joshua keroes

That’s our timeline until we leave for Burning Man. (the Man burns five days later) Will we make it? Will we have to resort to sleeping in the car? Stay tuned!

The plans have a template for the side profile. A teardrop has to look like a teardrop, after all. I put the 10′ sheet of plywood on sawhorses and played Battleship with the edge coordinates. About 20 points later, I used a pliable dowel and some heavy weights (in my case, half-full cans of paint), to connect the dots. Cut, sanded.

Karissa and I played Towers of Hanoi to put the next sheet of plywood under the first. Traced, cut, sanded. Kinda hard to see from this perspective, but they’re pretty heavy. You’ll get a better picture when they’re vertical.

Stats for today: three torn sander belts.

Built the subfloor over two days. This is a rectangle of 2x2s (ripped 2x4s) with additional 2×2 cross-braces. The subfloor is 10′x4′ and sheets of plywood are only 8′ long. Under the subfloor, there’s a single 2×4 to handle the gap and shorty plywood.

Painted two coats of green wood preservative on the bottom and sides so the road splatter doesn’t rot it out from underneath.

It will be bolted through the chassis. Here’s a pic with it resting on top:

Welded on the safety chain stays. Need to have chains on your trailer – it’s one of those Good Laws.

Primered and painted the chain stays and the rest of the tongue. Touched up some other spots, too. All that primering and painting takes a long time while it dries. The chassis would have been done a week ago if not for the drying.

Primered and painted.

Went to drill holes for the tongue coupler but broke one drill bit and couldn’t make much progress with any of the other 1/2″ bits. Ended up poking small holes through with a tiny drill bit and expanding them with the oxyfuel torch.

Bolted the wheels on. Yes, folks, we have a chassis and it rolls smooth.

Flipped the chassis over with two guys (thanks Russ, Dennis!) and welded all visible joints on the top deck. Here are some of the A-member welds:

Mounted the wheel hubs, packed the bearings with grease. Wow. Sure hope I never have to do that again. I’ve got grease on half my tools now.

To prepare for the paint job, there can’t be any rust or dirt on the frame. Took a grinder with a wire cup to all the welds and made them nice and shiny. Hit every spot of rust I could find. Gave all the steel a quick twice over with acetone. Next time, I think I’ll clean the steel before welding it.

To do: weld spare wheel carrier to side. Determine optimal tongue height and mount ball-hitch coupler. Primer and paint. Remount wheel jack to tongue. That should do it for the chassis.

Well, we screwed up last time. We mounted the axle only 20% of the way from the back. It should be 35-45%.  I think we basically welded one spring hanger and instead of extending forward to weld the second, we went extended backward instead. Whoops. So I cut the welds, got new hangers, and rewelded them all today.

I added A-members to the front. That’ll add a bit of structural rigidity and prevent tongue twist.

Also added some cross braces on each back corner and plug welded a pair of Atwood swingdown stabilizer jacks to the braces.

Bolted my swingdown wheel jack to the tongue.

Tomorrow, we flip, grease pack bearings, add wheels, and add a few more welds.

Richard came over yesterday and in about three hours we welded the chassis. We tag-teamed it: he’d do a joint, I’d take the next, and back again. He’s been welding for ten years, so a few of the trickier/more critical joints were all his.

The chassis is mostly done. What we’ve got now is a 10′ x 4′ rectangle, two 4′ cross bars, a tongue that extends back to the 1st cross bar, springs, and an axle.

Bare minimum to get it rolling, I need to mount the hubs, grease the bearings, add the wheels, and mount a ball-hitch coupler.

For bonus points, I’d like to add A-members that connect the tongue diagonally to the front corners of the rectangle. That will give us a triangular platform for stuff like propane and car batteries. More importantly, it’ll strengthen the frame a substantial amount.

Installed the tow hitch receiver. The tricky part was cutting a bigger hole in one side of the frame. Needed a bigger hole to get the bolts inside the frame. Mr. Sawzall made short work of that. With a little help from Karissa holding up one side of the hitch receiver, I got two bolts thumb-tightened on, aligned it straight, and went back with a ratchet. Nice.

Next, we need electrical. Can’t tow a trailer without working brake lights and turn signals. This didn’t go as smoothly: I couldn’t find the turn signals in the wire harness hanging near my left rear wheel (there it is in the picture). Found pos and neg power as well as a few other wires that illuminated steadily but nothing that flashed in time with the blinker. Course I broke one of the wires testing it. Great.. called it a night after that and went back the next day.

ETrailer’s support suggested pulling the rear lights and splicing into those lines. Perfect except I had to extend my right-turn signal’s wire to get all the way across. A little 18 gauge speaker wire (that should work, right?) and that was taken care of.  Soldered my broken wire back, cleaned, covered, and sealed all the wire harnesses I took apart, and then snaked 20 feet of 10 gauge wire all the way to the front, zip tying as I went, and connected it to the battery. We now have two signals that work! I still need to test brake lights with Karissa… but that has to wait until she’s here – it’s hard to work the circuit tester in the back and hit the brakes at the same time.

Kinda need that 220v now…

Made a power cable while I waited. 10-3 gauge cable.