The Teardrop In The Wild!

 Well - - - maybe not all that wild.

I just got back from the family reunion campout up in Michigan and with trailers  ranging from 19' up to 40' long (not counting my little teardrop), and some attendees (as usual, there were about 40 of us there) that require flush toilets and hot showers, you can't get too wild.

At the place we go, the group-loops are electric only with a couple of potable water hydrants in the communal center of the loops and a five minute walk to the bathhouse, and that's about all the wild some of us can handle.

But I "struggled" through anyway.

I got a lot of sympathetic looks (one person, as in all on thier lonesome nowadays, since it was his wife's memorial service I was at in March, was there in his 40' bumper-pull with two slideouts and chandeliers over the stone-topped kitchen island!),

a few, semi-tolerant eye-rolls (as in "he always was the weird one"),

and a couple of head-shakes, but I dare say I was just as comfortable as those with larger rigs and my 'shower room' was bigger (the bike is stored in there too, to the right just out of the shot.) and arguably cleaner, than what the bathouses had to offer.

I got a couple of incredulous 'do you really sleep in there!"s.

Well - yeah, and more - quite comfortably.

The low-slung beach-chair leaves me about a foot of head-clearance for decadent lounging, I've put wooden tops on both my Boxio's, one the toilet and the other a self-contained wash-sink, so they make great little tables as well as good seats for dealing with socks and shoes like a civilized person.

In this photo the bedroll - a sleeping bag and deflated 7" thick single-sized air-mattress, are rolled up out of the way to the left.

In this shot I'm using my other option. A 6" foam tri-fold mattress with the sleeping bag tucked in behind it.

Both boxio's stow under the cabinet to the left, and the chair folds up and stands out of the way against the front wall

 when either mattress is deployed for sleeping.

There's a little more floor space available when using the air-mattress option, but I have found I don't really use that extra space. The tri-fold is quicker to deploy when I'm worn out at the end of the day, but with a 12v airpump for the air-mattress, not by much. Both are equally comfortable to sleep on.

Here's where being a curmudgeon that camps by himself comes in handy! Usually the entire floor space of a teardrop this size is covered by mattress and the occupants are pretty much limited to kneeling long enough to change clothes and sleeping, but I've got plenty of room in there for - well, living. I've even brought my stove inside a couple of times to make evening tea in out of the weather.

The cargo trailer is roomier, maybe decadently so, but short of full-time living, which I could easily do in the cargo trailer, the teardrop is quite comfortable for me and tows easier. (Not that the cargo trailer is all that hard to tow either.)

In the county park we go to, you rent the group sites from Wednesday to the next Tuesday.

It might have been something I said, but come Sunday night this is what our loop looked like. (Those trailers in the distance are on a different loop.)

The drunken old fool from an ajacent loop took my solitude as an invitation to come on over. After a week of dealing with wall-to-wall relatives I shut that down in a hurry!

I had to stick around to give my sisters time to unload thier trailer and get it over to storage so I would have a spot in thier suburban driveway because they had a project they wanted my woodworking help with, but that's a theme for a different post.

Are They Amused?

We have 14 acres of heavily wooded property. That means thousands of trees.

I have, with a lot of work cut a bunch of trails through those woods. Other than the few open areas we have it's  pretty thick going and it took me quite a while of working on it a few snatched hours at a time.

But now there's trail maintenance.

That stuff out there just insists on constantly growing! Not that I'm terribly particular about "grooming" the trails to public-trail standards where they have to worry about some snowflake, that has no business being out on a trail in the first place, sueing because a stray twig made a mark on thier face, or a low branch messed up thier hair.

Yep, that’s a section of one of my trails

 Not exactly groomed to public-space standards

No, my trails are a little on the rugged side, requiring a lot of ducking, weaving, and high-stepping as I make my way along them (good for core strength and balance).

 I do wear a stiff straw hat which helps deflect pointy, scratchy things when ducking my head and bulling my way through. (And the wide brim sweeps some of the cobwebs away from my face too, a hazard of hiking just after dawn.)

This, the one up in the air, not the one laying on the ground, wasn't there yesterday. The trail is supposed to be right there in the middle of the photo. This thing is hanging across the trail just a little above crotch high and bent two smaller trees down with it.

But it seems like, with all that ground out there, a disproportionate number of trees fall right into my trails.

Maybe it amuses them.

Sometimes they very politely lay down neatly and I can just step over and leave them there to do what they do naturaly.

Sometimes I can just re-route the trail around them with a few minutes work with a heavy pair of loppers,

What I would have to cut through to re-route around this latest downed tree.

but other times, like this one, going around is a whole lota work and just not very practical.

When that happens I have to lug the heavy chainsaw back there, in this case over two ridges and through one valley,

and remove the obstruction from my original trail.

