Tuesday, November 25, 2008

First Weekend of Work

The first weekend of work consisted of Blake and I cutting off the cab of the truck and getting all of the steel and equipment to turn it into a functioning gooseneck trailer. We cut the cab off and loaded up the trailer with the scrap and attempted to get rid of it, but suprisingly the scrap metal place is closed on the weekend. After that we headed to Gooseneck Trailers in Bryan. The guys there were super helpful and friendly, we spent quite a bit of time talking to them and they helped us realized that we could probably keep the rear axle from the truck and use it on the trailer instead of ripping it out and replacing it with two trailer axles. We were concerned with how we could make the hydraulic brakes from the truck work now it was going to be a trailer. We knew that we could use a vacuum over hydraulic system but that requires retrofitting all the trucks that would potentially pull the trailer, which is certainly less than ideal. They sold us an electric over hydraulic acutator that will allow us to save the rear axle and have a simple hookup to most trucks. In addition to that we picked up a gooseneck coupler and a few sidewinder trailer jacks to get us going. After a stop at a steel supply store we started work.

The trailer made it into the shop in College Station and is ready to go.
So we started cutting, grinding and welding.

Blake and his dad discussing the design.....


Blake doing some welding to put the jacks onto the frame.

The is as far as we made it in the first weekend as we ran out of wire for the MIG gun on Sunday and Tractor Supply Company was out of wire and no place to re-stock in the BCS area. So we called it a day.

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