building the floor

With my mad engineering and carpentry skills, I spearheaded the next part of our project - building the floor frame onto the trailer.

Nah. I'm kidding. I'm probably the most engineeringly challenged person in the universe. Give me some plywood, nails and hammer and tell me to hammer away and I'll do it...but leaving me the task of designing and constructing...uh, just don't ever ask me, okay?

But anyway, our next part of the project was to construct the frame for the floor of the trailer. Simple enough, right? Actually, a lot more went into it than I thought! We had to get the wood cut into perfect dimensions, cut up enough cross beams to provide support for the frame, put it all together making sure everything was aligned as perfectly square as possible, tar the bottom (to waterproof the underside), and bolt it all to the trailer. Throw in some sawing, gluing, nailing, hammering, routing, and tar coating and you have yourself one heck of a fun time! :-)

Here are some photos...enjoy!

building the trailer

All right. So. Enough procrastinating on the blog writing.

Joe and I looked around for awhile for a decently priced, dependable trailer and decided we really liked the trailers sold by Harbor Freight. Plus Harbor Freight lets you get pretty much anything in the store for 20% with coupons from Joe's motorcycle magazines. But Harbor Freight didn't ever have the size trailer we wanted. Joe asked if they could order one to be shipped to the store for pickup. They said yes, but that we would not be able to use the 20% off coupon because it wasn't "in stock" in the store. BS, I tell ya! I big load of BS.

Now don't get me wrong...we still go to Harbor Freight for a million other things all the time! But Joe shopped around and found the same exact trailer at an online store called Northern Tool + Equipment. We ordered it (with free shipping) for pretty much the same cost as what we would have spent at Harbor Freight. There were a few mishaps and frustrations along the way:

• Only one box arrived. They asked us to ship that one box back so that they could ship both boxes together. So weird...why couldn't they just send the second box?
• The trailer we bought went on sale for $90 CHEAPER within the week after we bought it; which was a little frustrating. But....Joe worked his magic and was able to get a credit for the $90.
  
• Once BOTH boxes arrived, there was a hole in one of them. After arranging all of the parts and taking an inventory, we noticed that we were missing one hub assembly. Awesome. That's, apparently, what came out of the big hole in the box. We were able to get them to ship us a hub assembly replacement with no problem.
  

But after all of that, after waiting anxiously to be able to put it all together, we finally got the trailer and all necessary parts. And, with the help of my sister, Alanna, and her mad putting-together skills, we were finally able to put the trailer together. Here are some photos...enjoy!

the beginning

Excerpt taken from Wikipedia:
"A teardrop trailer, also known as a teardrop camper trailer, is a streamlined,compact, lightweight travel trailer, which gets its name from its teardrop profile. They usually only have sleeping space for two adults and often have a basic kitchen in the rear. Teardrop trailers first became popular in the 1930s, when magazines such as Mechanics Illustrated published plans. The first teardrops were designed around the idea of using standard 4 by 8-foot sheets of plywood with hardwood spars. Teardrop trailers remained popular until the mid 1960s after which they disappeared from mainstream camping. However, in the late 1990s, plans became available on the internet and in recent years teardrop trailers have made a resurgence and are again growing in popularity."

And after seeing teardrop trailers of all shapes, sizes, colors, and finishes on the road over the past few years, we now begin a quest to build our very own teardrop trailer. A comfy, cozy little trailer for two.

Welcome to...