My horse trailer is finished, registered, and road worthy. I've given it its maiden shakedown cruise carrying a one ton load and then did a complete re-inspection. Everything checks out so I'm good to go. Of course, my horses, even though they've been trailered extensively before, see this new trailer as an existential crisis so they have to be re-trained. Pain in the... A few pictures of it are shown below the jump.
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.
What with my truck being sidelined and having other things to take care of I fell off on my schedule to get my horse trailer finished. I'm almost there. I have finished all the sheet metal work and primed and painted the interior. I'll be painting the exterior this weekend. The uprights and the main frame of the roof was fabricated from 14 Gauge 1 1/2" square tubing, and the roof bows were made using 1" 14 Gauge square tubing. A diagram is shown after the break.
I've finished the chassis work on my trailer. I added steps, a heavy duty bumper and put in all the reinforcements. I sandblasted it, and then primed and painted it. I also completed the electrical rough-in. I took it for a spin and was well pleased with the pull. I only noticed one bit of shudder at 50 mph that subsequently vanished above 55 mph. I rechecked all the torques and found one wheel's lug nuts insufficiently torqued, three of the bolts on the axle hanger system below specification, and the thing now glides at all speeds. I torqued the u-bolts for the axles to 50 foot-pounds and the axle hanger bolts to 75 foot-pounds. There are some photos of the completed chassis below the break.
After finishing some of the long welds on the chassis I mounted it on two supports I fabricated so I could rotate the frame as needed to get my welds down at an optimum angle. The rotating chassis is shown in the picture. That's also my trusty Ranch Truck, 250,000 miles and still running strong.
I spent today cutting all the odds and ends for gusset plates, corner bracing and miscellaneous pieces. On Monday I get my order of steel in to build the frame for the top of the trailer. I still have to build a square tube bender to facilitate bending the roof bows. Onward.
I finished my design on my trailer and ordered the steel for the chassis. I did all the calculations myself but I always get a second opinion. In this case I used a web based beam calculator at Optimal Beam which gave me a free 14 day trial. Check them out, it's a really good bit of software and really easy to use. I got my steel on Wednesday and waited for 2 days. I find that a couple of days wait before starting any major project allows me to fully think through the steps of the project and make sure I have it firmly in mind. The final chassis design is below the jump.
I've decided I want a custom horse trailer. I want it as wide as allowed, and with as much head room and length as is feasible. As always I like to roll my own so this will be a fun build. A horse trailer poses an interesting design challenge. It needs to be light, yet strong, and needs to account for a shifting load. It also needs to be able to be hauled with your average pick-up truck.
I've hauled some interesting loads, but the worst is a live load that shifts around on you. On occasion my machismo has got the better of my common sense, "sure I'll give it a whirl" I've been heard to say. One such instance was a load of ostriches for someone I knew. I had no idea that ostriches, stamp, kick, fight, squawk like mad and in general carry-on during the trailering process. Getting the damn things in the stock trailer was my first clue as to the general wrongness of the proposition, but what the hell they're in there now so let's go.
On to the horse trailer. I started with a simple beam to give myself some basic design inputs. I did the original calculations myself but there are plenty of beam bending calculators out there on the web. For the design I used a total weight of 2500 pounds for my two horses, and a trailer weight of 2500 pounds. My initial design set-up looked like below. So this gives me a starting point and I then proceeded to a more detailed design which I will describe later.
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