Setting Up the Tow Vehicle
I have a Ford Escape with 2-wheel drive and a v6 engine. I bought it new in the fall of 2002 and it has treated me well over the years with nary a whimper, squeak or squeal. Knock wood. I have been very happy with it but one thing that I wish I would have gotten when I had the chance was the factory installed tow package. I never thought the car was strong enough to pull anything that would meet my needs. And I was right. It’s roof rack and interior provide ample ability to haul my Home Depot purchases so I haven’t needed a utility trailer. I had, and still have, no interest in owning a boat and never thought I would want to deal with the hassles of owning a camping trailer. Besides, in my book, hard walls aren’t really camping. Just being honest. But twelve years later, sleeping on a nice mattress off of the ground after a night sitting around the campfire out in the wild sounds pretty good. Even better since I came across the Teardrop Trailer Category a couple of years ago. I had toyed with the idea of just driving down to the U-Haul several times over the years to have them put a hitch on just in case. But budgeting for “just in case” seems silly when there are sure things to bankroll. I never did. Now that I am committed to the Teardrop Trailer, I started calling around for prices. It was upwards of $300 for what looked like 10 minutes of work if the Youtube videos are to be believed. I ended up just buying a hitch on-line and waited for a sunny day to put it on. I also priced out car ramps so I could get under the car easier. The cheapest I saw were the flimsy $50 ones at Harbor freight. I ended up using another Youtube idea that involved cutting up 2 pieces of 2×10’s in several lengths that when attached make a nice 6 inch ramp. Luckily, before I started cutting, I checked ground clearance without any raising and there was plenty. So I just crawled under and attached the hitch without raising the car. It was tight but it worked and I was glad I could return the lumber. I have plenty lying around and don’t need anymore.
 |
 |
| A Sunny day, A Hitch, and a Ford Escape, What to do? What to do? | Lets put on a Hitch. It went on without a hitch. |
Building the Frame
My 2 wheel drive Ford Escape with a v6 engine has a towing capacity of 2000 pounds. If I would have gotten the towing package, it could tow 3000 pounds. So with my 12 year old transmission, a lot of hills in my neighborhood and mountain passes to cross if you want to get very far from Seattle, I am hoping to go no heavier than 1250 pounds. I picked up the steel at my local-ish steel shop that was recommended by the teacher of the welding class I took. The outside frame is made up of 1/8″ 2×2 tube, The cross beam and tongue are a bit thicker at 3/16″ 2×2 tube I grinded the welds smooth and which looks nice but also let me see that the welds were solid. In preparation for attaching the floor to the frame, I welded on some tabs bade out of left over steel tube cut diagonally. A good idea that I got from some pictures that really made attaching the floor easy and I didn’t have to drill directly into the frame. I probably went overboard with the structural integrity of the frame and added a few unneeded pounds but peace of mind makes for a happy camper I am not sure I’ll really use them very much since they don’t seem to be very convenient to get to but I added stabilizer jacks to the back corner of the frame. I painted the frame with primer after doing my best to remove the slippery coating that comes on steel from the factory. There are a few different removal methods on the web and one even said to not worry about it but in the end I used some stuff I bought at Lowes. I then brushed on some white primer and sprayed that with a couple coats of flat black Rustoleum until there was no more white primer paint showing. I waited as long as I could to attach the wheels. Hoping that I would have a good feel for how much and where the weight would be dispersed on the frame. But the materials were getting to heavy to really move a fulcrum around. So I just eye balled it and tacked on the axle leaf springs. I also got to thinking about driving around with this thing on the back. We drive amongst a lot of distracted drivers. I would hate to get rear ended by a texting driver without some protection to the cabin. A crunched Galley would be harder to fix then a bent frame so I added a bumper to the back of the frame. I also got the idea for making it removable so that it won’t be in the way for the cook.
