One month of building

It's been a month since the start of this crazy idea, and how could you guess that the temperature's been exceeding 70 degrees in recent days, despite it being halfway through October. Last weekend, there were more trips to Home Depot, as usual, and some more work on the walls and the floor.

Above, I'm marking the walls with the locations of the horizontal spars that will make the skeleton of the roof. I used a bit of 1"x2" to draw the lines. A sheet from the "plan binder" and a cup of coffee are necessary build materials.

Drawing the lines. Here, I'm marking both interior sides with the layout for the shelves, bulkhead and cabinets. This was mostly tedious, with a lot of measuring and square work.

Floor alignment and bolt-down. Finally, I broke my mental block on bolting the floor to the frame. I'm using four bolts on each side, and three on the front and rear rails. For each of the corners, the there's a depression sunk for each bolt head on the trailer frame. I'm using two unoccupied holes on the top of the frame near the front and rear on the side rails. For the other two side-rail bolts, I'm using the holes just forward and aft the axle on each rail. These were occupied by bolts that were part of the trailer build that were connecting the chunk of crossmember to the side rails in order to make the folding trailer a rigid trailer.

There are three unused holes in the crossmembers in the front and rear of the trailer, and those are unquestionably used, as I've mentioned before.

Another bit of work this past week has been wiring the trailer for the taillights and turn signals. The motivation is to register the trailer as a flatbed, which is reportedly an easy process. In Pennsylvania, you can apparently register it this way, and whatever else you do to it doesn't change the status of the registration. That definitely simplifies the situation.

We've been working this build completely outside so far, as you'd do when you don't have a garage. Sure, the weather has been great this far into October, but it's time to move this operation to "the barn" for the winter, while it's still pleasant to do some organization and setup. We'll have to move the trailer to the barn along with some sawhorses and install a few lights above.

I was considering packing this all in for the winter at some point, but use of the barn will allow some continued building under some shelter. It may be cold, but I might fire up a propane heater to cut the edge a bit. I might take off work Wednesday to work on the barn space and watch out for the epoxy sealant that UPS is supposed to deliver that day.

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