mikeschn wrote:It's time to work on an optimized tiny travel trailer that pops up, again.
I'm not sure I ought to do that - not having finished all the plans for the Compact, I shouldn't be supporting the competition.....
Various thoughts:
- Modesty should forbid me to mention it, but I still like the all-tilting roof I did for that competition. It is easier to get a seal (important in an ET?) in the up and down positions, and it is not so sensitive to building tolerances as most other pop-up designs. It's similar to the Vardo, except hinging at one end makes it much easier to arrange lifting. It can work with a front galley and front side door, as in this Belgian WaWa trailer:
Here's a nice photo of the lifting and opening roof of the WaWa from this page:
- If an A/C is mounted in the lifting roof, does anyone know if it will suffer by being tilted over (while switched off) during towing? I presume it would suffer if run in a tilted position.
- It seems to me that minimising the overall height demands a custom frame designed for that purpose. The small (tiny?) fiberglass trailers like Bolers and Scamps show one way to do this with the main rails passing either side of the dropped floor:
Note how the 3"x1.5"x11ga main rail on the street side is turned on its side to go under the door threshold, so it's only 1.5" deep there! Actually I don't think the step-over like Mike's ET is any problem on a home-built trailer.
I had several more thoughts on this subject when thinking about it before, but they seem to have evaporated now!
Andrew
