One Swell Trailer

[GeoTracker90]

It's the Little Things

Yes, it's the little things that seem to take the most time.Today I spent some time knocking the rust off of the trailer project and then hitting it with some self etching primer. This is just an effort to slow down the development of any future rust while I work on the project. The hope is that when everything is finalized I'll have a buddy sand blast it and powder coat the whole thing.

With the rust dealt with, I moved on to welding up the body mounts that will keep the box attached to the trailer. Yes, that did mean grinding off some of the fresh primer everywhere I was going to place a body mount.














I'll probably end up adding a couple more body mounts but, before I do, I want to have the suspension in place and see how everything needs to be situated and packaged. Regarding the suspension, the latest word is that the machinist at work is getting caught up on his backlog of work projects. That means that he'll probably have some time to machine out the critical features on the suspension brackets for me some time soon. I've got my fingers crossed.

 

[rustED]

I haven't been on here in awhile, just got caught up on your build, your making some good progrèss!

You wouldn't happen to have a link to those side marker lights would you?

 

[GeoTracker90]

I haven't been on here in awhile, just got caught up on your build, your making some good progress!

You wouldn't happen to have a link to those side marker lights would you?

Sorry about that, I'm usually pretty good at attaching the link in my posts. You can follow this link and then select whether you want red, amber or even white light. I've ordered all three in the ten pack.

3/4" LED Marker Lights

These came from China so the shipping time takes a while. I've got some extras so shoot me a message if you want to buy a couple from me. They won't be as inexpensive per unit, but you wouldn't need to wait 21 days for them to arrive either.

 

[GeoTracker90]

One More Step Forward

After being gone for the weekend I stopped into the office to grab some papers and I found a pleasant surprise waiting for me on my desk. The machinist at work finally had time to machine the bolt holes in the inner brackets for the trailing arms!!!











This is getting me all the more excited to keep going with this trailer, so I took time tonight to draw up the machining print for the remaining four outer brackets. With any luck the machinist will have a few minutes this week to run these last four parts for me. Once that happens I'll be well on my way to getting this guy sitting on it's own two wheels.








I guess I had better get busy and draw up the camber adjustment plates that will get bolted on to the outer joint brackets. With the length of the slot in the outer brackets, I have a calculated +/- 5.5 degrees of camber adjustment. I had better also get going on designing the air bag mounts as well as the bump stop mounts and their associated landing pads. One of the reasons for the bump stops is so that when I get in camp I can dump the air out of the airbags and keep the suspension from bottoming out the airbags causing damage. (I'm still going to carry one spare air bag.)

I can't wait to provide the next update.

 

[GeoTracker90]

In case you're wondering this project isn't dead. I just went back and talked to the machinist here at work about getting the outer suspension brackets machined. It looks like he'll get them done in the next week or two at this point. He's had the brackets and the drawing since my last post in May of 2016, but the machining center at work has been slammed busy and I've had some other life events that have taken my attention away from this project. I think that things are now getting to the point where I can finally get back to working on a few projects and this one is at the top of the list.

I'll be sure to post updates and photos as things start to get rolling on this again.

 

[indiedog]

Yep, life certainly gets in the way. Good to see it on the move be it ever so slowly.

 

[GeoTracker90]

Thanks indiedog. I was actually going to check with the machinist today, but he was real busy and the wrong people were hanging around the machining area so I though I had better not bug him today. This will get going again, even if it takes a little bit still to get the brackets completed.

 

[GeoTracker90]

Life continues to change for me, but it's getting better every day. The suspension brackets that I had been waiting for the machinist to work on for me got trashed. I had asked that they be CNC machined, but the machinist that was going to do them for me handed the project off to one of our co-workers and he did them on the man mill instead of the CNC. Sadly he wasn't very diligent in sticking to the print that I provided and the holes and the slots were off in relation to each other as I compared the four brackets after he was done with them. Rubbish!

