Need advice on starting my first trailer!!

[Oster]

Hello everyone! My husband & I (but mostly me) are really getting excited about building our first teardrop! I am recently out of college, and he will be finishing his degree in May. Our original plan was to start building as soon as he is done with school in May, take a couple of weeks to build, and then spend next summer traveling around the west. We've been saving up for this for a while now, so the plan is that when he's done with school I will quit my job and we can work a lot on the trailer. However, I'm starting to wonder if this is unrealistic! My dad will be helping us with the build, but he will be working as well, and i'm not sure how much we will be able to do without him. So my question is, how long does building a basic 5x8 trailer take? When I say basic, I mean we're probably not going to have much cabinetry, and we don't really want a detailed galley. Is 3-4 weeks, 3-5 hours a day, realistic, or do we need to rethink our plans?

[CarlLaFong]

A lot depends upon your skill level(s), your work environment, your tool kit and your expectations. Are you going to follow a set of plans or wing it? Do you have your ducks in a row as far as sourcing materials? Do you have a chassis ready to go?
I believe your time line is reasonable as long as you have the skills, the room and the stuff.
My motto is, "What could possibly go wrong?"

[KenC]

Welcome to the site and have fun!


+1 with what Carl said.

I believe your time line is reasonable as long as you have the skills, the room and the stuff.

[Kharn]

A cargo trailer conversion could be campable in a few hours, a weekender would take longer (maybe a week of solid working days) but since it is all cut sheets it is easier to pre-make more parts than a regular tear.

It just depends how far you want/need to go before you're happy and how much you can afford. For example, 3/4" plywood walls with institutional-style cable runs attached directly to the walls would be much faster than building a sandwich wall and hiding the cable runs, but it would not look nearly as nice and the insulation value would be half or lower. Ebay doors would be faster than trying to build your own door and waterproofing it, but they're $250 each.

[Deryk the Pirate]

And weather can work against you as well, I can relate to that one lol. Its doable working everyday on it, but realize everything always takes longer to do then you think it will lol.....be dedicated and do a good days work on it and you will be fine!

[campmaster-k]

Welcome. If you and yours have the building skills and tools and treat it like a job then you can do it. The idea about 3-5 hour per day forget it. More like 10 hrs per day would be more realistic. Post lots of Pictures please.

[bobhenry]

I will go out on a limb here and make a statement......

150 hours will get you a long ways and campable if you are building on an existing frame.

I am sure I have started an argument here but I was able to build "The Barn" in 5 weekends every Sat and Sunday was 10 - 12 hours solid with a helper on 3 of those days.

Here is the pics and post dates to prove it !

http://www.tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?t=30307&start=0

[campmaster-k]

So Bob are you saying 5 weekends = 10 days (sat/sun) x 10hrs per day. Thats 100 hrs. Plus 3 day of help = 30 hrs. Total 130 hrs?

[bobhenry]

So Bob are you saying 5 weekends = 10 days (sat/sun) x 10hrs per day. Thats 100 hrs. Plus 3 day of help = 30 hrs. Total 130 hrs?

YEP ! and to be fair a couple hours here and there in the evening. It got real busy the week before the Greenfield In. parade I hit it 3 or 4 week nights the last couple weeks. You will see in the parade pics some things were not yet even painted.

[campmaster-k]

I think that is totally realistic. I think (properly armed with tools and skills) campability is 100 or more hrs. Less than that is possible I guess but not probable.

[Oster]

Thanks everyone for your advice! I've spent the last couple of months pouring over this site and deciding exactly what I want. Just so you know, we're planning on building our trailer on top of a HF frame, mostly using the plans from this site. I think I've come to the conclusion that it's probably best if we start now so we can take our time!

[atahoekid]

There are a couple of trite old sayings that come to mind when I contemplate what you're attempting. "A job will always take as long as you allow for it", meaning a job always takes at least as long as you've allowed for it. The other saying is courtesy of my my wife... "It takes you three times longer to get anything done than you say it will" A TRUE statement, but I have two reasons (excuses) for that... 1) I am hard to please. I always want to make sure it is right and will spend lots of time and effort to make sure it's done the right way... 2) I am famous for the phrase "while I'm at it" as in "While I'm at it, I might as well put in new flooring too, and perhaps I should change out the fixture and change the lighting" Before you know it, there's a full remodeling job going on. I agree with Carl above, I think your time estimate is doable if you've got skills, tools, space and a reasonable set of expectations of what your trailer should be like

Good Luck

[Roly Nelson]

I think you are being a bit unrealistic, to plan on building a "basic teardrop" in 2 weeks. Also, later in your post you feel that "3 to 4 weeks, 3 to 5 hours a day" might produce a campable teardrop with no frills. If all you are interested in is having a towable box that is somewhat waterproof that you can sleep in, I guess that would be possible.

However, most builders experience delays in their builds, due to time lost obtaining parts and materials, plus the complexity of the fit and finish of the final product. I know that this is what slows my builds down considerably. I am plagued by wanting all of the joints to be glued and screwed tightly together, then spending extra time rounding off corners, sanding off all of the saw marks and generally doing the kind of job that I won't be ashamed of when in a campground. Perhaps my 65 years of professional woodworking really isn't a plus when building a new trailer, and I find it hard to just slap it together, in an effort to beat the clock. Being retired, undoubtedly allows me to take as much time as necessary to attain the desired end result.

I have only built 4ft wides, and feel that going 5 ft wide and longer than 8 feet long, will also slow down your anticipated time of construction. I don't want to rain on your parade, but working part-time for a few weeks, might actually fall way short of your anticipated plans to really make it "campable". I agree that a few days spent altering a cargo trailer, would be so much quicker, but of course much more expensive.

For many of us, building a teardrop trailer is often a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will totally change our camping habits forever and puts us on a friendship level with other like-minded campers, that is unimaginable. I know you will also find this to be true, just you wait! Good luck on your build, take lots of pics, ask any questions and always know, we are here to help.
Roly ~~

[Oster]

Thanks Roly, that is really what I was thinking. It may seem crazy to some people, but we are really minimalistic kind of people We don’t want a kitchen because we don’t think we’d use it, so the galley will mainly be storage. That’s mostly what I mean by “no-frillsâ€

[bobhenry]

deciding exactly what I want. !

NOW THAT THERE IS FUNNY I DON'T CARE WHO YA ARE !

4 years and five build ( starting #6) and I still have no idea what I want so I simply must salute you.


O.K. I'll be serious I jumped into my 2nd build (Chubby)

with my mind fairly well fixed and it fell together very well there are few if any things I would change. I did learn one thing that quite a few have copied and agree with the improvement. Reinforce and extend the HF tongue. The flex in mine always worried me and I redid mine after the fact. It is far easier if it is done at the frame stage and it vastly improves towing manners and make backing up much easier.

Let me see if I can find a few pics........

Here are Harvey's pics This is the gentleman that gave me the idea




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Here are my retrofit improvements