All aluminum hard sided popup toy hauler

[OP827]

That is good to know, thanks for sharing and happy building!

[coal_burner]

A couple additions
Mud flaps made from cheap .125" rubber sheet from Amazon, and held on by a zillion stainless steel screws.


And a wheeled tongue jack

[coal_burner]

Next up is the trailer lights and wiring.
Since I've had to troubleshoot and/or replace so much trailer wiring in the past, I went all out and bought a high end junction box and PVC coated wire to go along with it.


The lights are all mounted on temporary aluminum brackets that will be removed when I get walls on the camper.


Wow, the round plug that has wires for trailer brakes is HUGE (and much sturdier) compared to the common 4 pin flat plug all my other trailers had.

After I got it looking street legal, I hooked it up and towed it to the nearest scrap yard to get an official weight slip for it.



With the weight slip and a bunch of receipts in hand, I went to the Secretary Of State, paid my taxes, and received my license plate.

Now I have a trailer that's capable of picking up all of the 24 ft long aluminum stock I'll need to build the rest of the trailer.

Having the first batch of aluminum delivered cost me $75, and I had to take the day off of work to make sure I'd be home to help unload when the delivery guy got there.

[coal_burner]

Well, I ran out of parts at the same time my car went to the shop, so there was a month long pause in work.
(It's not cheap to hit a concrete block)

Now that I have the car back, the trailer has been on a freeway road trip to pick up more material.

Those are 24ft sticks of square tube and angle.

(And a pair of boxer shorts flagging the overhang)

[coal_burner]

Time to build some walls!

I started by cutting all of my verticals, and getting them to match down to less than 1/32".


I welded them all to the top rails laying flat, using my floor beams as alignment jigs.
(Worked like a charm).

Here's the first wall section temporarily clamped in position:

[Grummy]

Nice looking project. I'm curious what your frame weight was ? And, I'll be real interested in what your final weight ends up to be. Most factory built full aluminum single axle 6x12's run up to 1300 or so lbs.

[coal_burner]

So far it's up to only 320 pounds.

Almost 200 pounds of that is just the big honking steel axle and the wheels, even though they're super light weight aluminum rims.

[Wolfgang92025]

Nice looking build.
I'll keep watching your progress.

[coal_burner]

Digressing for a moment here.
The hitch height on the Tesla is low, which is good because I'm trying to keep my overall height down, but it ends up being lower than the top of my frame rails resting directly on the axle.


Apparently I tightened that ball more than I remembered, so the torch came out to assist.


The new ball has a 2 inch taller shank, which gives me an almost perfectly level trailer deck when hitched.
It did, however, rust most of its chrome off within the first couple weeks of being installed.

[coal_burner]

Here we are, one and one half walls welded in place (the right wall is only completed up to the doorway)


My welds have become much more consistent. I welded a couple wall studs slightly off vertical, so I grabbed them with a pipe wrench to straighten.
I figured I'd probably snap the welds, but instead I managed to actually bent the 1.5" square steel tube.
Since any wave in my wall frame will probably look exaggerated when I cover everything with smooth aluminum sheet, I decided to cut the welds, straighten, then re-weld.

Since this is a pop-up, and the walls are not held firmly by being connected to the roof, that means there's a three foot long lever arm acting on the weld connection between the wall and floor.
Just because I'm a belt and suspenders guy, and I want this thing to last forever, I'm putting gussets between every wall stud and floor beam.

The gussets are made with some of the extra stock from. My floor joists.

[featherliteCT1]

I like it a lot!!!!

[pchast]

Looks good!

[coal_burner]

Lots of gussets welding going on.


I've been slowly learning all the ways one can screw up aluminum tig welding, and correcting.

I invested in a diamond sharpening wheel for the tungsten electrodes instead of a dedicated stone wheel, and the Weld penetration got better.

I invested in much larger gas cups and gas "lens" for the torch tip, and the Welds became much cleaner.

I bought an argon tank four times the size of my original, since since I'm now using twice as much argon because of the gas lens.

And finally, I'm building a tent around every single Weld I'm making, since even the slightest breeze blows my gas blanket off the work area, ruins the Weld, and costs me 15 minutes re-sharpening my electrode and grinding the contamination out of the Weld.

[coal_burner]

My new problem is that the gussets are tilting my walls.

If I brace my wall studs perfectly vertical, then Weld a gusset in place, the entire gussets goes up by a few hundred degrees and expands.
Since the wall is being held vertical, the molten edges of the gussets are squishing shorter as I Weld, and when things cool down, they pull the tops of my walls inward by somewhere between a half inch and a full inch.

The hard part is that the exact change in length of the gussets are determined by the temperature the gusset got up to during that SPECIFIC Weld.

I've been welding gussets, checking how out of plum my wall stud got, using a cutting disk to cut straight through the center of the Weld, then hammering a wedge into the gap to push the wall slightly out of vertical in the opposite direction, then bridge welding the gap, pulling the wedge, and seeing how close to vertical I've got.
(Wow, that's a run-on sentence)

Some of my Welds now look super wide because they're actually 3 Welds done one atop the other.



This seemingly simple part of the project is taking WAAAYYY too much time!

[coal_burner]

Since the gussets are so tedious, I'll do a couple of them, then work on a different part of the project.

The quarter rounds on the front walls of the trailer are slowly happening.

Here's where I cut a bunch of slices out of 1 side of my 1.5" square tube, bent it to match the exact curve of its complimentary former, and bridge welded over the gaps I cut.


I still need to grind away my previous welds on the lower curve formers and Weld them again using my much improved skill set.



Note the lack of scorch marks and burn through in all the newer welds.