joshua keroes

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.