Three years ago I felt the tug of exploring new trailering options. Only instead of suffering “two foot-itis”, wherein boat owners are forever locked into the cycle of bigger is better, I was interested in something considerably smaller than Sparta. So small, in fact, that I would’ve been hard pressed to find any trailer as diminutive as what I found. The home-built, one-of-a-kind teardrop trailer that I brought home to my unsuspecting wife was four feet wide by eight feet long, versus the forty foot long by eight foot wide behemoth we call home.
Like most of my impulse purchases, I failed to do much research on tear-drop trailers in general and even less on this home build for which there was no information on the Internet. My cursory inspection of this little gem yielded the following: it was cute; it appeared well built; it had all the comforts of home (surround sound audio, a T.V., DVD player and air-conditioning [yep, that’s not a typo]).
For several years this little trailer was great for camping at the coast, trips to the mountains and even out-of-town catering gigs by providing us a crash pad. Although it is very small and the “mattress” hard, Cristina and I managed to sleep, watch Netflix and snuggle in it without too much complaint.
Alas, the romance of roughing it on wheels came to an end this summer during a trip to Yosemite. The long drive and rough roads stressed the frame to such an extent that, upon arrival, I discovered the back end was about to fall off due to dry rot.
WTF!! What I thought was a solid, well-built trailer was actually a mess resulting from lousy, untreated plywood, insufficient seals around seams and porous construction.
Long story short, I commenced to peeling the onion. Dealing with rot is always a bad-to-getting-worse endeavor and it can never end soon enough. By the time I finished tearing out flimsy, rotted wood I was back to the wheel well. Like extracting a cancer, I had to cut even more to achieve a reasonable margin. Once done, I cut a 1/2 inch thick piece of birch to mirror the vacancy. Before installing it I slathered it with copious amounts of anti-rot treatment and then covered it with polyurethane for good measure. The rest of the trailer may fall apart but the new piece will definitely be the last piece standing along with the tires.
Before the rains start in earnest I will have to button up this project by bending the steel skin back into place, screwing it up tight and applying weather sealing tape, caulk and my old friend, Captain Tolleys Creeping Crack Cure.
Once I finish this project I will provide more pics. Until then.
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