Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

You could do it like this too...



Mike...

We hope it's normal to design the teardrops that would fit on utility trailers as you follow them down the road. We just returned from a long road trip and decided we could live permanently in the trailer we'd build on a semi-flat bed. The mileage for the tractor was the only thing that put us off.....

Lois and Roger

denverd0n wrote:I'm trying to figure out the lifting mechanism, though. Have you thought it out?

Sorry, been away, hence no answer before.

My plan was very similar to Sumner's (somebody please post a link to his site, as I'm away from home) with a boat trailer winch pulling on wire ropes. Each wire rope goes from the winch, around fixed pulleys until it gets to a fixed pulley on the top of the lower wall, from where it pulls up the bottom of the upper wall. The only mod from Sumner's was to use four lift wires on the four corners - using an entirely wood structure, I am concerned about torsion of the lifting top, so four wires largely prevents that. Sumner's structure is steel tube so it's got a lot more torsional stiffness and so it's fine to lift it from three points.

When I get home at the end of this week, I can do some diagrams if required - anyone who thinks they'd be useful, post a reply.

Andrew

How about like this?
We used to have an old folding caravan that used this idea.
You raise each end of the roof which takes up the end walls with it - they are hinged at the trailer base & attached to the top on rollers.
Then the sides can be lifted up - yup, hinged along the trailer sides & secured to the roof with simple latches.
Have a look here to see how its done.
The roof is made oversize - the overhang allowing rainwater to run off.

Swizz...[/url]

Look at the bottom of the page of my website. Something pretty much the same.

Andrew,

I'd love to see the diagrams!

Zack wrote:I'd love to see the diagrams!

So here they are. This is the overall layout with the lifting gear in blue:



A boat trailer winch mounted above the tongue pulls on a single wire. Under the body this is split into four wires with adjusters. The wires are routed via pulleys to the four corners, where they pass over more pulleys to go upwards. On the top of the fixed sidewalls are more pulleys (total 13!) that turn the wire down to attach to the bottom of the lifting sidewalls.

The first turning pulleys need to be well back from the front of the body to leave space for the wires to be joined together and for the joints to move without hitting a pulley:



The top drawing shows the wire joints/adjusters with the lifting top up and the bottom drawing shows them when the top is down.

The detail of the wire joints and adjusters is shown below:



From right to left:
- A triangular plate is used to split the single lift wire into two.
- Two more triangular plates spilt these two wires into four.
- Each individual lift wire has a turnbuckle to adjust its length.

All these drawings are in my personal gallery.

Andrew

Reminds me of when I was a kid and my first car, a 37 Ford which had mechanical brakes. I was constantly adjusting them.

Tumble weed Houses offers this

http://www.tumbleweedhouses.com/houses.htm#67vardo

DEE

Hi Folks,

I've been away from the forum for a while, but I thought I'd drop in and say hi. If anyone is interested, I did somehow end up making a new vardo. (Still not a teardrop) You can check it out at the old URL.

http://www.enslin.com/rae/gypsy/wagon.htm

We had discussed our rather unsophisticated method for lifting the top of our old wagon. I think that's the main reason my husband and I decided to do another one. The pulley system that the trailer builder developed appears to be similar to one that I've seen shown on this forum. Unfortunately, I don't know all the inner workings of it, but I'd say it's the same principle. So now it's a one person lift.

Please excuse the unfinished nature of things. I'm climbing the walls waiting for spring so I can go out and get painting. The website will be updated pretty regularly this spring and summer, so please feel free to drop by and visit.

Looks pretty kewl Rae,

Too bad you don't have any more pictures of the boat winch, and all the pullies.

Mike...

Too bad you don't have any more pictures of the boat winch, and all the pullies.

Well, I can try to get some when the weather warms up. But the mechanism appears to be pretty much exactly like the diagrams posted above by Angib. The only issue we ran into is that the system worked great when it was a metal frame, not as well when it was covered with wood. (To be fair to the trailer builder, his wife died very unexpectedly while he was in the middle of building it, and he somehow STILL managed to finish. This little detail escaping his notice was absolutely understandable.)

We've added a few extra pulleys which seem to be taking care of the extra weight nicely.

The thought of 13 pulleys having to work perfectly after bouncing down the freeway for a couple of hours, or I don't get to sleep in my camper tonight, terrifies me.

I'm considering using the following mechanism on my popup

this is a side view showing my winch motor mounted in the canopy, pulling lift rods from an almost horizontal position, to an almost vertical position.
there would be one pair of aluminum lift rods on each side of the trailer.
the winch drum would span the entire width of the canopy, so a single winch could pull all four steel wires equally, without using any pulleys.

In another beer and epoxy fume haze, I went to sleep and dreamed of lift mechanisms. Only in the land of Nod would I have thought of looking at the entire lift mechanism concept upside-down.
If you were to use gas springs (or springs sealed in tubes)in each corner of the trailer to hold the ceiling in the up position, the question would be "how do I lower this?".
A hook installed in the middle of the ceiling could be winched down to A matching hook in the floor for travel. Once you are on site, you loosen the winch and let the gas springs raise the roof for you. After everything is raised, you toss the winch in A cabinet somewhere, and use the ceiling hook for something useful like A chandelier.
Did vardo's ever have chandeliers? Maybe just A gypsy lantern.

I belive that is the coleman lift system. Here is a link http://www.customcylindersintinc.com/camper_trailer_roof_lift_system.htm

I'm currently in the planning stages of a similar hard side pop-up.
I might use an electric winch if its in my price range.