A Tiny Cabin Atop a Pickup Truck Can Handle Snow, Hills, and Seashore

Welcome to Different Strokes, a look at unique home design choices that beg for further explanation.

Living off the grid is one thing. Actually getting there is something else entirely. When Scott Profit, owner of Prince Edward Island track system company Rubitracks, built a tiny house on tracks as a marketing ploy for his business, he wasn’t necessarily trying to solve that niche problem. But Profit says the 112-square-foot wooden cabin on wheels, which he calls the Rubishack, can navigate rough terrain like sand, snow, hills, and seashore.

Built on the frame of a busted 1993 Dodge first-gen Cummins pickup truck, the Rubishack is part vehicle, part living space. Though it was not originally intended to be a functional accommodation, once Profit started the project, he was having so much fun with its construction that he decided to continue decking it out as his own atypical pleasure craft. Profit handled the mechanical and fabrication work, while his cousin, Katie Pitre, and her partner handled the carpentry. He says that the Rubishack cost him about 400 hours and $12,000 to construct, though he estimates that if someone else were to buy a vehicle, tracks, and cabin-building materials to DIY something similar, it would likely cost them $50,000 to $60,000.

Inside, the setup is bare bones: There’s a double bed built into the space between the steering wheel and a wall of windows that serves as the front windshield. When parked, the driver and passenger seats can swivel to face a TV on the opposite side of the space. In addition to installing air-conditioning, Profit recently wired the Rubishack for high-speed internet, and he says he plans to add a furnace for the winter, and later, a deck.

Profit says that since he started posting about the Rubishack on Instagram (as well as Youtube and TikTok) around six months ago, his following has grown from 5,000 to more than 55,000, though the social media likes have yet to lead to actual sales of his Rubitracks systems like he’d hoped for. Still, Profit loves the Rubishack so much that over the summer, he camped in it on his property with his dog, Bogan. We talked to Profit about how he made a rusted-out truck into a portable tiny cabin. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dwell: First, let’s talk a little bit about what Rubitracks systems are typically used for.

Scott Profit: One use is just recreation. You know the guys that go rock crawling in the summer? They can put these tracks on and go snow wheeling in the winter, whereas before they’d have to find something else to do. A lot of people, especially in California, use them up in the mountains. There are a lot of people who have off-grid homes up there that are on unserviceable forest roads. So they use the tracks to access their properties. A lot [of Rubitracks systems] are being used for ice fishing in, like, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and North Dakota and Minnesota.

What was the thought process behind putting the tracks on a tiny cabin—or, should I say, a tiny cabin on the tracks?

I wanted a marketing gimmick for Rubitracks and I didn’t want to spend a whole lot of money doing it. We just happened to have that old truck here with tracks on it that we used for testing. The truck hadn’t been roadworthy for 10 years. I had a choice of throwing it away and starting another project or making use of the running gear, which still ran fine, it just had holes in the floor. I was gonna put another body on that truck and put a cabin on the back, and it just made no sense. I thought, why would I stop there? Why not just make the cabin go all the way to the front and forget about the truck cab? So that’s what we did.

How did you actually go about constructing the Rubishack? What materials did you use?

From the ground to the peak of the roof, it’s 11 feet tall. Inside, it’s six feet tall. It’s all stud frame construction, the same way you would build a house: two-by-fours and plywood. On the inside, we finished it with beadboard, and it’s all insulated and wired with 110-volt household current. The windows are a little bit special. They’re acrylic, or Lexan, basically the same stuff they make bulletproof windows with, just thinner, so we didn’t have to worry about them breaking from going through hidden tree branches and stuff. Glass wouldn’t have made it a day where we’ve taken it so far.

From the looks of your videos, you’ve already taken the Rubishack on some pretty intense terrain.

We haven’t even really scratched the surface of where I want to go with it yet. We’re waiting for the snow to come, and then we can really sneak around. Where my shop is, I’m like 500 feet from the ocean, so there’s five miles of beach that I can get down onto and go for a rip. Then there are some trails and lots of dirt roads. I’d like to be on the mainland, where there’s Crown land and I could get a lot further.