As a close follower of this Blog you will be aware that I had decided to go down the route of a small car plus trailer for my summer shade sail deliveries. The car was covered in the previous post :
https://v2xs.com/ford-focus-2/
I was looking for a relatively lightweight (Max 500 Kg gross weight) box-type trailer. Trailers of this size don’t need to be separately registered in France, are covered by the towing vehicle insurance and can be driven on a normal car license. Shortly after beginning my search I found an ad on a local Facebook Group that appeared to be the ideal solution. I got in touch with the seller and, completely ignoring the sage advice of “Caveat Emptor”, I agreed to buy it without seeing it. The seller very kindly agreed to deliver the trailer 50Km to Alexander’s house in Limoges – this was during lockdown so I had no legal means of being able to view the trailer in advance. The price was right, the deal was done and the trailer duly delivered. It then sat in Alexander’s garden for nearly two months until I had the opportunity to collect it. Once I had got the trailer back home and started to inspect it, I quickly realised it wasn’t such a good deal after all…
The main problem was that the wooden floor of the trailer was completely rotten and needed replacing. The owner had covered the floor with lino so on initial inspection it looked OK, but having peeled back the lino the floor itself was very soggy and falling apart. Having started to strip out the floor the second issue quickly became apparent – the chassis frame was rusty and would need rubbing down and repainting. Fortunately the structure was solid and it was only surface rust, but it was another job I wasn’t expecting.
Other issues were that one of the tyres turned out to have a slow puncture and the other one wasn’t much better as the rubber was badly cracked. Finally the electrics were a mess and the lights didn’t work so would need fixing or replacing. Altogether quite a catalogue of jobs that meant the trailer definitely wasn’t a bargain. And I now had no choice but to fix it before I could use it and even if I just decided to resell it there was still a lot of work to do. Lesson learnt ? Maybe…
I visited a few of the local DIY shops to price up a replacement floor. The correct trailer-spec marine grade plywood was expensive and only available to special order so I started looking at alternatives. It’s not the right time of year for decking so the stores had some leftover stock that was cheap which set me thinking. I felt sure it would do the job and is treated timber but was concerned about the expansion due to temperature and humidity. The store also had some composite decking which was more expensive but a lot cheaper than the marine plywood so I bought some lengths of that. It was a few mm thicker than the original floor so had to be shaved at each end to get it to fit in the existing metal framework. In addition the composite decking is hollow and I didn’t want to leave the ends exposed as they looked rather odd and would be a hiding place for dirt and spiders. At the front end I welded in a new section of angle iron to block off the ends and at the rear fitted a strip of Aluminium checker plate which had the added advantage of protecting the loading lip. The end result was very tidy.
I decided to rub down the interior wood work and treat it to a coat of paint to brighten the interior and generally make the trailer a bit more presentable – I had some old pots of paint left over (don’t we all ?) and managed to choose what I thought were complimentary shades…
The chassis frame was treated to wire brushing / sand papering to get off the old flaky paint and loose rust before painting with silver Hammerite – left over from the Focus re-painting.
The electrics and lights were all stripped out and replaced with a brand new set.
I bought two new tyres and decided to fit them myself (how hard can it be ?). I fit all my motorbike tyres and had recently replaced the tyres on my motorbike trailer so was feeling reasonably confident. However, these were “full size” car tyres 145/70-13 and it proved almost impossible to break the bead in order to remove the old tyres. I eventually came up with a lever system which worked a treat – but only after a lot of struggling and swearing.
Apart from a general clean up and fitting new locks that was about it – one fully reconditioned trailer ready to go…
