Widening trailer axle, M416 copy

[Toy-Roverlander]

Hi all,

I recently jointed the camper trailer society with a Dutch copy of the M416. After WW2 the Dutch copied the M416 trailer, most were made by Polynorm and Roset. Mine is a Roset from somewhere between the '50s and 60's.
The only real visual difference are the arched fenders instead of angled ones. Polynorm offered them with a tailgate as well.

I've adapted mine to fit behind my 1965 Land Rover. I lengthened the drawbar, fitted an Aussie McHitch and fitted the same Trucklite taillights as the LR has.

Here's what it looks like now:

Plans are to fit a lid to it and mount an RTT on top. And both trailer and LR will be painted the color the LR used to be originally, Marine Blue. It has to sit on the same wheels as well.
Now there's the problem. I would like to keep this axle, as I like rebuildable wheel bearings and the handbrake it has. But it's too narrow and has an early Jeep 5 stud bolt pattern.
It would have to be widened something like 15" to match the trackwidth of the LR. And the boltpattern has to change to 6x139.6mm to match the Toyota wheels.

What would be a smart, strong way to achieve this? It has a square axle, I haven't checked yet but Im guessing solid bar.

 

[Martyinco]

Simple quick solution would be to use adapters, that's what I did on my trailer build. Had 5 lug Jeep pattern and needed to match my Toyota pattern, but that would only increase your track with 4" which is how thick spacers usually are. But you would still be 11" short of your goal. Without seeing exactly what kind of axle is under it, its hard to say if you could widen it or now.

Love the Rover by the way! :drool:

 

[rustED]

Like Martyinco said you can use wheel adapters to change the lug pattern to match your LR.

For widening the trailer axel you might be able to cut the square axel down, essentially turning it into 2 square spindles and buy some heavy wall square tubing and sleeve the spindles to making the axel the appropriate length that you need. You would need to weld on new spring perches too. Something like this (not my pic):



Hope this helps, nice looking trailer and LR!

 

[Toy-Roverlander]

Thank you all!

Yesterday I took the hubs of and noticed there's plenty of room to knock (or grind) the old studs out, weld up at least one of the holes and drill the 6 hole toyota pattern. That solves the stud pattern issue.

Sleeving the cut axle sounds like a good option. Would it have to be sleeved over its full length, or would sleeving between the leaf springs be sufficient. Max loaded weight is about 1100lbs.

Interesting that the trailer already sits high enough that fitting 35s brings it up enough to sit near about perfectly level behind the landy. It doesn't even need to be SOA.

 

[rustED]

I don't think it would be necessary to sleeve the entire length of the axel. Just taking a quick look at etrailer.com (as an example) they sell square spindles, the one I'm looking at only has a 4" stub, and if I remember correctly they suggest leaving 1" of the stub exposed when welding, so your actually only sleeving 3" total (for each spindle on each end.) The spindles are 1-1/2" squared rated at 1750lb ea, when sleeved with a 2"×1/4" wall axel tube you would have a 3500lb rated axel when finished. I don't know what size diameter your square axel tube is, but you could leave the stub longer like 6" or more if you wanted to sleeve it more to be on the safe side, I always tend to over build stuff, lol.

I hope this is helpful, here's a link to etrailer.com showing the info I mentioned just as a quick reference example. If you scroll down a little ways there is a drawing with the spindle dimensions listed including stub length and diameter size.
http://www.etrailer.com/Trailer-Spindles/Redline/SP20484.html