Let's Lighten Up a Little!

 

OK, if you can't quite make sense of this I don't blame you.

I mean who the hell parks a trailer on its ass standing up against the side of a building!

Well, apparently I do.

But wait! Let me back up

to about 20 years ago.

That's when we bought this light-duty trailer off the lot of a Tractor Supply to use as our recycling trailer. (We bought the deck-boxes at about the same time. They've weathered and show a lot of wear, but are still functional, which is good because those damn things are expensive! The three of them together cost about as much as the trailer.)

Our county has a great recycling program, in fact other counties come check it out to see how it works, but the main collection center is a little over 20 miles away in the county seat. A place we don't visit very often.

We have this 'trash center', where we sort trash and the various recycling stuff (the recycling center requires your stuff to be sorted and placed in the proper bins) in the barn just outside our living quarters (when you live in a tiny space you do NOT want trash, especially kitchen trash, inside your living space with you!), but it fills up in faster than a trip to town every 6 to 8 weeks. So we periodicly empty these small bins into larger bins on the recycling trailer.

In fact it's clearly time to do that right now.

But first, back to the trailer.

This was a cheap-ass trailer that came with appropriately cheap-ass lights.

Incandecent bulbs with filaments that could only stand just so much banging and vibrating before they broke and needed replacing, and little spring-clip wire connections that are iffy to begin with and even more so since they were open to the weather and connstantly needing cleaning to restore conductivity.

We use the trailer infrequently so I put up with it - until I didn't anymore - - -

And bought a replacement kit.

A sealed, waterproof, LED kit that, if wired properly, will not require me to crawl under the trailer and jiggle wires everytime we hook it up.

Which brings us back to

this weird setup.

Cheap as it is, this trailer has a series of tubular raceways to manage and protect the wiring. But they are all on the bottom side so are damn close to the ground.

Rather than lay on my back and squirm into tight places when running the new wiring and hooking it up (After 20 years of exposure I thought it was prudent to replace the wiring as well as the lights. See, I do have my lucid moments!) I recruited The Wife and we tipped the trailer on end against the barn so I could do the majority of the work standing up.

First step was to climb the ladder and use the old harness, with connector clipped off, to pull the new harness through the tongue-tube

then split into left and right runs out to the side-markers then back down their respective sides to the rear lights. For a 4-way harness that's yellow & brown down the left side, green & brown down the right (assuming the trailer is down on the ground and you're looking at it from the rear.).

It was with great joy that I enthusiasticly removed the old, highly troublesome, markers, threw them, hard so they couldn't come back and haunt me, into the trash and mounted the new marker lights in their place.

While I was at it I ground down to fresh, clean metal to mount the ground wires with ring connectors and self-taping screws, using my trusty GB Ox-guard to ensure good, long-term, non-corroding  electrical connections, before further corrosion proofing with a coat of black Rustolium.

The combination tail/brake/side-marker lights were next, connected up with water-tight shrink-wrap butt-splices.

This trailer is low enough to the ground that those silly plastic license-plate holders that hang under the white light of the left tail-light assembly regularly get snapped off, so the plate is bolted verticly to the back of the left fender.

This does mean that there was no light on the plate. Since we have never pulled this trailer at night we've gotten away with that, but technicly - - -

So while I was at it I went ahead

and mounted a dedicated license-plate light to make us legal again.

None of this took all that long and the trailer was back on its feet before lunch-time.

Now when I hook up and run a light-test (the Ranger has an app for that!) I have a great deal of confidence that I'm not going to have to crawl around under there jiggling wires to get the damn things to work!

(It's the little things that make life easier.)

But now I'm not going to be able to ignore that 20 year old spare (the tires on the ground have been replaced due to age twice now). It holds air but the sidewalls are seriously checked, to the point where I hook up the air-hose and top it up from a distance in case it explodes!