As the days grow shorter in Anchorage, Paul’s getting busy with his trailer. Thanks to Paul for taking the time to document another beautiful build!

“With fall in the air and winter coming fast the first week of September is when I began working on the rebuild of the M100 trailer after I hauled the frame home from the sand blasters. There were a couple of cracks in the frame where the shock mounts attach and a few other areas I felt also needed some attention from the welder so I positioned the frame on a 2X6 and plywood platform and screwed blocks down to hold the frame in alignment. My plan was to fabricate the replacement box on the clean frame and after the box was bonded and riveted together the box would be removed so the frame could return to the powder coat place for a coating off satin black.

I felt the original trailer box floor was a little weak so I planned to add extra hat channels for strength and I needed to design and fabricating the tail light, brake light and turn signals mounts.

Below is the new 18 gauge stainless steel floor being fitted to the original trailer frame.  I’d hoped to have a local company press the reinforcing strips in this floor panel (like the original) but soon learned I couldn’t afford the cost to make the die and pay for the press time just for one floor panel.  I ended up buying 60 feet of 1 inch wide by 1/4 inch thick stainless steel strap for the trailer floor and 24 feet of 3/4 inch wide by 1/4 inch thick stainless strap for the side and end panel reinforcements.  The strap was rectangular but I needed the floor strips beveled and the side strips rounded along the edges so I had to get creative and come up with a cheap solution to recontour these straps.

I used scrap pieces of plywood stapled to the platform along with additional plywood clamps screwed to the wood to hold the strap in position while worked on the strap edge.  By carefully holding a 4 inch grinder at the necessary angle as I rolled from one end of the strap to the other while sitting on a roll around seat I was able to reshape each strap to the contour I needed.  The floor of my garage has a good sized crack down the middle so I had to pay attention and not damage the stainless strap while bouncing across the uneven floor surface.  With my face mask on, my ear protection clamped to my head and nothing much else to do I spent 47 hours grinding theses straps so they would be a reasonable duplicate of the original ridges pressed into the trailer panels.

Here’s the end result of rolling back and forth while holding the grinder against the stainless strap. It’s far from perfect but it’s something I can live with.

After I’d finished with the sides of the straps I needed to bevel the ends in a 180 degree curve.

I miscounted and beveled 10 straps for the floor when I really only needed 9 straps.  Oh well, what’s an extra three hours or so of grinding. Continue reading →