One Pothole Away From Disaster...............

[VirginIslander]

As most of you know, the trailer under my SF18 was pretty rough when I got it. The one fender still hanging on didn't even make it 20 minutes drive to my house.

The boat needed a fair amount of work too, so I've been trying to balance the resources ($$$) between fixing up both to where I can at least use the boat (which is pretty much done) as long as I don't have to trailer it very far to launch.

Coming back from an outing a couple weeks back, I stopped to gas up, and noticed a distinct "leaning inward at the top" appearance to one of the trailer wheels. I've just previously replaced both wheels, tires and hubs, so this wasn't a good sign.

Fortunately, home was only a few minutes away, and I drove carefully to avoid major bumps and potholes (as it turned out, one big hole could have spelled disaster). Once parked up in the yard with the trailer frame blocked up, It was time to pull all the undercarriage out and see what was rusted away to oblivion this time. It was not a pretty sight. The axle tube was rusted thru at the bottom on both ends and the spindles were bending up. As if that wasn't enough, the front right spring hanger was totally rusted thru on one side and almost nothing left of the other side. The rear hanger was only slightly better, and the left side wasn't much better.

I ended up making new sliders for both sides with all new hangers and also a new axle. It took me two weekends of working in a shop to make all the parts. .... Which the welder then welded up in about 2 or 3 hours.... One of the drawbacks to living here in paradise, is that you have to make everything from scratch, since there's no place that you can just walk into and get what you need, or even order it and find any place that will ship here.

At least this time around, I made everything an order of magnitude heavier duty than what it replaced, so no matter how long I keep the rig, I won't be having to go thru this ordeal again.

Anyway, it's all done, and I took a couple vacation days this week so I have a 4 day weekend to put it back together. The leaning post finally got here, so I'll be installing that as well. (or at least that's the plan)

So for everyone that's read all the way thru this post, here's the pics of the trials of being surrounded by salt water, and the joys of living in paradise.


Darlene