Horse Trailer Transformation

When I get something in my head, I tend to have a one track mind.  I had a not great trailering experience a month or so ago and made the “decision” that I needed a different trailer.  I listed my trailer for sale and started looking for another one.  Everything I found in my price range either needed a lot of work, the seller responded well until it came time for me to actually go SEE the stupid thing and then disappeared or someone responded to my wanted ad with exactly what I wanted – we even discussed my going to see/buy the trailer and the seller just POOF vanished.  No response to emails or phone calls!!!  I even drove TWO HOURS in the snow to see one horse trailer that the seller neglected to mention was in hicksville USA and didn’t give me a phone number – I got lost, frustrated and ticked off and finally gave up and came home!!  SO!!  In all of this, I’ve also had my trailer for sale – had some interest but for the most part nothing serious.  I did have one person that was going to come with cash to buy it, but because I’d just driven FOUR HOURS only to not find the trailer I was going to buy, I backed out and explained that I just couldn’t be trailer-less.  The person was very understanding. 

Anyway!!  There is a point in all of this rambling!!  Thru all of this trailer “shopping”, I keep coming back to the fact that I LOVE my trailer.  Yes it’s old.  Yes it needs some work, but it hauls nicely, I can back it and maneuver it with great ease – I just love this stupid thing.  SO!  We all put our heads together and decided that we’d replace the floor in it, throw some paint on it and call it good.  Great?!  Well…..with anything that’s 27 years old, there’s going to be problems.  The biggest one on this trailer is that the back piece that the ramp is welded too was rusting thru.  I was assured that it wasn’t as bad as it looked and an “easy fix”.  By now I should know that my idea of an easy fix and certain other male members of my family have different ideas on what an “easy fix” is…..

Here are some before pictures of my trailer –

These just show the basics of course.  You can see it needs paint but nothing majorly wrong.  The escape door handle is taped shut as you can see in the first picture – that’s already fixed.  Vince drilled out the rivets and took the handle off.  He fixed the pin and then re-riveted the handle on again.  Good as new.

So now for the “good stuff”…..not really good per-say but this is what needed to be fixed.

The bad floor boards can be seen here and vaguely the bad spots in the metal.

This one was taken right after the boards came out – Once the boards were out, we realized there was more rot on this beam than we’d realized.

We had “tested” the floor, on several occasions really – and the boards although they LOOKED crappy, seemed solid.  When we started pulling boards out though – the back most parts of the boards were awful.  The board on the left-most side disintegrated (basically) when I whacked it with the hammer accidentally while trying to get the small piece of angle iron off that was there.  The right side was worse!!  When Vince leaned on the drill to try to remove a screw, the drill went right thru the board!!!  YIKES!!

Here is the repair job that Dan did on Saturday.  I took my camera to the garage with us, but forgot to take pictures of the job in progress!!  :(

 Yesterday afternoon, I spent putting a nice coat of rust inhibiting primer on the floor beams and supports.  On one of our many trips to Lowes this weekend, we bought the floor boards to put down.  We were planning to use rough cut hemlock boards from a sawmill, however, upon closer inspection of the layout of this trailer – it would have been extremely difficult if not nearly impossible to get rough cut lumber in here – it just wouldn’t have worked easily and without much “dove tailing” and “cramming” – so I made the command decision to just use pressure treated planks instead.  I made the mistake of letting Dan and Vince do the math and we ended up a board short – with further math “junk” we made the decision to get one more 2x8 when we took back the broken 2x10.  So this afternoon, we started on the floor.

 

Ethan supervising

Even my dad got in on the action – he needs Vince’s help getting a barn done for his new calves before they get here so he’s hurrying Vince along in this trailer process.  Dad wants to paint his truck this summer, so he’s volunteered his time and air compressor/painting stuff to “practice” on my trailer.  Once we got the floor in, we got some sanding done too!!  Dad says if the sanding is done tomorrow evening, he’ll get the inside painted for me!! 

And finally – this was my barn help for the evening.  Tosh and Keags came over to visit Skippy – Keags fed the babies and then went to work on stalls!!! 

Stay tuned for more pictures and updates – I’ll try to keep up from here on out so that I don’t have mile long blogs after this one!!