, despite Champion’s genuine RV innovations, much of this history is slowly disappearing. Today’s Champion Homes makes no mention of how it was decades ahead of almost everyone else in the RV game. It also appears that when Champion did build RVs, the coaches found few buyers.

That’s a shame because when I look at the features of the Woodsman, I think of basically every “overland” RV marketed today.

The Champion Woodsman

Part of it is because the Woodsman appeared to have existed as just a blip in RV history. If it weren’t for the few remaining survivors, nobody would know these things were even around.

There have been multiple articles published and several forum posts about the Woodsman, but nobody ever really gets further than identifying the Champion Home Builders logo up front and noting that the chassis underneath came from Dodge. For years, people didn’t even know what kind of Dodge was underneath. I’ve been digging for additional information for over a year, myself.

Some digging around the Internet Archive revealed that Champion Home Builders registered Woodsman as a trademark in 1975. The mark was then canceled in 1981. That would support the idea that very few of these were sold. I kept looking, finding no advertisements, no brochures, and not even breadcrumbs.

In 1975, Popular Mechanics wrote about the explosion of 4×4 culture.

The publication noted how there had been custom 4×4 RVs in the past, but the Champion Woodsman was rolling out of Indiana as a production 4×4 motorhome for those new 4×4 enthusiasts. That wasn’t enough, I had to find more.

Now that I knew this was a creation of roughly 1975, I started flipping through car magazines. That’s when I landed on the December 1974 issue of Motor Trend. In it, Ginny Ade explained how 4×4 culture was experiencing an explosion. Big trucks were once seen as tools for workers, but now people were buying them to have fun.

However, as Ade noted, the RV industry lagged behind, not realizing that there was a market of 4×4 enthusiasts who also wanted to go camping. But this was a market Champion saw potential in.

Earlier in 1974, Champion sold the Titan Handi-Van, a bizarre blocky multi-purpose van. The exterior of the Handi-Van looked like that of a motorhome, but it wasn’t really an actual coach. Instead, the Handi-Van was supposed to be a daily driver, a toy hauler, and a weekend camper all in one.

Just look at the weirdness of this guy:

Apparently, the Handi-Van sold well enough to convince Champion to expand on the concept. What would come next was the Woodsman, a real motorhome that borrowed elements from the Handi-Van while adding in Champion’s characteristic build quality and a proven 4×4 platform.

According to Motor Trend, Woodsman motorhomes were built in the heart of RV manufacturing, Elkhart, Indiana. There, Champion started with a Dodge Power Wagon 4×4 three-quarter-ton chassis. Champion equipped these trucks with Warn hubs and shod the wheels in mud tires. On top of the chassis sat Champion’s signature steel skeleton structure, but how it was finished took a turn.

A Woodsman has a 21-foot exterior that is mostly flat aluminum like most other Champion RV products. However, from the tops of the wheel wells down to the bottom of the body Champion used stainless steel. Champion said its aluminum was twice the thickness anyone else was using and that the stainless steel lower portion was there for durability and corrosion resistance. Champion then tried to do some aerodynamic streamlining for fuel economy, but let’s be honest here, it wasn’t really successful.

You may wonder why Champion would even care about fuel economy, but remember, this was right in the Malaise Era when everything sort of sucked. The Champion Woodsman tested by Motor Trend had a 318 cubic inch V8 good for a whopping 150 HP.

However, if you kept it between 55 mph and 60 mph Champion said you should have gotten 10 to 12 mpg with this bad boy. If you wanted more power, a 360 cubic inch V8 was available that made 175 HP. There’s no estimate on fuel economy for that one.

So, Champion built this thing like a tank. It had four-wheel drive, ample ground clearance, and a body that was ready to take a beating. You could stop right here and the Woodsman is something worthy of the RV/MH Hall Of Fame, but Champion couldn’t leave it there.

The back of the Woodsman features a hatch that allows you to slide in a canoe or a couple of motorcycles to take inside your Woodsman for your adventure. In the back is a bed area that transforms into a dinette. Up front, the chairs swiveled around to make for a living room of sorts. You were even able to drag the table up front in case you had a motorcycle or something taking up the rear.

In the middle was your facilities. The kitchen consisted of a single-basin sink, a four-burner stove, and a refrigerator. Across from that is your bathroom, which has both a shower and a marine toilet. Other neat stuff included a ducted furnace and skylights. The Woodsman was definitely short on luxury. You didn’t get an oven and ventilation was achieved through roof vents. Still, you got everything you needed for a fun trip in the wilderness for the price of $12,000.

This Woodsman

That brings us to this Woodsman, which I’ve featured in the above paragraphs. I was stunned when I saw this come up for sale in Trussville, Alabama. I’m not sure how much I can stress that these things are crazy rare. I know of a grand total of five of these out there and none of them look even remotely as good as this one does.

The seller doesn’t say much about the RV’s condition, but flipping through the photos takes you for a ride. Those swivel seats look like the chairs you’d sit in at a barber shop and the dashboard looks like it’s a mile long. The dash is so huge that there’s even a bed on top of it!

The rest of the RV appears to be in remarkably good shape from the padded walls to the seeming lack of water damage. It looks like the coach could have been restored at some point, but the seller doesn’t say. What we do know is that the chassis apparently has 67,000 original miles on it and the seller wants $25,000 for it.

I have no idea if $25,000 is the right price, but I can tell you that I’m in love. This thing is just plain silly from its shape down to how it was built. It’s like a spaceship you take into the woods and I wish more RV builders today would go as hard as the Woodsman did.