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.