 |
 |
| Raw Materials all in a pile | Lining everything up |
 |
 |
| Grinding Steel | A little input from the neighbors |
 |
|
| Welding it up | More welding |
 |
 |
| Coming Together | So Close |
 |
 |
| Tabs for easy mounting of the floor | Floor and wheels are on |
Building the Trailer Cabin
Those of you who may be unfamiliar with a teardrop trailer, they not much more than a fancy chuckwagon with a place to sleep. And by fancy, I do mean no expense spared and no amenity foresaken. If you Google teardrop trailer images, you’ll find everything from simple four walls and roof to designs that are only limited by your wood working skills and how much your car and tow. I don’t really have a budget for the cabin but want to go as cheaply as I can while not using cheap materials. I chose a 10 ft long style called the Grumman 2. Not sure what the Grumman 1 was but liked the curves of this one. The plans I found online were for a 4 foot wide version. I want the extra room and modified to 5 feet-ish. Here is a picture of the profile: The first step is to build the floor of the cabin. I used 3/4″ poplar for the support sandwiched between a 1/4″ plywood on the bottom and 1/2&” birch plywood for the top. I decided to attach the walls in a slightly more complicated fashion than some other options I read about. This would give me the widest possible inside cabin dimensions while still being strongly attached to the floor. I started with 3 sheets of 3/4″ 4×8 Baltic birch. It needs to be a pretty high quality plywood since the lower cheaper grades may have lower quality glue ups and more knot repairs in the various layers of wood. Knot repairs look like 3 inch long leaves inlaid into the wood. Fewer is always better but more expensive. In reality though, these walls are just the skeleton and will be covered later in the build process, so pretty isn’t all that important. I bought 3 sheets because 4×10 sized plywood sheets are hard to come by and really expensive when you do. I cut 2.5 feet off of either end of the 3rd sheet in the hopes that the mill cut the wood square better than I could. There are several ways to join plywood. I did the most complicated of course. I routed a 1/4″ high, 1/2″ deep groove down the 4 foot lengths of the plywood. Then I cut a 1″ wide strip of 1/4″ baltic birch plywood and wood glued both edges and slid it down the slots joining them together when they dried up. I used the same material for the spline as the two pieces of plywood just to limit any variance in how different wood might react to weather changes. Not sure it matters but why risk it. Once glued up I used some 12 feet pull down straps to keep them together while the glue set up. I should have checked closed while the glue was still wet. The tie down straps pulled the end up and left me with a good sized gap on the bottom.
 |
 |
| Pulling the two ends together. I didn’t have a 10 foot clamp so the straps were my only recourse. They tended to bow the plywood though. | I weighed the plywood down at the seam using wax paper to keep the dried glue from sticking to anything. I braced the length of the plywood with 2×4’s to control the flex. |
 |
 |
| So here is what happens when you get in a hurry. I flipped one of the pieces of plywood before glue up so the splines didn’t line up. There was enough play in the groove that I still got as flat board. | Here is a spline glued up right |
The fix for that backward glueup was fiberglass mesh and epoxy over the seam on boths sides. I had never worked with fiberglass before and it is dirty messy business. I used a respirator because of the fumes. The epoxy is tough to get off the skin but gloves are just hard to work with. I got one side of each piece set fiberglassed and just waited for the epoxy to set up. Two weeks later it was still tacky. The garage is cold so I put a heater on it but still not much firmer a couple of days later. I finally decided that I didn’t use enough epoxy hardener in the mix so I scraped off the parts that were still wet, remixed it epoxy with ample hardener and redid the parts that weren’t drying. This time it was rock hard in a day. Sanded it back and did the other side. Fiberglass cloth is not something I would choose to work with in the future.