I swear that sometimes, when the saw is running and I have my hearing-protection on, I can almost hear a chuckle or two.

And, in case anybody caught that in the previous photo, yes. That's a battery powered chainsaw.

Back when I was clearing space for our barns and initially cutting trails I had a couple of gas-powered chainsaws, but unlike my brother I have a terrible time keeping small gas engines happy. And now that the barns are up, the trails cut, and I'm a little older, if theres any serious tree-falling to be done around here I'll call an insured and bonded arborist. So the troublesome gas saws moved on to new homes and I picked up a Greenworks 48V battery powered chainsaw for simple maintenance work.

Greenworks because that's the same brand, and the same 24V batteries, as the drill and impact-driver I carry in the Ranger.

So far I have never flattened the saw's batteries while doing my usual maintenance, which sometimes has included a significant number of cuts through 12" or larger logs. But if I ever do flatten the batteries, it was probably time to take a break anyway while the batteries charge back up.

Gas or battery, it's still a chainsaw. It still requires chain-oil and gets dirty and gummy when used.

Some reviewers of this particular saw complain about the chain-oil leaking when the saw is sitting on the shelf. Personally I suspect that they aren't cleaning the saw and all the collected gunk is wicking the oil out of the reservoir.

And yep, I'm that annoying guy that backs into parking spots and driveways so I'm pointed the right way when it's time to leave and puts the lawnmower away clean and full of gas so it's ready for next time.

I'm that anal fool that, everytime I use it, opens up the chainsaw and cleans it out, tops up the oil reservoir,

and hones up each and every tooth with a few swipes of the sharpening file

before putting it up for next time.

And I have never had an issue with leaking chain-oil.

Oh damn! Gota go.

One of the branches on that big live-oak keeps growing and has nearly blocked the trail over the pond's dam.

Later people!

Wheels And Electrons

There's reason you don't  find many septuagenarians playing on the same ruggby team as tricenarians. It's  not that they can't play the game, it's just that they have slowed down a bit and can't compete on the same physical level as 30 year olds.

It's not that I can't ride a standard bike, it's just that the inevitable passage of time means the kind of riding I like to do is difficult on a cheap standard bike anymore, to the point of sucking all the joy out of the experiance.

I'm not much of a road biker, nor does slamming around on mountain-bike trails hold much appeal, I'd rather hike those and soak in the experiance at a slower pace, I'm not a loop around and around the city-park affectionato, so that pretty much leaves the many rails-to-trails - well, trails.

Only thing is, those tend to have longer distances between access points and being on my own, all my rides are out-&-backs, so no chance to pick the downhill direction for a ride.

The last time I rode the Quad-B (my $120 Walmart Big Box Beater Bike) on the Tunnel Trail from Viena, over the crest at Tunnel, and down to Burnside (there's a really pretty stream and some beaver dams between Tunnel and Burnside) and back again, I thought I'd never make it back uphill to Tunnel before starting the long glide, or what should have been a long glide, back down to Viena. 

Finally back at Tunnel, while I was flat on my back on the bench of a picnic table trying to recover enough from that last uphill slog to finish the ride, I had to work hard to convince a concerned young woman (more like a child in her form, and what a form, fitting lycra) that she didn't need to call the paramedics for me, even though I wasn't entirely sure she was wrong.

That was the last time I road the Quad-B, which, admittedly, was nearing the end of its useful life with worn wheel, pedal, and head-tube bearings and badly brake-worn rims. (Even going downhill from Tunnel to Viena that bike wouldn't coast anymore and I had to work for every mile!)

But I still like the idea of riding the many rails-to-trails opportunities available today, as well as being able to occasionally scout questionable forest-roads by bike before committing a vehicle.

I could bridge the gap between desire and ability a bit by buying a decent mid-level standard bike to replace my ragged out Quad-B. But for that kind of money, enter the ebike (with conciderable help from Mom's estate). An investment that's more  likely to keep on providing as my physical condition ages out.

Now I know there are those out there that quote - would die before buying an ebike - unquote, but we're all different, and for me the electrons seem to be working.

Most evenings now I end up riding the ebike in (rugged) loops around the property for 30 to 60 minutes before calling it a night, something I haven't done on the Quad-B in years. Something that's good for me both physicly and mentally as I de-stress from the day. Not that you'd think I have all that much stress in my day as it is, but a feature of the end of the spectrum where I apparently dwell is having dificulty shutting the mind down.

There's  a ton of decent e-bike offerings out there and after much research over several months I picked a Lectric XP Stepthrough 3.0.

