Hello From Western NY

[woodi]

Well in the excitement of working on my teardrop design I started posting elsewhere around the forum prior to properly introducing myself over here. I apologize.

My wife and I are currently in the early stages of designing and building our first teardrop. We are in our mid 20's and are planning to take a year off of our current engineering jobs to travel the country mountain biking, hiking, skiing, rock climbing, sightseeing, etc all the while living in our teardrop. One of our biggest criteria and challenges we have for our trailer is the ability to store our mountain bikes out of sight and out of the weather inside the trailer. I've started a thread over in the member designs forum discussing our design with some pictures and ideas (http://tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=55299).

And here's an image of the latest design...


I've begun amassing lots of parts for our build with brown santa showing up at the house almost every day this week. Our hf trailer is almost completely assembled on the barn floor with plenty of modifications to suit my trailer design. Another night or two this week and I think it'll be ready to roll. Then it'll be time for the big lumber shopping trip and things will really begin. We are planning on leaving our jobs mid July so the plan is to have our camper ready to hit the road by then.

This is a great site and great community and has been a wonderful resource so far in the designing and planning of our Teardrop. The threads on here took my idea of building a tear from just a wild idea to a reality in short order. Thanks so much for all the help thus far and I look forward to contributing to this community and getting to know you all better.

[mezmo]

Hi Woodi and Wife,

Welcome to the forum ! That's an interesting design you've got going there.
For your stated purposes It looks like it will fit you needs splendidly. I think
that the closed locked storage area is a good idea, especially when you will
find yourselves in a multitude of travel and parking situations over time on
your planned sabbatical trip.

One thing else to consider for the new TD is how you will go about locking it
up. Since you are going for the closed storage, a good locking system for that
is the final piece for that plan.

Here is a link to a thread I did about a keyless mechanical deadbolt lock that I came
across last year which solved my problem of securely locking up a vintage
Avion we are refurbishing to use as a 'summerplace' up in NYS for the summers.
http://tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=52187
The details are in the thread. What I like most about it was the ease of installation,
and since it is surface mounted - both externally and internally, there was no need
to mortise the door frame for it. It bears against the full door frame and wall
thickness - you can't get much stronger than that.

BTW, I'm originally from Olean, and that area is where we'll be using the Avion.

Cheers,
Norm/mezmo

[woodi]

Thanks for the welcome Mezmo. That is a very interesting setup you've got there for dead bolting the door. I like it. For us having a secure place to lockup our bikes was a huge motivation in going with building a teardrop for our travels.

My current plan for locks was to buy two sets of residential door locks with keyed knobs and deadbolts with matching keys. Then installing the keyed entry knobs on the sleeping cabin doors and the keyed deadbolts from the set on the bike garage doors. Adding an extra layer of plywood (or possibly sheet metal) to one side or both to get the thickness right if necessary. That would allow us to lock everything up well enough for my tastes I believe and do so fairly frugally. The costs of building a tear can quickly spiral out of control it would seem so I'm trying to save coin wherever I can.