NorCal_HC

At least you didn't go with leaf springs! Can you imagine how heavy that set up would be? Looking great!

exgr

sweet build. i have a minor suggestion, in the first post can you list the cost of all the parts together so it is easy to see at a glance? and also maybe hours spent on the build. cool project!

Davidss

Yesterdays progress:

I had planned since the start to brace the tongue more than what you guys have seen so far but based on the comments I was getting I decided to go much further with it. I capped off the outside corners, made custom larger gussets, boxed in the bottom of the tongue, and added some significant bracing.

Today's progress:

Flipped the trailer over for the last time and welded the decking on. That is over 50 feet of weld bead so it took a while! Welded on steel decking is the way to go IMHO. In my case it was $100 cheaper, only 50lbs heavier and made the trailer much stronger.

Not much left to go at this point. I will probably have it on the ground by tomorrow.

Davidss

I'll post costs at some point but this is not a budget build. I can tell you that I will end up spending around $1500. A single axle without brakes would be in the $1000 territory.

descartesfool

Curious about where your design gets its bending strength. Sections are very shallow in the vertical direction it seems. Looks almost like a simple flat plane.

Davidss

Got the axles on and lowered the trailer to the ground this morning:


I have gone back and forth on fender ideas. Everything from making my own jeep style fenders to usiing 4 fenders and directly attaching them to the hubs. So this evening I stopped by Northern Tool to look at some in person and just happened to stumble across some aluminum jeep style fenders like this in the clearance section:


They were 5 of them all marked down from $80 to $36. All of them had some purely cosmetic blemishes in the chrome. I picked out the best pair and went to pay for them. The cashier scanned them and they came up as $8 each!!! On top of that I had a $5 off $15 coupons so I ended up getting $150 of aluminium fenders for $11!!!


I stopped by my shop on the way home to see what they look like. I will need to cut them down but they should work really well:


A note to future readers of this post who are actually building a trailer of their own. Here is a really boring video on how to order a torsion axle: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5W1Hpgq9tWA The first thing to note is that most axles come cambered (basically they are pre-bent). Make sure your frame design will accommodate this! Next when you are building from scratch you will have a frame width dimension to go off of but will have to come up with your own hub face measurement. When you look at the specs for the axle you're ordering it will give you a minimum hub face measurement. In my case for a dexter toflex #9 axle the hub face width must be at least 12" wider than the frame. That minimum width will be very conservative so don't be afraid to use it. I added an inch just to be safe and now wish I hadn't.

Viciouss

nice!

exgr

I declare this is the best project shown in rr/ax ever! :-) Outside of project car/racecars builds!!

essex

Are you going to be adding a beaver tail?

Davidss

Got the trailer hooked up today and took it out for it's maiden voyage! I initially made a loop around my shop and then stop and look over the trailer. I repeated this a few times and then decided to hit the public street and head to an empty neighbourhood to run the trailer through some bumper and harder maneuvers:



One of the decisions you have to make when designing a trailer is tongue length. In very general terms a longer tongue is easier to back up with and a shorter tongue length will track behind the truck better and not cut corners as much. Personally I prefer a very short tongue but if you go too short the trailer can hit the truck when taking a tight turn. So at a crawl turning at full lock here is what I ended up with:



This is pretty perfect, close but not enough to worry about. Next stop was to head to the scales and luckily there is a truck stop a few minutes from my shop. In addition I can get there taking all bumpy back roads so it was a great shakedown for the trailer:



Using the scales at a truck stop is always a little confusing. Instead of trying to unhitch/rehitch the trailer while on the scale I decided to weight twice, once with trailer once without:



Now I don't have fenders/lights and a few other parts on yet. But I have all the components and weighed them individually so I can come up with a total final weight of 750lbs! I am very happy with that. My car and trailer together will weight less than a new Mini Cooper S!

Other than that the only other news is that one my $20 wheels leaks:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvK9g3Z5iCA

Davidss

No way! Why make the trailer longer than it needs to be? I would rather just carry longer aluminum ramps.

dirty19

iTrader: (1)

This is soo bad ***...
I need to learn to weld.

Davidss

Got the car on the trailer a few days ago. First job was to get the tongue weight set. Since the car/trailer are soo light I could just use a regular bathroom scale.



After that I needed to figure out what ramp lenght I needed. There are a numerous ramp length caclulators online. These work well if you need a simple attack/breakover angle calculation. My car has one spot where the exhaust hangs down paticularly low so it was easier just to do some actual testing. I made some temporary wood ramps and then would repeatedly cut a few inches off the ramps until I ran out of clearance.



With the ramps at 6 feet long my car would still clear but it was getting pretty close. Just to be safe I am going to go with 6.5 foot ramps which should give me some buffer for unloading on unlevel ground. A side note I found was that wood 2x10s are 3.36lbs per foot which makes them just as light as any aluminum ramp, unfortunately they aren't strong enough on their own. I would love to try and make a simple lightweight brace to add to the wood but I don't have enought time to reinvent the wheel. So I just ordered a set of aluminum ATV ramps.

After that it was time to hit the road with the car on the trailer. After a few dozen assorted miles just to make sure everything was ok it was time to do some torture testing. If something is going to go wrong I want to know now. In addition with no paint on the trailer yet it's much easier to see problems. So I spent an hour driving around to every bumpy road I know of and ramming the trailer into every pothole I could find. During all of this I would get out and look over the trailer/car/chains/straps every few minutes. Finally to wrap things up I took the rig over some elevated rail road tracks (the kind that ramp up and down) and drove over them at least a half dozen times at faster speeds than I would ever normally drive.



