Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

I'm planning on a large slideout for my canned ham.

I've seen some people do them without any kind of track if they're smaller ones. I know very large RV's are commonly using Lippert rack & pinion style slideouts.

My current thought is basically something like:


Clearly I'd have to leave a 2" space for the walls to slide through the floor so I'd be needing to put some backing on the floor to provide strength when people are walking over it. I'm thinking what I'll do is have the slideout go significantly under the floor so when it slides out the slideout itself provides some of the stability the floor would be lacking without it.

Unfortunately, that kind of building takes extra weight that I'd honestly rather save if possible. Does anyone have suggestions for how to do a slideout like this and save weight while realizing that you'll have at least one 300 lbs guy walking on it so using thin plywood is definitely not an option. Maybe an aluminum grid put across the floor underneath plywood wouldn't require the support? (it seems to work out to about 90 lbs in weight for the extra bit of floor to provide strength)

Thanks!

Maybe I shouldn't comment here since I never done slideouts, but I am confused by your drawing. Usually slideouts floor is located above main trailer floor to have a rigid box to move out of another rigid box. Is that the case here? I am not sure how you can have a pocket in the floor like that and have a slideout box as one piece moving out of the trailer body...

Home-built RVs usually slide-out over the floor it seems but commercial units are "flush" mount which is a way of saying "under the floor". Over the floor is easier but you lose a lot of usable space inside unless you move things out of the way before closing the slide.

I think 600 lbs drawer slides and a linear actuator could be far lighter weight while doing this than something like the Lippert Power Gear unit which uses one steel H frame rack & pinion unit bolted to the wall on either side. The Linear actuator seems to be about 10 lbs and drawer slides aren't that heavy either whereas large steel frames about 7' tall and 4' wide are quite heavy even before you add in the weight of the rack & pinion and motor.

The other thing the linear actuator method would do is to give you easy availability to pulling the pins and doing manual slide-in or out if it broke. I know there's a way to do it on the Lipperts as well but I've watched videos of it and it seems like a PITA.

A drawing of both trailer and slideout box with walls and floors shown would help me understand your idea. Currently I am having difficulty understanding how the slideout walls are attached to its floor by this design.

Closed:

Opened:

Side view:

Hopefully that helps to make it more clear.

I'm not sure how the larger RV's do it with their flush floors yet but they have a way of constructing the floor to not need a thicker reinforcement. If you only use plywood on the portion of floor that doesn't slide it has to be very thick when the floor underneath it slides out or you'd get deflection if anything that weighed a lot was put on it.

I simply haven't figured out how to build a thin & strong floor yet.

Thanks for pictures, I see what you mean now. I agree with you that there are some challenges with this large size design from structural and cost point of view. Commercial slideouts that I saw on youtube are build as "a box in a box" design, with the slideout box ramp dropping at the end of expanded position to make the slideout floor to get flush with the main body floor. the slideout floor then has small roller on the edge of its floor to allow sliding on the main body floor. The slideout rails are usually hidden under the floor and there are no cuts or openings in the main body floor and the rails are only affixed to the slideout exterior face wall. I would consider the sliders being only attached to the slideout's exterior face wall as a horizontal hinge connection. Sliders could be positioned either under the trailer frame (for a low profile trailer frame) of built in the frame structure like in this video.
That is my personal and high level view on this idea and there are many details to consider as this is a serious design task, especially from structural and weather protection point of view. Adding a rack and pinion gear like in the above mentioned video or a cable and pulleys system may be needed to address jamming. Looking at your floor plan, instead of one big slideout, did you consider two slideouts, one for each bed to improve main trailer body structurally? This looks like a big opening on a side. I do not think I saw such a wide slideout (two beds length) on commercially built trailers yet.

It looks like you are planning quite a big size trailer build, comparing to other builds completed on this forum. I am subscribed to your challenging build, thanks for sharing . One thing I learned from my build: it took more time than I thought it would take. I think it is because I had a little idea about what I was doing and what it really takes to accomplish. I am more careful now about the size of a project I consider building and will make good and detailed plans before I commit to next build and materials purchase.

Hope it helps and good luck with your build design!

Oleg

If you want to build lighter, there is another way to make the trailer space expandable like this guy did, which would better fit a foam sandwich panel idea than a commercial type of slide outs.

I've seen the video of the guy testing his slide-out. Where his floor goes is a little uncertain though. Are you saying his floor would slide *over* the other floor? Would the box of the slideout somehow allow movement then so the whole thing goes up on it?

