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.