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10/2001: We found this old Trail King trailer in a lot by our house. It was used to haul steel, it has a 37,100 GVWR, 15 ton axle rating, and 24 feet of deck. It could easily haul all of the toys we own, except our crane. |
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Nice pintle hitch, jack, and electric brake system.
It could be the next new toy!
After some begging, we sealed the deal! |
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Look at the tandem duals, Dexter axles rated at 15,000 lbs per axle.
The only problem is no ramps, so a fabrication project is in order here!
Ooops, we found we'd need to angle the tail of the trailer to get ramps to work right! That's okay, we can just snip the end off and tack it back at an angle! |
| 5/2002: Okay, with the deck stripped off, we can get a good look at the project at hand. Oh no, what did we get in to! That's a really heavy steel frame. |  |
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Ahh, a lucky break, the tail has a taper on the under side of the main beams.
We can "just cut 'em and flip 'em over", real easy!
What! you're going to cut your new trailer in half! well, actually it's about 1/5th, but I thought better than to say that. |
| We did some extensive CAD modeling of the trailer to make sure that it would all fit as planned (hoped). We measured twice and marked the cuts. |  |
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About 45 minutes later, we had the heavy main beams sawn through. |
| With the cutting torch we finished the job. Slicing the support beams dropped the tail to the pavement. |  |
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While the tail was 'loose' we welded the ramp supports on. I'm not very good at welding, so it's much easier to weld flat that to weld upside down. |
| We finished the ramp supports, now we're ready to weld the tail back on. |  |
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The side rails were left on to make it eaiser to hoist the tail into position. I used them to make sure everything was as straight as before the cuts. |
| We have the side rails cut down, now it's starting to look like the plans. Next we need to make the new angled siderails. |  |
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A back view of the trailer, it looks kinda silly without sides |
| Here we added the side rails.It's starting to look better. |  |
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We added some angle steel next to the main beams to adjust the angle of the tail. |
| Here is a shot of the tail ready for the angle deck. |  |
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The prep work took forever, but the deck dropped right on. |
| That's it for now, we need to change out some rusted cross members, and then assemble the ramps. |  |
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7/2002: With all of the welding and grinding done, we decided to replace the decking.
While it was off, we wire brushed and power washed all of the scaling rust.
Then we gave it a good coat of Rust-oleum primer, Wow 3 hours of painting! |
| After another 4 hours of painting over 2 days we had 2 color coats on. |  |
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Rear view in red |
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We painted the front too.
Next is the decking and the ramps. |
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Well, maybe not, we wired the light and the electric brakes only to find the electric brakes didn't seem to work! So we had to pull the wheels to get at the brake magnet. |
| Wow, 4 of these 150 pound hubs and 80 lug nut later. |  |
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While it was apart, we painted the suspension and hubs black, and the wheels white. |
| Reassembled finally, next we need to get some oak for the deck. We only have a few hours until we leave for up north. |  |
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We finished the decking, loaded the trailer with old deck boards from another project and drove it up north |
| back to the top
Sorry, not much here yet! |
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