I could see where you could use some angled trim to make the slideout go back over the floor but most of the ones i've seen seem to have a small drop and a transition. Heck, most of them one's i've seen seem to use sheets of 3/4" plywood and minimal or zero floor joists.

I think what I'm going to do is build a couple of samples of floor.. like 2x3' samples so that I can test weight and strength. I want a floor that's light and that I can jump on and not have it break and I'm really not sure right now how strong a foam sandwich floor is vs 3/4" plywood let along the weight difference because both would have to have some kind of supports.

I like your idea about using 2 separate sliders. I think if I extended the size by about 6" I could do that. I just have to have enough room between them for putting on the seals.

I'm hoping that with correct reinforcement and centered pushing there wont be any problem with binding. Thats part of the reason I've been planning to use at least 4 tracks instead of only 2 and I'm currently thinking that a good idea is 1 track for every 24".

Thanks for the ideas on the track systems.

With regards to good detailed plans, I tend to do that too, even going as far as calculating weight to include screws and trim. I've had to get better with cad and floor planning software lately so I can communicate with my wife how things will work. As an example, I figured out that we can create a ceiling hung bed instead of it being a wall bed to allow access to building storage and I very much had to show how things would fit together and why it was needed before she understood.

OP827 wrote:Thanks for pictures, I see what you mean now. I agree with you that there are some challenges with this large size design from structural and cost point of view. Commercial slideouts that I saw on youtube are build as "a box in a box" design, with the slideout box ramp dropping at the end of expanded position to make the slideout floor to get flush with the main body floor. the slideout floor then has small roller on the edge of its floor to allow sliding on the main body floor. The slideout rails are usually hidden under the floor and there are no cuts or openings in the main body floor and the rails are only affixed to the slideout exterior face wall. I would consider the sliders being only attached to the slideout's exterior face wall as a horizontal hinge connection. Sliders could be positioned either under the trailer frame (for a low profile trailer frame) of built in the frame structure like in this video.
That is my personal and high level view on this idea and there are many details to consider as this is a serious design task, especially from structural and weather protection point of view. Adding a rack and pinion gear like in the above mentioned video or a cable and pulleys system may be needed to address jamming. Looking at your floor plan, instead of one big slideout, did you consider two slideouts, one for each bed to improve main trailer body structurally? This looks like a big opening on a side. I do not think I saw such a wide slideout (two beds length) on commercially built trailers yet.

It looks like you are planning quite a big size trailer build, comparing to other builds completed on this forum. I am subscribed to your challenging build, thanks for sharing . One thing I learned from my build: it took more time than I thought it would take. I think it is because I had a little idea about what I was doing and what it really takes to accomplish. I am more careful now about the size of a project I consider building and will make good and detailed plans before I commit to next build and materials purchase.

Hope it helps and good luck with your build design!

Oleg

OP827 wrote:Looking at your floor plan, instead of one big slideout, did you consider two slideouts, one for each bed to improve main trailer body structurally? This looks like a big opening on a side. I do not think I saw such a wide slideout (two beds length) on commercially built trailers yet.

I agree. That is an enormous chunk to take out of a sidewall. However... now that I see those words in front of me I am reminded of a few designs I have seen of tiny commercial campers that literally have no sides but rather full size slides on both sides that essentially triple the available floor space. I'm not sure how you might pull that off structurally with a cabin your size, even with foam sandwich construction.

So, back to what Oleg suggested... if you had two slides of 6' each in a 14' sidewall that would still leave you two feet of wall to have some bit of structure in the center of all that real estate!

I was trying to convince my wife that it might be easier to do these extensions as fold-outs instead of slide-outs but she seems unwilling to buy into these as fold-outs. She really just doesn't want to have to move the bunkbeds around prior to it folding up.

So I'm back to it being 2 6' 6" slideouts. Maybe if I can mock up in some foam what the fold-outs would do then she'd buy into it. It would certainly be easier and lighter than the slideouts.

I came across V-Track today which is normally used for creating sliding gates. The wheels for it often have weight ratings of 800-3000 lbs and it looks like the track might be able to handle that much as well. Interestingly, some comes in aluminum.

I'm thinking that I might use the v-track as it should allow for a lower profile floor and it would also be quite inexpensive.

currently thinking about a pulley system like this for keeping the sides straight:



let me know if I'm missing something...

Been thinking about this more and I'm seriously thinking about using gate opener rack and pinions. Theyre readily available and meant to handle up to some 800kg.

One metal rod between two gate opener pinions and some 3d printed washers for holding them in the right place and i should have a really easy way to keep them in sync. Then i could easily use a modified gate opener for opening and closing. (Mostly just need the motor and gearing and not the automatic closing)

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