The Aero-Ham

[gww25]

Thanks Dave but it's really not anything artistic. I just bent a spline curve around the areas where I needed headroom, elbow space and hip room in the sitting places and that's just how it came about. I could have made it a lot nicer looking but would have had to squish things down more than I wanted to. I'm fast learning that a builder has to make compromises on a daily basis as a project starts coming together.
There are so many good designs and talented builders at this site that I'm sometimes embarassed to post about my simple little project but hoping that others might learn from my progress since I'm really constrained by budget.

[GuyllFyre]

You're doing great!
Making sawdust and posting pictures, it's what we like to see!

[aggie79]

Hi Gww25, That's a very cute profile you have there! Really appealing design. I'm looking forward to following your build.

Cheers,

Dave

I second what Dave says. That is a really cool design!

Take care,
Tom

[gww25]

Here's a picture of the floor framing with the wheel tubs temporarily set in place. They actually will sit down 4-inches deeper than shown here. Still trying to decide whether or not to insulate the floor so no plywood yet. I plan on using the floor as my 'bench' and layout table as I work on building the walls so the tubs will installed later on down the road.

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[gww25]

Frame is underway. I used the framing as my frame jig and then held everything in place with picture-frame clamps. Checked for square and did a little tweaking where needed and then tacked it up.
Using 2x2x.120 wall square tubing. 2x2 angle would have been strong enough but I figured a custom built trailer deserved a nicer frame than what I'd build for a utility trailer.
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[starleen2]

Nice frame!

[gww25]

This site has probably saved me hundreds of dollars and thousands of hours in wasted work. I think I joined in July but I lurked as a guest for quite a while. I bought the first lumber for the project on 8-4-2011 which is the date I scribed into the main floor framing member so I could keep track of time. I'm pretty sure that I've visited almost every post on the site and culled out what I found interesting with respect to my own project. My 'favorites' menu now has over 120 entries just from T&TTT.
Two things that I found especially valuable were the 'Tongue Strength' article and the weight/CG spreadsheet embedded with the Widget plans which I've been expanding for this build.
I hope that what I'm doing will add to the information here and help other prospective builders down the line. I have to just thank everybody who posts here, and the site admins for putting together an incredible site.

[gww25]

It has been around 3 years since I bought any significant amount of lumber or steel and the thing that really bummed me out when I got started was the incredible increase in prices for both materials since I was last in the marketplace. Needless to say I have had to adjust what I'm trying to build based on cost more than any other single factor. When I was preparing the plans, weight was the biggest factor but that got quickly moved way down the list of important things as money started moving up in the budget column. As a result I've become almost obsessed with utilizing every little last piece of 'scrap' material and ironically I'm fast on my way to having enough 'left-over' bits and pieces to eventually build a simple Benroy as a side project someday.

[gww25]

Not a lot of progress as I ended up spending a months budget buying some tools. A little over $200 got me a Black and Decker belt sander, saber saw, circular saw and hand drill so I can move forward on the project. Did manage to finish waterproofing the wheel tubs and give them a couple coats of porch paint.

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[gww25]

Over the weekend I did snag some good garage sale finds including a 'new/old' porta-potty, extension chord matching my color scheme, a draw bar and great old sander all for $20
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[gww25]

I'm starting to work on the chassis again and cut some gussets from the scraps of 2x2 stock I had on hand. I was taught never to use flat plate gussets on trailers as they just provide a place for crud to accumulate. This is a harder way to go, especially if you have to cut them as I did with a reciprocal saw. It takes a lot of time and then you have to dress them down with a belt sander. I really wish I had an abrasive chop saw but just can't afford one.

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[aggie79]

gww25,

You do some really nice work...very clean and precise! Those brackets look really good.

BTW, what's your first name?

Keep up the good work,
Tom

[gww25]

Thanks Aggie. My name is Gary by the way.
I finally got around to installing the sheathing on the floor framing today. For me this represented a major step in the progress on the construction so I'm pretty happy tonight.
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[gww25]

The stuff I ended up buying at Home Depot was regular old 1/2-inch BCX roof sheathing at a little over $31 a sheet which was hard to swallow since that's about what I was paying for cabinet grade 3/4-inch Birch a few years ago. Anyway it is pretty poor quality material but will work about as well as anything. Like most plywood it was not perfectly square or 48x96. My sheets were 48.125x96.1875 but they did have two good square edges. I needed to rip them down to 40-inches wide so I just overlapped the sheets after I squared them to the floor framing and used an aluminum straightedge to cut both sheets in a single pass.
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[gww25]

I spent the better part of any hour getting these sheets trimmed square, ripped to width and trimmed to length until I had a perfect fit on the floor framing so I didn't want to screw it up when I glued the sheets down. To make it easy I just made some dowels from a scrap piece of 1/4-inch aluminum rod and then drilled holes in all four corners of each sheet all the way into the subframe. I pulled the sheets up, spread the glue and then put them back down using the dowels as alignment pins to hold the panels in place as I screwed them down. It worked very well.

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