by tem3000 » Wed Nov 27, 2019 7:07 am
Thank you again, everyone, for the suggestions. The pros and cons for width in terms of aerodynamics and terror of driving while not being able to see well enough was eye opening.
Postal_Dave, I'm definitely nowhere near a professional driver of any sort so your story was helpful. I hadn't thought of that aspect. I'm curious, did you ever try one of those rear cameras on top of your truck, or at the end of the boat trailer? If so, did it help at all? If not, do you think it would have?
I'm going gangbusters on planning now. I found that sketchup had just a little too much of a learning curve for me so I started using something called Floorplanner, at floorplanner.com. It's been reeeally helpful, showing where I had less room than I thought in some spaces, and more in others. On the surface, Floorplanner really is just like sketching out a floorplan, but much more detailed. There are a gazillion pieces of furniture, wall fixtures, showers, lighting, all you can think of to add to help you (me) visualize better and realize possibilities and where you were just fantasizing. The coolest thing is that you can specify the height, width, and depth of all walls, interior and exterior, specify all window dimensions including height off the floor, type and angles of the ceiling, etc. You don't have to use these extra details, but if you do, it gives you the ability (theoretically; I haven't tried it yet) to export to a program that can render it 3D like... sketchup. I'm sure you can do all this and more in sketchup, but the mental entry point for Floorplanner was better for me.
I have a funny story that illustrate the plight of the foamie builder. Yesterday, three junk hauler guys came over to finally haul away the enormous pile o' debris resulting from my demo of the original trailer. (I'm almost finished but I had to have the junk removed before it snows here.) Two guys arrive first, and they essentially tell me that I'm nuts, that I should scrap the whole thing, these trailers aren't worth nothin'. Even after I 'splained what I was doing, I just got bewildered and/or knowing-better looks. Once again, all those thoughts and self-doubts crept in like, what the heck am I doing? Everyone tells me this is crazy. It's going to be a giant flop, and everyone will have a good laugh and an "I told you so." How do I think I can do this?
But then, the third guy arrives. He essentially knew what I was doing before I even told him, and he was a giddy as a school girl. He wanted to know all the details. He'd started a tiny house of his own, realized how insanely heavy they are, then built an amazing truck camper he proudly showed me on his phone. He'd never heard of a foamie but when I likened it to SIPs, he got it and was excited. Any time I started to make jokes about how little I knew what I was doing and how nuts everyone thought I was, he laughed, said people said and thought the same thing about him, but don't stop, keep learning from the million mistakes you're going to make, have fun, and gloat when it's successful. It was about the only real, sincere encouragement I've had since starting this project back when I was just by talking about it, and it was a real shot of motivation. And of course it showed how doing something like this is going to be met with head shakes and open challenging a lot of the time. And for me at least, it shows that doing something like this requires a tenacity that's stronger than your confidence in your own skills sometimes.
As always, apologies for the book length post, and thank you all for being so generous.
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Don't believe everything you think.
