Teardrops n Tiny Travel Trailers

Not sure how rough of a road you are planning to drive, but it is good practice for true off road trailers to keep the wheel distance the same as the tow vehicles. Makes it a lot easier to navigate through the rough stuff.

George,

The Colorado track is about 6'4" and the Woodie is about 6' 8". If the math is correct, the foamie track will be almost 7'.
If I decide that it needs to go narrower, stock trailer wheels vs the Colorado wheels & wheel adapter would give me back 4 or 5 inches.

Wolfgang92025 wrote:George,

The Colorado track is about 6'4" and the Woodie is about 6' 8". If the math is correct, the foamie track will be almost 7'.
If I decide that it needs to go narrower, stock trailer wheels vs the Colorado wheels & wheel adapter would give me back 4 or 5 inches.

I'll be following this too! You had a fantastic first build. I look forward to your foamie construction.

So, While I was trying to work out some detail about the plan/design, I used some insulation to play around with to see what could be done.

Couple of different shapes
Surprised how tight a radius you could make and how strong it was just covered with thin paper stock




Next I glued some bed sheet material on foam. Half of it was over Primer, half over raw foam. Results were about equal.



Did the same with gluing down a piece of 1/8 in ply. Turned out to be pretty difficult to remove



Last test piece was 1/8" ply yo foam with Great Stuff foam. Man,that really works well.



Once the design was close,I figured out that I would need about 14 sheets of insulation for my build.
The big place in Utah for want/sale adds is KSL. On occasion I would see adds for 2" foam.
Found a guy that was selling 4*8 sheets for $20. Bough all he had(10 sheets).

Good price on the foam. About $10.00 more economical than local retail here.

More foamie fun

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WVKttqb6HQ Bending without kerfing …. Stronger yet …

Right around the time I got the foam, the temperatures in the garage started get warn enough to start construction.

Started with what I call the Nose Cone. Its all held together with an 1.25 x 0.1" spline, titebond II and a strip of an old bed sheet.
It took a couple of tries before I was able to get it all to fit the way I wanted and get the correct spacing.

Two pieces coming together.



Now 4......



Then 6



Some left over scrap panels with the spline



Closeup of the joint

What a great nose !!!

Hope to see this one sitting still

Its all held together with an 1.25 x 0.1" spline...

Wolf:

How'd you cut the slot for the spline?



Tony

If you don't want to use a wood spline you can take 1" XPS and cut it into strips. Cut a 1" spline channel and you have a tight joint and still using foam. Just some thoughts.

tony.latham wrote:

Its all held together with an 1.25 x 0.1" spline...

Wolf:

How'd you cut the slot for the spline?



Tony

Tony,

I have an older (35+ years) 10" Craftman table saw. The blade I'm using makes a 0.100" cut and the spline material is a cheap 3 ply plywood that happens to be ~ 0.105" thick. My garage floor to ceiling clearance is almost 12'. This allows me to stand a 2" piece of foam on end on top of the table saw to make the spline cut.

The fence is made out of some cheaper 12 mm Baltic birch and built in a box frame style with two 1/4" all-thread rods that I used a jack screws to take the bow out of the plywood frame.

Pictures of the fence







For the nose cone I made a 15 deg cut deeper than needed on the long edges first for the splines to sit in. Then I cut the pieces to the proper width while the table saw was still at 15 deg. I would glue the spline into one side of the panel with Titebond II first and after a few hours glue two panels together with Titebond. I used a temporary support structure to hold it all together until the glue was dry.

Next was starting on the floor.
The floor is three pieces joint together with splines using Gorilla glue. Before gluing the floor together, I cut a 2" x 1/2" rabbit joint around the perimeter to help fit the large panels that will form the body.
Once the floor was one big piece, I cleaned up the joints and did a rough sanding. Wiped down the floor with alcohol and painted it with Valspar Primer.
A few weeks earlier I had send away for some canvas samples. Settled on 10 oz 72" cotton fabric from http://WWW.Marsidian.com. If you only order say 5 yards from Marsidian, the shipping will be a deal breaker.
But, since I will need 20+ yards, a 25 yard x 72" roll was $102.10 delivered to my door in about a week. By my math that's just over $4 per yard.
Comes in a nice big roll, wrapped up nice and tight. No seams or wrinkles, just roll out what you need and cut to size.

Sorry, but I did not take pictures before the canvas was put on.





Sides are next............