The day before Mother's Day I received an email that 300 square feet of FREE Craigslist red brick pavers were still available. It was good news as I've been looking to add more bricks to the pile at camp so that we could eventually create some pathways from the deck to the fire pit and hopefully down to where the camper will be placed. So as not to interefere with Mother's Day, I headed out to Brecksville for a 6:30AM pickup in the SUV towing my newly constructed 6.5' X 9' utility trailer. This marked the maiden voyage for the trailer and I was very interested in discovering how well it would handle the load. My concerns were the amount of travel in the leaf springs and whether I'd have to make some cut outs above the tires to compensate for their travel when being battered by bumps and potholes.
I arrived home and found that there were black skid marks where the tires had bottomed out and hit the underside of the decking. There was approximately 2" of travel space above the tread while the trailer was loaded down, but I guess that wasn't enough. I took of the issue (I hope) by cutting out a square the size of the apex of the tire and insetting aluminum diamond plate as a cover and thus gaining an additional 1" of travel. I'm hoping that 4" of travel is enough. The Trailer weighs 450#'s and when it was a 1984 Coleman Newport camper it had a gross weight (camper plus goods) of 1450#'s. So, all in all I'm comfortable with not exceeding a conservative 900#'s worth of goods. This should be good enough for what we'll need it to do for the family.
Here's several videos that my son shot of our cruising through the woods surrounding trout camp on Sunday.
I arrived home and found that there were black skid marks where the tires had bottomed out and hit the underside of the decking. There was approximately 2" of travel space above the tread while the trailer was loaded down, but I guess that wasn't enough. I took of the issue (I hope) by cutting out a square the size of the apex of the tire and insetting aluminum diamond plate as a cover and thus gaining an additional 1" of travel. I'm hoping that 4" of travel is enough. The Trailer weighs 450#'s and when it was a 1984 Coleman Newport camper it had a gross weight (camper plus goods) of 1450#'s. So, all in all I'm comfortable with not exceeding a conservative 900#'s worth of goods. This should be good enough for what we'll need it to do for the family.
Here's several videos that my son shot of our cruising through the woods surrounding trout camp on Sunday.
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