Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Was watching a youtube video on fold up caravans and there was an interesting trailer shown about half way through the video.

Did some digging and found out that it was a Chateau Mobile from a Norwegian company made in the 50s-70s.

Pretty simple design. Thought that this was something that might lend itself to a foamie construction for the end walls...

Not the best pics but I think you'll get the idea...















Seems like the walls ought to be adaptable to a sandwich type foam contruction. Would probably need to retain the usage of plywood for the top that flips open to form the base of the beds.

Would foam walls support enough weight to make use of the bunks?

Thoughts?

"Would foam walls support enough weight to make use of the bunks? “ ... Maybe if you installed some braces ... Basically vertical wood strips that support the bunk pipes ...

That is very cool. Never seen anything like it before, and I LIKE it.

GPW wrote:"Would foam walls support enough weight to make use of the bunks? “ ... Maybe if you installed some braces ... Basically vertical wood strips that support the bunk pipes ...

The way they seem to have done it was, if you look at the 3rd through 4th pics, there are recessed brackets in the walls that go all the way through the outter skin. Those are those little square plates that you see on the outside at window height in the 3rd pic.

So, near as I can tell, all that appears to be holding it in the original design are the skins, unless there is a cross member directly below the bracket.

I was thinking that, if you used thicker foam... say at least 1"... maybe 2" with luan skinned on the outside that it would accomplish more or less the same thing?

The canvas support poles are more or less connected the same way, I guess.

Oldragbaggers wrote:That is very cool. Never seen anything like it before, and I LIKE it.

I hadn't either.

Some of the sketchups I came up with previously were based on a simple tent-type design. I happened to log into youtube a few days ago and there were a couple of "folding caravan" suggestions that it had made for me based on some of my previous searches.

There was a 10 minute video from the UK on the subject. One of these was in the video. So, naturally, I had to do some digging.

Not sure how many they made all together. They were apparently all hand made at the time so they could be tweaked a bit to fit individual needs.

My thought was, instead of doing the two individual bunks where the flip outs are, to take where the table sits in the interior pic and put a removable bed base that goes across the trailer as a double bed. Or, one could do a drop down table.

As it sits now, all the beds seem to be singles.

Great for a hunting trailer, though.

I also liked the Propert Folding Caravan from the same time period. Not sure if it could be done as a foamie, though. Although, if the Wild Goose could be...

That's one cool idea! Canvas roof would make it fairly lightweight overall.

The original was pretty light as it was.

The specs I saw said that it weighed somewhere around 260 kg. If my math is correct that's somewhere around 575 pounds. I saw a pic someplace where the trailer frame looked to be similar to the pico frame. So not much weight there, either.

153cm wide, 280cm long. Height 185cm open.

Thats about 5'x9'x6'

Looking at the profile, I'm guessing that's the closed width and the length to the tongue.

Not sure that doing foam would make it any lighter or not. Would probably make it a tad warmer, though.

Would probably end up actually weighing more if you put it on a 5x8 frame.

That said, you could build a 2 person sleeper with this design on a HF 40x48 trailer and have it be 5x8 opened up.

You could possibly still do 2 bunks for the kids if they're not more than 5' tall. Not sure I'd put anybody too heavy in the bunks anyway.

That thing is sweet!