Figured I'd throw up some pics since we've been back for a couple of weeks now. Life has a way of whisking you from one activity to another without a moment's breath in between. We're expecting our first child in October, and it has been all hands on deck since we got back.
Anyway, back to the trailer.
The first and major objective of this overhaul was to get the trailer finished. That may sound funny in a build thread that started 5 or 6 years ago, but unfortunately it's the truth. The trailer had been made functional long ago, but it was never truly finished. So with that in mind, I set out to paint the thing from top to bottom. The frame had been left in raw steel since it's maiden voyage in August of 2011. We(my dad and brother helped a lot!) started by blowing everything apart with a full tear down. Then we prepped and prepped and prepped and prepped until everything was ready for paint. Altogether it took about 2 weeks of nights and weekends to get the thing into primer and a full day and a half of many many thin coats of finish paint to get it done. All in all as part of the painting tear down/reassembly process, I ended up revamping the air system a bit, replacing the airbags due to dryrot, cleaning up a bit of the wiring, and giving it a new floor.
Finish painting in progress:
A pic from the road showing it finished:
The other major objective was to transform the "kitchen" cabinet from a simple box to throw stuff in, into a useful organized space with a place for everything. To that end I added a drop down shelf to utilize the 4" of "wasted space" in the ceiling of the cabinet, and a drawer to allow layered storage in the lower portion of the compartment. We also added some LED lighting for both the kitchen and fridge compartments. The LEDs are magnetized and on whips, so they can be relocated outside of the cabinet for area lighting or concentrated in one area for better task lighting.
Kitchen compartment with shelf in up position and drawer retracted. You can also see the paper towel holder on the right.
Kitchen with the shelf in the down position and drawer extended. In order to reach the lowest level of storage you have to reach behind the drawer into the bottom of the cabinet. It's a mild inconvenience, but it's better than letting that 3" of height go to waste.
Here is a closeup of the latch mechanism for the drop down shelf. It's just 2 gate latches strategically placed with a bit of luck mixed in.
Kitchen fully stocked with the lights on.
That summarizes the major updates that we made to the trailer in the recent past. If anyone would like more info on anything, please feel free.
Thanks for reading!