Hello, people of steem! Welcome to my page!
For this post in my continuing series, I'd like to show you how I extended the steel frame on the back end of the trailer so that I can put a bumper on the trailer. Adding the rear frame also gives me a place to mount a carrier for a bicycle or other small transportation such as a little scooter.
These trailers were built without a back bumper back in the 1940s and 50s, perhaps as a way to lower the weight of the trailer a bit, or perhaps simply because the builder thought that the trailer didn't need a rear bumper.
The first thing I had to do was to find a place to buy some 3 inch channel iron. The main frame of the trailer is 3 inch channel iron and I wanted to match that. There's a custom fabricator here in town that I was able to get my parts from, I had them cut me 2 pieces of 3 inch channel iron that are 48 inches long.
I trial fitted them to the trailer frame and drilled the mounting holes for them in both the channel irons and the trailer frame. Next, I cleaned them up with a wire wheel on my angle grinder, and then gave them a couple of coats of primer paint.
Then I gave them a couple of coats of gloss black. The gloss colors tend to be more durable than the satin or flat paints.
After a couple days of drying time, I mounted the channel irons onto the trailer frame. I used 3/8ths inch diameter stainless steel bolts with lock nuts to bolt the channel irons onto the trailer frame.
After getting the rear frames put together, I was able to put a treated 2X4 across the top of them from one side to the other. This 2X4 supports the lower sides and determines the width of the back end of the trailer. I measured the width of the trailer on the roof and used that to determine the width of the back end.
At this point, I decided that I needed to remove the big back window from the trailer so that I could work on that section of the back end. I mounted another treated 2X4 in the lower back end to stabilize the back of the trailer, and also mounted a regular 2X4 where the bottom of the window had been. I pulled the old 2X4 out of that position because it had been getting leaked on, and it was a bit short for the proper width of the back of the trailer.
The big back window is not original to the trailer, it had been put in by a previous owner, probably the people that I bought the trailer from. They had put the 2X4s into the back to hold the window, and the lower one had been cut a bit short when they put it in. I decided that I wasn't going to put the big window back into the trailer, it's just a source of leakage on the back of the roof, and I don't need that. I will probably not put any window back there at all because I don't want a window right over the bed, and I don't want the potential leakage.
From this point on, it's just a matter of rebuilding the back end of the trailer structure and putting the aluminum skin back on. I will show you the start of that process in my next post in this series.
If you would like to read the previous posts in this series, here are the links to them.
https://steemit.com/travel-trailer/@amberyooper/restoring-a-tin-tent-trailer-part-1-i-got-it-home-now-what
https://steemit.com/travel-trailer/@amberyooper/restoring-a-tin-tent-trailer-part-2-starting-the-work
https://steemit.com/trailer-repair/@amberyooper/restoring-a-tin-tent-trailer-part-3-continuing-the-wood-work-on-the-lower-back-end-of-the-trailer
https://steemit.com/trailer-repair/@amberyooper/restoring-a-tin-tent-trailer-part-4
That's all I have for this post, thanks for stopping by my page to check it out!
