Step 4: The Assembly Begins!

Step 4

The assembly begins. Trailer assembly is pretty straight forward. There is a base made up of 2 side rails and 5 cross bars. This is bolted together with 20 bolts washers and lock nuts. These get hand tightened so that you can square everything later.

Next up to build is the axle assembly. This consists of a 2 brackets per side leaf springs and axle and hubs. The original plans call for mounting the leaf springs on top of the axle. For my purposes I wanted the trailer a few inches lower so I decided to flip the axle. Flipping the axle means mounting the leaf springs hanging below the axle. This axle has notches that fit into the leaf spring. So step one in flipping the axle is removing the bolt holding the leaf springs together and turning it over. After that every thing bolts right up with U-bolts. 

Up next is installing the tongue. This is two bars mounted under the trailer in a V and the hitch attaches to that. Here is also where squaring up the trailer comes in. Turns out that the axle being bolted in severely hinders being able to moving things around so its time for that to come out. 

So far off from square I can't get the tongue bolts in 

Almost square

With 20 bolts hand tightened and it being basically a long floppy box it took a very long time to get it square and tightened down. I was being a bit of a perfectionist but after hours of swearing and tapping, accidentally bumping it and more tapping I got it square to withing 1/16th of an inch over the 10.3 foot diagonals. 

Finally square

Once it was square just had to get the tongue finished, axle bolted back up and wheels put on. I have different plans for the lights and because of the the lowering of the trailer I have to mount the fenders differently but other than that the trailer frame is set to go!