Stepthrough because there's no reason to make life more difficult than it needs to be. Lectric because they are US based, well known, have good quality and customer service reviews, and at the time were offering a package deal that included the fancy seat, saddle-bags, and two extended range batteries for about the same price ($1500 or so) as some decent standard bikes. XP, not because I was particularly looking for a folding bike, but because that was the only way to get a bike with 20" wheels, shortening the overall length enough

that, without taking anything apart, it would fit between the walls across the rear door of the cargo-trailer (by a half inch!)

while still leaving room to fold the bed down.

I added some low-profile D-rings to the floor and the door/ramp so the bike can be securely strapped down.

I also added a 1up bike rack to my arsenal.

Bike racks are pricey and I've had a Thule swing-away rack for - well, since forever - but it's a frame-hanger which won't work at all for this new bike.

Besides, electric bikes, with thier steel frames with integraded welded-on steel rear rack, 3" tires, fancy shock-post seat, saddle bags, and extended-range battery are heavy! 70 pounds ready-to-ride in my case.

Constantly arm-curling one of those up to hang it on a frame-hanger rack - well that's just not in my vocabulary anymore!

Hence the wheel-suport rack with ramp (30 pounds all together), so I can just roll the bike on and off.

The wheel-support trays of the 1up also fold 90 degrees to end up parrallel with the hitch-tube which streamlines the stored rack so I can slide it into the bed of the Ranger when towing the cargo trailer to a destination, then once there, mount the rack on the back of the Ranger for day-trips.

As you may have already seen in a previous post, I added a reciever-tube to the front of the teardrop so I can mount the rack there too,

then travel with the bike mounted on the trailer, then once there, wherever 'there' is, shift the rack to the Ranger for day-trips.

First impresions are good, but I've only got a couple hundred miles on the bike so far and frankly I'm still learning how to use it, so maybe sometime in the future I'll go into more detail on riding it and how it's doing. (Don't you want to just reach through the screen and grab by the neck those people that leave reviews saying 'arrived on time, packaging in good shape, haven't used it yet, 5 stars!'?)

Project Detour - A Small Centerpiece

This morning The Wife brought me a small blue jar she likes

along with a tub full of doodads and said "do something!".

So, even though she also said, "no rush, whenever you have time.", like any man that has been successfully married for over 40 years, I dropped everything

and did something - - -

Especially since she had to go to town this morning for more supplies

to keep her tore-up arm bandaged (feral cat that panicked), and she's always grouchy when she gets back from having to be around people.

Final step, assuming she signs off on it,

is to put a 50/50 mix of water & glue, with a few drops of soap to make it flow better, over the copper-coated bb's I half-filled the jar with, to lock everything down.

Uh-oh, I hear her coming down the driveway - wish me luck!

A Bike Rack Where?!

Who ever heard of adding a 2" hitch reciever on the FRONT of a trailer?! Especially when there's already one on the rear, where they belong.

Well, that's exactly what I did to the teardrop, because attaching things to the back of a lightweight trailer with a rear hatch is inconvenient (when you need to get the hatch open), problematic in terms of weight-distribution (there's only just over a 100 pounds of tongue-weight on this thing. Add any more behind the axel and the tongue will be floating! Disasterous for trailer control!), and hanging things out back there makes them just a little vulnerable in traffic.

So, to the front!

My brother, the metal-guy in the family, told me I had to span two frame-members with the receiver-tube to avoid work-hardening of the welds which could result in eventual cracking and failure.

That meant two things.

First I had to drop the spare tire to make room for the actual welding process

and second, I had to cut a 24" long 1/4 inch walled steel reciever tube

Don't know what I would ever need that short cut-off for, but ya never know so, now that the cut end is painted up so it won't rust on me, I'll find a spot on a shelf for it

so that I could still get the spare mounted back up afterwards because apparently nobody stocks the 14" reciever tube I needed and there was a month-long backlog on 18" tubes.

Now if you thought I was going to weld this thing on myself, you were wildly mistaken!

I'll weld up things like this racoon-proof fountain, shown above in the dry-fit stage, for the little pond out the back-door, but generally speaking - OK, always speaking - my welding SUCKS, so I took the freshly cut tube and the teardrop down to a proper weld-shop to make sure the damn thing doesn't fall off one day and wipe out the poor smuck following me.

You might remember that I mentioned building two different campers on an Isuzu NPR chassis. Well the second version required removing the flatbed from the truck and this is the same shop (new owner) that did that work for me 20+ years ago. At the time I told the guy the flatbed was his to sell on or scrap.

While waiting on the welding job I wandered around and discovered that the flatbed is still sitting out there in the weeds!

All welded up (properly!), I headed back home,

painted up the bare metal bits,

wrestled the spare tire back up into its mounting spot (good thing the Ranger uses the same wheel as the teardrop because its spare is a lot easier to get at!),

and now I'm able to mount my single-bike-with-ramp 1up bike rack on the front of the teardrop  when towing or the back of the Ranger when not.