What to do? The only logical thing to do was to redraw the brackets, send the file to the local fab shop and let them laser cut new brackets out of 3/8" plate. When I was requesting the quote I had the shop give me a quote for a few different quantities. In the end I had enough brackets cut that I can make four trailers with this style of camber adjustment for the trailing arms. (You never know when you will get the urger to build another trailer.)



The two holes on either side of the slot will be tapped for 3/8" - 16 TPI. I'll then locktight in some buttton head bolts to use a studs for holding the camber adjustment plates to the sides of the susupension brackets.

With this part of the project handled I've now talked to a buddy and it's looking like I can go over to his place in a couple weeks to weld the brackets to the frame of the trailer. I'm crossing my fingers that it doesn't drag on longer than that. I'm getting excited to see the trailing arms installed and to have this trailer resting on its own pair of tires for the first time.

 

[stomperxj]

Glad to see you back at it Brackets look good.

Who are you using for laser cutting?

 

[GeoTracker90]

Thanks stomperxj! It's good to see some movement on this again. It's going to be slow going for a bit still, but progress is progress.

For the laser cutting, I used Premier Powder Coating and Custom Fabrication here in Rexburg. For any laser cutting or for anything that you outsource I would suggest getting two and if possible three quotes. I did this on this project and it saved me a ton of money. I had Premier quote me as well as Metal Vision out of Smithfield, Utah. I had asked for a quote from another company, but did not get a response back from them in time.

Metal Vision ended up being almost half as much as Premier, but I like working with local companies so I let Premiere know what they were up against and asked them to take a second look at their quote. After some back and forth and answering some questions I was able to negotiate the lower price from Premiere.

Here are the quantities and the pricing that I was able to secure:

Slotted Part Qty 8 $8.25 each
Solid part Qty 8 $8.00 each

Total cost for 8 each $130


This gave me enough parts for the camber adjustment trailing arm mounts that I can build this current trailer plus three more. The nice thing with projects like this is that as the quantity of parts goes up, the cost per part goes down. I was able to get all of these parts for just a little more than it would have cost me to have one set (two of each design).

Feel free to shoot me any questions that you may have about working with a job shop to get custom parts manufactured for your projects. I'll share as many tips and tricks as I can.

 

[ottsville]

Finally worked my way all the way through your thread. Great build and I'm gathering some inspiration for what I want to build. I've got a decent steel-decked 5x9 utility trailer that I want to build on. Think I might emulate your bolt on idea.

 

[GeoTracker90]

Thanks ottsville! With any luck I can get some more work done either Tuesday night or Wednesday night. Fingers crossed.

 

[GeoTracker90]

2-22-2018 Work Report

This build is finally starting to get some traction again. With that said I must warn you that I'm in the middle of moving from Idaho to Utah and I'm starting a new job on March 13th. Lucky for me my new job has me working alternating shifts of either three or four days per week. Which also means that I get alternating three or four day weekends too. Maybe I can find some more time to keep the ball rolling on the trailer once the move is done and things are settled again.

Enough of that, on to the show!

As part of my big move I needed to get my trailer project out of the drive way. So, on January 22nd I loaded it into my utility trailer, hooked up to it all with my Subaru Forester and headed out to my buddy Josh's place to burn in all of the suspension brackets as well as weld the trailing arms to the axle.






Once out at Josh's shop I unloaded everything. The frame, the axle, the trailing arms, the wheels and tires, the air bags, and the suspension brackets. Oh yes, the suspension brackets. The first order of business for the day was to prepare the outer joint brackets for the camber adjustment plates. To do this opened up the camber bolt holes out to 3/8" and then dropped in some 3/8" button head bolts.






