The Leaf Spring Begins...

A few weeks ago I caught wind of a trailer deal.  Sterling lives next to the Hoh Hum Ranch right off of 101 on the Coast of the Olympic Peninsula.  He mentioned that his neighbor has a bunch of rotting travel trailers. I have been interested in building a small house on a trailer frame for sometime, so I jumped at the opportunity and drove up to the Hoh and moved the trailer to Sterling's rental property.

I got this 21' Terry Taurus travel trailer for free! (this is a picture I found on a google image search, the real trailer was in very bad shape)  It was almost entirely covered in black mold on the inside and it was damp.  Sterling and I got some beer and other implements of destruction and separated out the aluminum, steel, and copper scrap.  We dumped the damp wood and debris into a small dumpster he had rented.  We made a pile of trash on tarps and he re-filled the dumpster each week with all the remains of the trailer.  In just 2 days we had it stripped to a frame.

I pulled it out to my shop this weekend and got to fabbing.

Fortunately there was a huge memorial day flea market in Packwood, WA this weekend so some friends and I drove down and I got this high rise jack to maneuver the trailer by myself.  This tool was the purpose for the trip to packwood and we came out victorious.  I scored this beauty for 30 bucks.

I decided to make the front of the house more aerodynamic, so I used an angle grinder to cut off the corners of the trailer.  Then I got some 2x3" steel tubing with 1/8" wall thickness and built out the trailer to the width and shape I was looking for.

There were 2 pieces of heavy channel running parallel between the wheels.  I used the metal tubing to build off of the channel, to expand the width of the trailer.

Here is a picture of the back.

I had to use a truck to move the trailer for each weld because the cord for the welder was not long enough to reach further than a few feet in front of the door to the shop.

It was pissing rain for the entire weekend so I had to rig up shanty town tarps in different arrangements each time I needed to weld while it was raining.  When the sun emerged I would move the tarp.  You can see Py was wet and miserable in this tarp town.

Here she is.  The foundation of the leaf spring is complete!  From the ashes of white trash, my domestic vessel emerges.  So far I've spent about $400 on metal and gas to lug her around.