It's About Damn Time

My horse trailer is finally ready to be titled and registered. I'll be going to the DMV on Monday and we'll see how that goes. California handily allows for the registration for an own built horse trailer and the paperwork seems to be straightforward. I'll temper my enthusiasm until I have the temporary tags in place. I'm really pleased with how it came out and I like the color scheme. Here's a picture of the interior, and a second one showing the outside.

I need to get a final gross trailer weight and tongue weight to see if I need to modify my trailer hitch. I am also curious to see how close I came to my design criteria. The loading and unloading ramps are all electrical using some ATV winches I purchased. Everything works smoothly but the real test will be how smooth it is with the horses loaded up. I'll need to work slowly and carefully when I'm operating the winches so they don't get spooked. As usual the horses will need to be re-trained for this trailer and everything I'll be doing while they're loaded up. Over the next few weeks I'll be doing some decorative wood and metal work to round the trailer out. As time goes by, and with usage I'm sure I will also be adding features to make it more user friendly. Below the jump are some details of other parts I needed to fabricate for this build.

Some Notes on Hinges

One of the challenges in this build was fabricating heavy duty hinges for the ramps and stall separators. The main problem was that all of the hinges I could find commercially had no, or suspect load ratings, or were otherwise unsuitable for what I had planned. The first type of hinge was a vertical center mount hinge with close tolerances. These were used on the stall seperators where close tolerances were required to limit extraneous motion during travel. I didn't want the horses disturbed by rattling mounts. For the hinge piece I used inside deburred 1/2" Schedule 40 black steel pipe with a 5/8" bolt as the hinge pin. The bolt fits smoothly and closely in the pipe The horizontal hinges were fabricated by fillet welding 3/16" web angle iron to black steel pipe. For larger hinges I used 3/4" pipe and for smaller ones 1/2" pipe. The hinge pins are 3/4" and 9/16" rod respectively. The Hinge length is typically 3" per piece for a total hinge length of 6". The hinge pins have a washer welded on one end and a cotter pin inserted through the other to keep the pin in place.  A schematic of each of hinge is shown below.

Vertical Hinge

Horizontal Hinge