This is the fiberglass cloth being stuck down to an initial coat of epoxy over the seam
While I waited for the plywood to dry, I started drawing out the profile to get a feel for what I was going to end up with. I was going to buy 4 feet wide butcher paper to make it a nice drawing I could easily transfer to the plywood. Shopping around, the cost was cost prohibitive and I would have been left with a ton of left over. I decided to join several 24″ sections of painters drop cloth paper form Lowes, I t was a start but the seams were a hassle and I could never get it flat.. I next tied the wider gift warp paper with the cut grids on the back glues to cardboard . That was OK but still hard to get a flat unwrinkled surface. I was till able to get a sizing from the end result though. In the end, I just took pencil to the 4X10 when the seams dried Once the Plywood was solidly 10 feet long, I started to draw the cutlines for the profile. I used the info provided by one of the TNTTT.com members. A godsend to those of us that haven’t done elliptical geometry in decades. I transferred the cut points and ellipse vertices to the plywood, I tried drawing the curves with a string but couldn’t quite keep the pencil perpendicular enough to get the correct line for the whole 15 feet or so curve. In the end I just free handed it between the drawing points provided by the documentation.
 |
 |
 |
| The painter’s paper technique. You can see that it didn’t lie very flat so the curves weren’t straight enough. If that makes sense | The Giftwrap over cardboard technique. I thought the preprinted cut grids would help and they did but it would have been hard to transfer the whole thing to the Plywood. It was good for getting a feel for how big it was going to be. | With the stretched plywood dried up, I was happy to go back to the old tried and true….. Pencil on the plywood.t |
I put the plywood on the saw horses and proceeded to cut out the profile with a jig saw. I tried to stay a few hairs wide and error to the outside of the curve when I was cutting. Once that was done, I went back with an 80 grit belt sander and smoothed everything out. Probably not a perfect curve but eyeballing it, it looks pretty close. I slid the uncut piece of plywood underneath it and used my new 2 1/4 HP Dewalt router and a trip bit with a top bearing to match the other piece exactly. It is a new router but once I got it set up, it was excellent. I took the belt sander to the two walls, still clamped together, to remove an glaring waves in profile curve. Once I was happy-ish with that the wall profiles were good, I temporarily mounted one to the trailer floor and attached a cutout of the door to get a feel for positioning. I wanted to make sure that it was properly positioned to make sure that I wasn’t going to have to take up yoga in order to get in and out of the trailer from standard sleeping location. The door also had to clear the fender which I still haven’t decided upon.
Testing the door location
I marked out the location and set to work on cutting out the door. I quarter inch 2’x4′ press board to make a template to route against. That worked pretty well but I did have to move it around to get each edge lined up as it was just a bit smaller than the actual opening. Cutting the corner around the curved top and straight sides required a bit of freehand drawing to extend the curve to the edge. Luckily, the curve is based on a 40″ circle so I was just able to move the template around to have an edge to route against. It is a powerful that got away from me a couple of times but I think it worked pretty well. I laid the wall with the door hole on top of the other wall and traced the hole and repeated the setup with the router to get the other hole to match. Worked well again. A strong router makes all the difference.
 |
 |
 |
| Tools for cutting out the door. | Cutting the curve of the door. | The door is cut out. |
As you would assume working with 10ft X 4ft pieces of 3/4 plywood in my tight space is difficult. It was time to lighten the load and cut as much of the wall as I could. I marked out areas torwards the front of the trailer that could be removed but without fender and galley layouts, the back end cutouts were limited. I pretty much repeated the door cutout process with this step to. I did take the recommendation that I should round the corners of the cutouts to provide added strength. I am not sure what the rounding radius needs to be to actually add strength but I used the biggest hole cutting saw I have, which is just an inch or 2.
 |
 |
 |
| Starting on the Skeleton. | Both walls stacked during the cutout out. | Fitting the 4×10 1/8 inch Mahogany to the inside walls. |
I also routed out wiring holes for the awning and clearance lights. I was going to come in from the bottom of the trailer but with the other wiring running through the ceiling, it thought it best to keep everything together. I have also heard story of rodents chewing through undercarriage wiring around the Northwest. Could be Trailhead (as opposed to Urban) legend but I didn’t want to take the risk. As part of the floor build out, I finished it up by painting the bottom with roofing tar to protect it from road wetness and debris. That stuff is very messy though. There was a few weeks between painting the bottom and putting up the walls and ceiling. As I moved the plywood around to work on it in my tight work space. I ended up getting tar on several bits. The plywood is already thin so my attempts to sand the tar off left pulled away too much sand wood and it can be seen. It isn’t bad and looks like normal wear and tear. I am not happy about it though.
