All aluminum hard sided popup toy hauler

[OP827]

You welds are looking much better !

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I've been moving slow with this last addition to the trailer base.
Since the hard shell is going to slide up/down around the outside of the base, all the walls need to be perfectly parallel and vertical.

I built a full trailer width former out of wood to make the top of the curved corners match the bottom of the curved corners.


I came up with a couple bush-league anvils to hammer the aluminum into the exact right shape.




Now that it's welded up, it looks like variances in my walls are less than 1/8" so that should be able to be made up for by using some 3M HST as an adhesive shim before riveting.

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With the wall frames complete, I hooked up the lights temporarily again so I could use the camper to pick up 1" 25psi foam board for the composite floor.
Being able to park in a pair of pull through spots is almost as convenient as I thought it would

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Testing her out at various speeds on the freeway, i discovered that it takes about 450 watt hours per mile to tow at 70mph; this should give me about 160 miles of range between battery charges as it sits.

Consumption should go down as my wheel bearings wear in, but should go up as i add weight.
Im curious what's going to happen once I get the aerodynamic skin on the trailer.

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Starting on the foam and fiberglass composite floor now.

I made a test piece of floor on 1" thick 25psi foam.
It had 2 layers of 18oz fiberglass cloth on 1 side, and 1 layer on the other.
It flexed more than I'd like, so I'm going to double the foam to 2" thick for the actual floor.

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The actual floor is 2 layers of 18 oz. Cloth on each side, over a 2" foam core.

Knowing that the floor will be super rigid after the epoxy hardens, I weighed down the fresh layup with a bunch of bricks (on pieces of wax paper) to make sure it conforms to any irregularities in the frame.




After allowing the epoxy to hardens for a couple of days, I flipped the foam over so I could skin the back side.
No bricks this time, since that would try to flex the floor. Backwards from how it's supposed to be.

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I made the rear floor section the same way as the front.
I made the floor in two 5' x 8' pieces because a single layup at that size took 3 hours, and I'm certain I don't have the stamina to spend 6 hours with no breaks, mixing epoxy and squeegeeing it into the fiberglass to make a single 5' x 16' piece.


Each floor panel ended up weighing 58 pounds.

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Setting those floor sections off to the side for now, I added the little bit of framework to form the wheel wells that I'd forgotten about up to this point.

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Somewhere in-between those previous steps, I added straps to hold my fresh and gray water tanks.
I drilled holes down through the 1.5"x3" floor joists to drop carriage bolts through.
After tightening down the nuts on the bottom, the square stainless steel bolt necks crushed down into the aluminum, guaranteeing they'll never be able to rotate.



The straps are only made of mild steel, but I'm keeping them from tou hing the aluminum with stainless steel washers.
I don't want any dielectric action going on down there.

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Being a bit worried about an 800 pound motorcycle's weight bearing down on two small contact patches on the composite floor (especially on rough roads), I'm planning on using a removable 10' long piece of 8" wide aluminum C channel as a load spreader.
It'll bolt through the floor using a pair of 3/8" stainlessnless bolts, into the trailer frame.

Since i dont trust 1/8" thick aluminum to hold a thread under any type of load, I built a couple of aluminum cages to capture the big 3/8 stainless nuts.

These are welded to a couple floor beams along the centerline of the trailer.






As a bonus, this will remove any possibility of the wheels moving side to side, and i can weld up a front wheel chock to keep the bike from moving forward no matter how hard i brake.

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The floor is in!
Each panel is held down by a few stainless steel bolts threaded right into the frame.

There's a thick bead of silicone on every floor joist to help hold things down as well as to keep things from. Rattling on The freeway or creaking while I'm walking.

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I got the black water tank installed.
All my other tanks use a pair of steel straps to support them, but this guy has a pair of 3" tall rails molded into it, so I'm using some long strips of 1/16" L screwed to the underside of the frame to engage with them.




To drain the tank i cut a rather nasty looking hole through the middle of my 1/4 frame rails.
Since it's only 1' from the back edge of the trailer, I'll trust it to remain strong enough as is (even though I plan on welding a bit of 1/4" plate on the bottom to reinforce anyway).

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I took the (as yet un-named) camper over to the metals supply house and picked up my .040 wall sheeting as well as my 2"x8" C channel to park the motorcycle on.

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Last week I started putting that wall sheeting on the frame.
Steps one through seventyfour were all - clamp it on, stare at it, wiggle it a little up/down/left/right, repeat

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The next step was drilling holes and adding Clecos.
Sooo many clecos.



Then finally the first rivet is sunk


Once the first rivet is in, the next few hundred are easy.