After a thorough inspection everything looks perfect so next up is paint. From some other posts I knew I decided I wanted to use bedliner but almost all bedliners will not adhere well to bare metal. Pretty much every bedliner out ther needs a primer but it gets even worse. If you are painting a car you can spray on a primer then wait 30 minutes then spray on the paint with no sanding inbetween. This won't work with bedliner and I AM NOT interested in sanding the whole stinking trailer twice.



So to sum up a what I learned from studying dozens of paint tech sheets. It turns out that rustoleum's bed liner will bond well with bare metal and can be used as a topcoat over fresh primer. In addition the rustoleum bed liner is sold locally, it's cheap, and it is available in both gallon and spray cans. For primers I tested a number of them on some and rustoleum's rusty metal primer was the best.



Next up was painting the underside of the trailer. Up until this point I have had a lot of fun building the trailer but this was a giant pain. It took hours working overhead to grind and wire brush the metal preparing it for paint.



So at this point the underside is done. Now all that's left is painting the top side, lights, and paperwork.

essex

I wouldn't add any length I would just pie cut the length you have on the back there

Davidss

Ok so I took the car off the lift and rolled it back to prep it for paint.



The prep is the most important step of any paint work. Here is after wire brushing, some grinding, and a hand wash with wax and grease remover. On a job like this if you aren't spending hours on prep then you won't have good results.



Even though the rustoleum bedliner will stick to bare metal I decided to spray primer anyway. This turned out to be pretty crucial as the spray primer will get into all the cracks the bedliner won't. In addition it makes it really easy to spot places you missed with the bedliner.



And 2 coats of bedliner 2 hours apart. It looks awesome in person. I am very impressed with the rustoleum bedliner for $40.

Jdm Dina

Wow looks good and what a weight savings! I am buying a new 2010 Bri-Mar 18 ft open deck trailer on tueaday. It's 1740 lbs. My wife and I will use it to trailer my 93 Civic Coupe the autocross and road race events, but also to pick up Honda and acura cars or shells to fix and sell. Gonna cost me $2700.

I was thinking of making my own trailer but it seemed too expensive and time consuming for me. Great job!

Davidss

Got the licence plate today. In Texas if the trailer is 4000lbs or less gross there is no title or vin. So all I had to do was sign my name, pay $50, and walk away with a plate. So as of now the trailer is basically finished. I'll post some final pics later this week.

Cost: A few people have asked to post up the total cost. I have kept track of everything so that is no problem. I would like to stress that this was not a super budget build. I set out to build a really awesome trailer that was far lighter and a better fit for a small car. I will always get better gas mileage with this trailer and if I want I could tow with a minivan or SUV. Not to mention the lower CG height, better ride/handling, shorter ramps, and the ability to open the door over the fenders. There are very few lightweight commercial trailers out there (trailex, featherlite, ???) and they all cost around three times what I spent or more.

Labor: I started work on February 1st so it took me around a week and a half. That was some days working a few hours, some full days, and a few days not working at all. I really took my time on this build so it went a lot slower than it needed to. In addition I started the build without all of the parts. If I was to do it over again I could do it all in 2-4 full days (not counting picking up parts beforehand).

Tools: Not counting basic hand tools I used both mig and tig welders, a metal chopsaw, plasma cutter, and three angle grinders. But you could get by with either a mig or stick welder, and a single angle grinder (just tip the guy at the metal yard to cut the metal accurately).

On the left is my actual trailer build. On the right is what I would have ended up spending on a single axle budget build.

NorCal_HC

Awesome project. Thank you for sharing the prices, the parts list and finished product. Inspires me to build my own!

Billy Elliot

I'm really thinking about tackling this myself. When I first started doing races I was going to 2-3 events a year so it wasn't that bad dishing out $500-$750 a year to rent a trailer.

Now I run 4-6 events per year (plus some long distance tows to track days) so I'm already spending $1000-$1500 a year to rent.

Might as well man up and get my own trailer and it will pay for itself mid-season next year. I'll also save some MPG on towing, which ads up when you're towing to a bunch of events.

civichb20

Have not been on ht for a while I am glad I found this subscribed good luck. Just realized your project is just about done lol good stuff anyways.

Davidss

Time to post some final pictures and conclusion. I hit the 1000 mile mark on the trailer today and all has been perfect so far. Having a car/trailer this light has made a big difference in towing mpg. A month ago I towed a 5000lb car/trailer/stuff on a 6 trip and got 13.5mpg. This weekend I made the same exact journey 2500lbs lighter with the cruise control set to the same speed and got 15.6mpg. Over the total 1000 miles I have averaged right at 16 mpg using regular unleaded!






I need to find some shorter straps.



Being able to open the doors over the fenders rules!



Here is a closeup of the rustoleum bed coating. It turned out great!



These are ATV ramps rated at 2000lbs. I called the company that sells them and they did not seem to think that putting a car on ATV ramps would be a problem. And since the car can't put all 4 wheels on them at once I have a pretty good bit of safety margin.

known

iTrader: (1)

Very nice work! You have given me some ideas for redoing my homeade trailer.

How much do those ramps weigh? My ramps weight at least 50-60 lbs a piece.

Davidss

13.5lbs each

Lo-Buck EF

looks good. i'd like to see a better strapping method (which i'm sure you are working on), but overall, great build!

known

iTrader: (1)

Yeah I was looking at that too and figured that was a temporary solution.

I have 4 of the big thick straps I hook to the control arms typically.

I really need to weld some hooks to my car so Im not tugging on the suspension. I would consider doing that as well since you can obviously weld.