Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Mike and Sheri in New England sent me some photos of the very nice Simple they've built and I thought I would show the simple wooden hatch prop they used.



It's semi-automatic - it engages itself on the way up and to bring the hatch down, lift it and pull on the red rope. The vertical fixed leg on the sidewall was added when they found the hatch prop hit the countertop on the way down.

And it's only second-simplest, since clearly a length of broom handle is simpler.....

Andrew

Pretty slick!

Simple is usually better.

Rob

Very clever...............
Barb

I have a very similar hatch on the back of mine and this would work great on it. I may have to give this a try. Thanks for the info.

Barb wrote:

Very clever...............

I agree!....


Andrew, thanks for sharing all you find, know, and do! Thanks go to Mike and Sheri, too!

Very cool! I'll have to see if I can adapt that to my Gen-Ben...

David

does it lock to keep wind from blowing the hatch up and over? I can't quite figure out how it works from the pic.

Arne has a good point.

I like the set up for ease of use, it shouldn't be hard to install a latch to keep it in place.

Yep, should be a 'simple' matter to have a 'captive pin' such as a quarter inch bolt, go thru a hole drilled in the lower part of the prop & into the 'vertical' leg of the 'V' prop rest. That should hold it except in extreme gusts & I'd expect you'd have the hatch lowered in such cases anyway.

Arne, it appears the 'props' are pinned or hinged where they join the hatch, with a horizontal piece fastened between them. When the hatch is raised the props swing into the 'V' rest on each side. Slight lifting of the hatch & pull on the red rope that is tied to the horizontal piece brings the props back past the rest & then just lower the hatch.

Here's the original idea:



The hatch props are just a pair of 1x2s with a dowel between them. As the hatch is lifted, the props fall into the sockets in the sidewalls - I envisaged those as having ply sides that could take a locking pin.

To lower the hatch, lift it a little and pull the dowel to move the props out of the sockets. My idea was that the dowel would act as a useful storage device too, like for drying dish cloths or the like.

Andrew