Tuesday, March 22, 2016

Trailers in Paradise...

Trailers in Paradise...  So I restarted working on a project I stopped last fall: building a four-wheeled stake-bed trailer.  Yesterday I installed six “pockets” for the stakes, and today I'm hoping to install the rest of them. 

Aside from some tricksy measuring (involving division of fractions!), there's nothing particularly challenging about installing these pocket brackets.  I'd cleaned and painted them last fall.  All I had to do yesterday was mark the holes, drill them, and then fasten them with bolts.  The nuts I used have nylon elements built in to hold them in place (the same thing that lock washers do, but neater).  These take quite a bit of torque to screw on – more than the square end of a carriage bolt can resist, in most cases.  So there was a bit of tricky use of pliers to keep the ends of the carriage bolts from twisting.

One nice little touch was enabled by the oscillating saw that I bought last year (in the second photo), after watching some of our remodeling craftsmen using one.  I was able to cut the bolts off to the exact correct length.  It took six seconds for each bolt with that saw.  Lovely thing, it is!


No comments:

Post a Comment