Once these brackets are installed and the trailing arm joints are in place it will be impossible to get a hex key in there to hold the bolts from spinning as you tighten the nuts down. The easy solution was to weld them into place on the bracket. My buddy has both TIG and MIG welders. I have lots of experience with MIG welders and could have very easilly tacked the bolts in place using the MIG welder, but when you have free reign of the shop and access to the TIG welder you just have to give it a try. One small problem - I couldn't find any TIG filler rod. What to do, what to do, what to do...

Well I tell you what you do. You tale four lengths of MIG wire and clamp them to the edge of the work bench. Next you take the opposite end of the wires and fold them back about an inch from the end. Now insert the folded MIG wires into the drill chuck, tighten it down and pull the trigger.








And just like that you have made your own TIG filler rod. I know this isn't ideal, but hey - it's only a tack weld. Oh, did I metion that this was only my second or third time touching a TIG torch? Yeah. As you can see I had a bit of learning to do, but I was starting to get it figures out. Little things like keeping the gas coverage for the full post flow time, how to run the foot pedal to get the arc and amperage that is needed, etc. Hopefully you can see the difference inbetween the two pairs of tack welds.

 

[GeoTracker90]

With that out of the way. I turned my attention to the camber adjustment plates. With this suspension design I have built in the provision to adjust for toe in/out as well as camber. Adjusting the tow is simple accomplished by unbolting the trailing arm and then screwing the trailing arm joint either in or out to make the tire either toed in, toed out, or dead straight ahead.

Adjusting the camber on the other hand is a little more involved. I designed the outer suspension brackets with the slot in them to allow for adjustment of either positive or negative camber. For the sake of assembly I whipped out these preliminary camber plates from some 1/4" thick bar stock. These are drilled with all three holes inline with each other. In theory this should produce a suspension that doesn't hold the tire at either a positive or negative camber position. But, garage fabrication being what it is I wanted plenty of adjustment in case I got things way out of whack. The biggest challenge to this adjustment is that in order to fix andy misalignment it required making a new set of camber plates (eight of them total) with the center hole offset by the correct amount to bring the camber value back into an acceptable range. My hope is that I don't have to make this adjustment, but if I ever do I'll have to polish off my high school trig lessons and figure out how much higher or lower the outer joint needs to be, and then make the new camber plates based on that calculation.






After all of that it was time to start burning in the brackets, installing the trailing arms, adjusting the trailing arm joints by screwing them either in or out so that the trailing arm would become parallel to the outside frame rail. Once the smoke cleared I couldn't resist the urge to prop the trailing arm up with the airbag supporting it.










Wash

Rinse

Repeat.

And just like that you've not only got the first trailing arm installed, but the second one just falls into place as well.

 

[GeoTracker90]

With both sets of brackets for the two trailing arms located and welded into place I went about adjusting the trailing arm joints so that the trailing arms were: 1) parallel to the frame rails, and 2) the same length from the center of the outer bolt to the end of the trailing arm. I do admit that I had to pull the arms out a few times and make adjustments, but hey that's the beauty of having designed these adjustments into the suspension from the very begining.






With the trailing arms in place I added the axle into the mix. You should be able to see it in the pictures above. As mentioned the length of the trailing arms were made to be the same during the set up. The inner leg of each of the trailing arms was a little different. Because of the bend in them I never felt comfortable trimming them down until after they had been installed on the trailer and the axle has in place as a reference on what angle to make the cut and how much steel tubing needed to come off as well. Lucky for me it really didn't take much.





With things prepped it was time to weld the axle to the trailing arms. These welds currently are simple filet welds from the square bar to the round tube. In the future I want to make some fish plates and get them welded in as a way to tie the axle into the trailing arm that much more securely. One of my goals is to make the suspension on this trailer pretty much bomb proof.

Now for this part, I don't recomend that you take the approach that I did. Have a buddy there to help you. Don't do it alone. Don't let things get ot of your control be not planning suficiently well in advance. What did I do you ask? Well, I flipped the trailer frame over without damaging it, or crushing myself. Now you can start to see just how beefy this trailer frame is.