When it's on the trailer it's not an issue, but for when the rack on on the Ranger the contents are partially blocking the tail-lights so I added some auxiliary lights to the ramp

that plug into the Ranger’s 4-way.

Just what I need a bike rack for is a long-ish story for another time.

Don’t Hit Me!

 I knew, even before it was in my hands, that I would be making modifications to the teardrop, that’s just the way I’m wired.

After a 6 month wait for it to get through the build schedule, in early June the trailer was finally ready - - and sitting in Grand Junction CO.

I was not.

So first thing on the list was a road trip to go fetch the damn thing back to where it belonged. I’m not used to making road trips without my living quarters on my back, so the first day was a long drive because I didn’t want to screw around homeless any longer than I had to. I didn’t leave the house until the day before my appointment at Timberleaf Trailers and made it across three states and one mountain pass to Salida CO where (shudder) I found a motel room for the night.

Next day I was in Grand Junction about three hours early for my appointment  after crossing the 11,000+ foot Monarch Pass and what Colorado calls two “crests” (most would call them serious passes with chain-up areas, runaway ramps and permanently mounted closure-gates) on US50.

That night I was camped on BLM land with my new trailer and already knew what my second upgrade project would be.

I was parked at a noticeable angle, not something I normally worry about (compressor fridges like I use to avoid the need for a mounted propane system work just fine up to a 30° angle), but this night the slope had me rolling across my air-mattress into the wall, and it was a bitch to get myself sorted out and upright uphill when it was time to get out of bed, well, at least up on my knees since there's no "upright" in here, because there was no place to grab onto. I was like a turtle turned upside down and waving my flippers around desperately! So, grab-handles! Four of them. on order from Amazon before I even got home.

But my first project was definitely going to be correcting the Department of Transportation’s criminally inadequate minimum lighting requirements.

For trailers less than 80” wide and less than 10,000 gross, the USDOT requires ONE tail light (Most states add to that and require the usual two) a pair of brake lights and a pair of turn signals. And they don’t require them to be separate lights, they can be combined into a pair of single 2 or 3-function fixtures, each with a minimum of 3.5 square inches of luminous surface area. Yep, that’s right 3.5, which is equivalent to a round light just barely more than 2” across!

I guess these people have never come up behind a slow-moving trailer in a heavy rain!

 Even when the minimums are exceeded by a factor of three, as they were on the trailer as it came from the factory (which is a 6 person combination workspace and showroom with a half-dozen trailers in various stages of production at a time), that’s not good enough in my books.

One slight problem.

The roof, including the rear-hatch, are built up glue-ups with the various bits being cut on a CNC machine which also routes out pathways for wiring which is added before the final glue-up, and the tail lights are very firmly glued in so access to the wiring on the back of them was non-existent. So unless I wanted to really hack-up the rear hatch, its real estate was not available for any additional lighting.

So I sourced these narrow lights, just shy of 17 sq. in. of luminous area each, that would fit on the frame of the trailer between the two heavy rubber blocks that act at bumpers. I made sure they met another criteria in that they also act as reflectors. Good thing too! But I'll get to that in a moment.

And while I was at it I picked through my leftovers pile and found a set of these 3/4" press-in LED lamps to add as front and rear fender clearance lights. Not stipulated by DOT standards but required by common sense!

To simplify wiring things up I bought a trailer wiring kit for a 4-way connector so I'd have plenty of length of the proper wire-colors, then climbed under the trailer, not all that difficult since it is only a few inches short of 2 feet off the ground, where the existing wiring harness, though neatly installed and anchored down, is accessible,

 and with my tools, rubber tape, plastic cable-way, and clamps, I spliced into the existing wiring harness,

drilled through the rear frame member and wired up the new tail-lights. I even added the vehicle-end of the 4-way connector that came with the wiring harness so that if, for some reason I throw a basket or something on the rear receiver that comes as part of the trailer, I'll have an easy way of lighting it up.

Adding the press-in lamps to the fenders was just a matter of running more wire in more cable-way fastened down with more clamps and drilling some holes.

There, much better - - except,

DOT also requires reflectors, even on small trailers. Now maybe the original tail and side lights were marketed as reflective, but this night shot clearly shows that until I added my own tail lights there was nothing reflective about the rear, or sides of this trailer.

Well my leftover parts box has that covered too, in the form of some 2" wide red reflective tape. So I added some of that on the rear and sides of the trailer to become compliant, and more importantly, visible!

I've used this stuff a lot on various projects and never had it peel off or lose its luminescence.

As you can see, it doesn't take much light, not even enough to make the frame visible here, to make this tape really glow.

But this was just the first of a number of modifications I've already made to the teardrop.