Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

by **jandbsteardrop** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 12:01 am

Hi Everyone,

My name is Jack and my wife is Becky. We're starting on our teardrop building journey and we couldn't be more excited! We've actually been researching for quite a few months now and have learned quite a bit from a lot of your builds. Special thanks to Steve Frederick for his TD shop manual, which I have studied quite a bit...but still have a lot of learning to do. I highly recommend this shop manual for any newbies out there.

We decided that we wanted to go with a 5x8 teardrop and wanted to have a solid trailer frame with 3500 lb axle so we ended up having our frame fabricated at a local spot here in Southern California. It took them a few extra weeks to get it done but man is this thing solid! They put 2x4 steel border and 2x2 steel cross members every 16" on center. They even put two stabilizer jacks on the back and a grate on the tongue. I cannot believe the deal we got - $800 all-in, including 5 year trailer registration in CA. Yeah Baby!!

Anyway, the trailer sat in the garage for a while as my job came into our busy season we didn't get a chance to start on this until now. Please enjoy watching our build and please, please, please make comments or suggestions if you have any ideas or thoughts! We are rookies in the TD building world so any and all suggestions are welcome.

Thanks and have a good one!

J & B

by **jandbsteardrop** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 12:13 am

Here is the profile we designed in SketchUp. We basically took the Grumman 2 and modified it to make it a tiny bit smaller to fit our trailer.

by **danlott** » Sun Mar 02, 2014 10:22 pm

Sounds like a very SOLID frame. I also really like your profile. It looks like you are planning on covering the sides of the frame, which I think always looks way better than not covering it.

Dan

by **KCStudly** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 10:37 am

Welcome, and good luck with your build! :thumbsup:

It must be nice that your wife is as enthused as you are.

I'm not afraid to stick my $.02 in, so I do have a couple of questions/comments.

Is the shelf at the back of the cabin a bunk? It looks like it juts into the sleeping area quite a bit. have you done a cardboard mock up to make sure you don't hit your chin or chest on it if you sit bolt up in the middle of the night? You may also want to check and see if you are comfortable making the bed with it like that. How about the "sit and spin test" to locate your side doors? You want the door located so that your arse lands pretty much where it will be when you are laying down (less wriggling and squirming to get comfortable that way). That shelf rail looks like it might be far enough forward to get into the door area.

The profile is nice looking, but I think you are going to have a problem with the long sharp taper at the bottom of your galley hatch. I would thicken this up at the bottom some and end the hatch with a sill/header piece that can support the lower hatch seal better and not be a sharp head knocker hazard. You can put a rabbet on the top of it to receive the plywood skin, and a nice radius on the underside with a bench plane. That way you do not have to worry about curling the plywood skin under.

I realize that you are in the early design stages, so these are somethings you probably hadn't worked out yet, but it is better to get ahead of these things right up front before you start cutting material.

Build on! :thumbsup:

by **jandbsteardrop** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 1:18 pm

Hi thank you for the .02 cents! Yes please any help is greatly appreciated. I think what we will do with the back hatch is make that lower piece a roll pan and have the hatch stop at the floor level. Does that make sense and would that work?

The bunk is a place holder. We really like the sliding bunks that we have seen on the other posts here....the canvas sliding bunks like the VW bunk thread. This way it can move back and forth.

Thank you! Let me know about the back bottom sharp triangle being ok as a roll pan and having the hatch stop flush into that at the floor level.

Thanks.

by **KCStudly** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 1:32 pm

I'm sure others will have their own opinions, but the way I am doing mine the hatch will close and seal against the back edge of the floor. That way the seal will be compressed w/o a dragging motion across it (otherwise it might get scuffed and damaged over time). I will be putting the seal on the underside of the hatch so that it is out of harms way while the hatch is open; no wear and tear from traffic that way.

Myself personally, I would only resort to the complexity of a roll pan on a super acute teardrop shape where the curl in the hatch wouldn't open due to the walls being in the way. That doesn't appear to be an issue with your hinge location.

We're up to $.04 now. :lol:

by **jandbsteardrop** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 1:38 pm

OK, .04 cents....let's make it .06....

Just to be clear...yes, originally we wanted to close the hatch against the frame. Would it make sense to let's say move the bottom of the shape out 1/2 to 1" away from the frame so it's not so pointy? I'm trying to understand what you're talking about exactly...thanks.

by **KCStudly** » Mon Mar 03, 2014 10:02 pm

Maybe I have made too many assumptions. Perhaps some clarifications would help me understand your sketch better.

You show a double line at the floor. Do you plan on making a built up floor or just a single layer plywood floor? I assumed that you were doing a built up floor, so it would be thick enough for your hatch seal to land on the back edge.

I wouldn’t recommend trying to get your hatch to seal between the side walls and the rear of the trailer frame. I think there are too many opportunities for a leak to occur where the seal bridges between these dissimilar surfaces, if that is what you were planning.

The way I read your double profile lines I was assuming that you were planning on cutting your hatch ribs to a very pointy taper at the bottom. I envisioned these tips being fragile and unable to take a screw or staple w/o splintering or splitting. Also, the pointy lower edge of the hatch could be a safety hazard if you should happen to whack your head or an arm on it while opening or closing. From your description it sounds more like you were planning to cut this off even with the floor making the tapered portion more like a fixed rolled pan(?). I guess I just didn’t see a horizontal line there in the sketch (if that is what you are planning).

