| 05-24-2012 |
My dad has had the wood to replace the floor in his cattle trailer for years now and we always are having to move the wood in and out of the trailer to use it so I decided to replace it. Since he was in Florida with his truck, the only vehicle around with a gooseneck, I asked if I could borrow my friend Lea's truck. She said I could so I borrowed it while she was at work and left her my keys. She also indulged me in taking this staged photo of the changing of the keys.
I can't imagine I looked too manly driving around with a pink Cummins license plate on the front. Hehe.
The trailer was pretty nasty and in the past when we used it we had to lay the boards down in the floor because of several holes in the floor that would allow the cows' hooves to fall through.
An upside to the bad rust was that the lower angle iron only remained connected in just a few places so a crowbar made pretty quick work of it.
A crowbar, and leverage. Sweet, sweet leverage.
The front door is rotted pretty bad as well.
Some more wielding of the crowbar and the floor starting coming up. The wood was so rotted it didn't take much work to get it all out. This part of the job was so nasty I had to wear a mask because I started having trouble breathing.
The night before I sat down with some masking tape and a razor and covered the Chevrolet script on an old valve cover I found in a junkyard. After a friend of mine sandblasted it it showed far too many holes to be worth fixing so it is going to become wall art, and it was good practice for when the time comes to do the same to 37's valve covers.
There were two problems with the existing angle iron already in the trailer. Problem one was that it was rusted so badly that it was mostly unusable. Problem two was that the bottom of the walls were rusted so badly that there was no good metal to re-weld them back with. So, I went to the local salvage yard, which I'm beginning to really, really love, and with some junk-diving, happened to find exactly what I needed. This is 265 pounds of 4x4 angle iron and it costs $65. Had I had to buy this brand new it would have cost more than the entire trailer was worth. My nephew Garrett let me borrow his truck and he drove me over to the scrapyard. I was really glad he wound up going because getting those heavy pieces out of the scrapyard, with all the obstacles that we had to climb around and over to get them out, would have been a huge, possibly impossible, feat for just myself.
Here's the difference between the old and the new metal.
Given that one of the boards had rotted and was practically in two pieces, there were exactly enough boards to finish the job. One less and I would have been in trouble. I used a couple of the boards to make a temporary work bench. This miter saw I got for Christmas made the job 100 times easier and 500 times faster. I was even able to put some 45 Degree angles on the end boards to make ingress a little easier for the cows.
I measured every board but the standard deviation only wound up being 1/8 inch. I was pretty impressed with that, though the length of the trailer wound up being slightly off form left to right which necessitated the last board being at an lengthwise angle.
I considered replacing the walls but a cost analysis revealed it would have been a much bigger job than was desired. The walls, fenders, doors, gate and latch would have all had to have been refabricated and then sandblasted and painted, at which point you would want to sandblast and paint the entire trailer, which would also mean fixing the roof and completely rewiring it as well as POR15 on the axles. To just make it useable I went with the larger angle iron and the tack welding will allow it to be easily removed in the future should the entire trailer need to be rebuilt. For now, it will at least be useable again.
Then the long boards. These must be in place for traction. It gets pretty slippery when a load of cows starts standing in the trailer, if you catch my drift, and without these they wouldn't be able to stand up.
I got this piece cut and then started grinding some spots to weld when my angle grinder died. It was a $2 yardsale find, and I have to say a part of me will be glad to not have to use that stupid screw to turn it on and off anymore.
I got one side welded in. Because the metal is overlapped in the middle of the trailer the piece will not lie completely flat against the side walls so there is about an 1/8 inch or so gap. It would have been best to have ground down little pieces of filler and welded them in between but I didn't have the right size metal and it would have cost a bit more in grinding wheels so I did it the way it was done before. You can't expect it to be pretty considering I was welding on larger-than-10-gauge steel with .023 wire with an 1/8" gap to fill, but I think it turned out pretty good. I hope to finish the other side tomorrow, which will be a bit more difficult because of the door opening, and then go back over and cover the primer with some brown paint.
I let April do the honors of peeling the tape off the lettering. I think this is always the best part.
Considering how pitted and unsmooth the metal was, I think it turned out OK. Good enough for a garage wall, anyway. It's been about 5 years since I did one of these, so I mainly wanted to practice before tackling the one's for the '37.