My comment about hinge location and curled under hatches… well, if you stick around here for a while sooner or later you will see someone propose a profile that curls under so far that the hatch would not be able to open because it wraps so far around the end of the wall that it can’t swing. Every point on the hatch profile has to swing in an arc from the hinge center point w/o going past tangent. Yours looks fine in that regard. A common solution to having the tight curl under and still being able to raise the hatch is using a roll pan and having the hatch cut shorter. But building a roll pan adds some complication, so to me, if it is not needed I would not bother.

I ramble a bit.

I spent some time this evening looking back over aggie79’s (Tom’s) Silver Beatle build thread (again!). You can kind of see how he did the back of his galley floor in this post. He did use ‘P’ seal on the back of the floor, but that is because he has a double seal with another opposing seal mounted on the lower edge of his hatch. He does have a small roll pan, but his profile curls under more than yours so I don’t think you would need a proper pan. Maybe just a vertical face (1x or ply) that spans between the walls and skirts from the top edge of the floor down to the bottom of the trailer frame to act as a sealing surface.

Then just nudge the lower portion of your hatch radius out a little to the rear so that there is just a bit more thickness at the bottom of the taper and it doesn’t come to a severe point.

I’m useless with Paint, and I don’t have any good images loaded of how I’m doing mine, but I can put something together tomorrow to better show what I mean.

Sorry if I’m creating more questions than I am helping.

by **jandbsteardrop** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 12:45 pm

Thanks that makes a lot of sense and thanks for the link to the other build. I'm at work now but will write more later...thanks again!

by **KCStudly** » Tue Mar 04, 2014 4:41 pm

Well I fibbed a little. I did have a model of my hatch loaded up. It just took a long time to find it in my gallery!

My build is a little different because it is a foamie, and a hybrid to boot. Not only that, but my cabin will sit on top of the frame with no skirt or pans because I am going off road and want the steel frame to help protect the cabin. Anyway, I hope this helps explain what I was suggesting a little better. In this image the walls have been "turned off" and don't show. They follow the inner curve of the 5 mm skin and end at the back top corner of the floor (which, in my case, is built up from 5 mm top and bottom on 2x cedar frame).

In my case the hatch ribs are exposed under the inner skin (5 mm), so just ignore those. Your ribs will be where I show the pink foam (which will actually end up being blue in true life).

So with your walls and hatch sill extending down to the bottom of the frame, what I was trying to suggest was capping the back of your floor with a vertical skirt board (between floor and hatch lower sill) to extend the rear edge of your floor down, then adjusting your lower hatch profile a little to thicken it up, make it a little more blunt like mine, if that works for you.

I don't show the hatch seal, but it will go between the hatch lower sill and the rear edge of the floor, whereas yours would go between the hatch lower sill and the skirt board (not shown).

Clear as mud, right?

by **jandbsteardrop** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 12:28 am

Wow it has been a long time...far too long. We actually have worked a little on the TD now. It was good meeting some of you at the Perris gathering. We got some good ideas and met some really nice people.

We went ahead and tweaked the bottom of the hatch out 1.5" so it's not so pointy as suggested, thanks. I'm going to post some pictures of our progress. Let me give you a summary:

We had a trailer frame fabricated out of 2x4 steel with 2x2 cross members and 3500 lb axle with 15" tires. The tongue has a grate on it and we also got two stabilizer jacks in the back. All for a steal of a price - $700 plus another $100 for CA registration. We were so stoked! That's until a few weeks/month later we realized that they built our trailer at 61" wide instead of the ordered 60" wide. We couldn't believe it. But, we figured that a 70 mile drive taking the trailer back on LA highways was just too much and that we could deal with the extra 1" width.

So far, the only real issue has been trying to figure out how we can get Aluminum that is 62" wide and 10 feet long for the roof. Hopefully we can get something as we don't want to have seams on the roof. Does anyone have any clues here? You may have seen my other post about this specific question. Anyway, please let us know if we're doing something wrong/right so we can modify things or keep an even keel.

So far, we've got the floor on (sandwich), cut out the side walls and ordered some accessories. We also want to thank Steve Frederick for the shop manual....a HUGE help!

Thanks for all your support. This is a great forum and we've really investigated a lot in here before moving forward.

Enjoy our build.

Jack & Rebecca

by **jandbsteardrop** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:34 am

: floor.JPG (114.06 KiB) Viewed 2435 times

Here is the first shot of the floor being put together. We did a sandwich method with 3/8" plywood on the bottom, 1x4" frame and 1/2" plywood on top. The floor was insulated, glued and screwed with liquid nails and deck screws.

by **jandbsteardrop** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:35 am

more floor pics....insulating the floor and asphalt emulsion.

by **jandbsteardrop** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 1:39 am

the floor is done! We used 8 stainless steel carriage bolts and a bunch of self tapping screws.

by **jandbsteardrop** » Thu Jul 24, 2014 9:49 am

Next, we started to work on the sides. We decided early on to mortise the bottom of the side wall and have it cover the frame....as Dave McCan did in his amazing build....which we're trying to "roughly" follow. The help with Steve's shop manual is a huge help as well. Here we are testing out a scrap piece of wood and the new router. We plan on gluing and screwing to the floor with long deck screws (3"?) and using liquid nails. I haven't figured out what to glue the lower 1/4" plywood to the metal frame yet. Any thoughts? We're going to also drill some self tapping screws into this part as well.