Taking it out of the garage for the first time.
With the walls up and locked in, I glued the outside skin to it. It is ¼” mahogany plywood. The color is good so was able to just use clear marine varnish on it. I cut the door out after the glue set up. There was room for error but not much so I had to have a steady hand on the saber saw using the door frame as the cut line. I glued the cut out to the ¾ inch plywood that I cut out of the wall earlier and trimmed the skin edges to the door edges. Then I cut out the window holes after the door skin set up.
I attached the doors with the offset hinge and door edging from Teardroptrailerparts.com. part numbers HT07 and
I used the T seal to keep the water out. It does bend around the corners so it required a 45 degree cut. It resulted in a gap that doesn’t look too waterproof though.
The door handles come with a plastic latch thingy that I could figure out how to use it with the thickness of my wall. I added a piece of aluminum angle on the inside edge of the door frame to give the latch something solid to latch onto.
The built the inside cabinetry out of the home milled maple I have been drying for a few years. It was still a bit warpy. Wasted a lot of the maple but I was able to get enough to make the cabinet face and doors. I don’t have a proper jointer so by glue ups aren’t exactly tight. Not a perfect fit but they will do.
I also wanted to add some non reading lighting so went to IKEA and got a cheap LED system. I cut off the AC adaptor and wired it directly to the DC system. There isn’t much space above the cabinet so it was a challenge to get a cabinet face that would allow a 120 outlet too. I angled the face and I think it looks pretty good now.
Last but not least I put up the wall between the cabin and the galley. Relatively easy but I had to build in place because the cabinets and galley are already fitted so I wasn’t able to just slide the prebuilt wall in. It is insulated.
Electrical Systems on Teardrop Trailer
I am torn about how much electrical capabilities I am going to add to the trailer. Beyond the trailer lights required for licensing, cabin, entry and galley lights are a must have. Then there is AC vs DC capacity.
Since I tend to end up in Walmart parking lots, I went with solar Power. Here is my main set up in test mode.
The panel is the major contributor to how big the tongue box is going to be since that is where it will get stored when I am rolling. Which means the tongue box is going to be pretty big but with a lot of air. Past experience shows that I’ll be able to fill it up though. My main power source is going to DC. I wired up a shore power plug (a boating term for plugging into the dockside electric to run the AC electric and charge the battery). To that end, I bought the highly recommended PD4045 Power converter. It lacks a bit on install instructions though. Probably because there doesn’t seem to be a standard install. Took a lot of reading through the TNTTT.com site to get some crowd sourced info and a couple blown fuses.
There are two electrical runs in the trailer. The first are the cables that supply the blinkers, running and brake lights. Pretty simple and pretty standard to every trailer.
The second is for cabin and galley lighting and power. I have a black (+) and a white (-) wire from the battery to the PD4045. From there, I run cables for all the DC outlets and lights. Pretty straight forward except that I did get a bit fancy on one circuit;
I have porch lights above each door. Because I am lazy, I didn’t want to have to reach across the cabin to turn off either light. I wired them up so that I can switch both lights on and off from each side. That was a lot of work to figure out the wiring and correct switches I needed to get it working even with all the diagrams and helpful input from the TNTTT.com board.
I was pretty happy once I finally got it working.
The other thing I learned is that the PD4045 is not an inverter. It only powers the AC outlets when the trailer is connected to shore power. I began to consider a power inverter for that but the expense is relatively high and overall need for AC power is low. I decided to do a quick rewire on the cabin to change the IKEA lighting to DC and added a DC powered USB plug,
I’ll carry an inverter just in case but their efficiency is pretty low so I’ll use it sparingly
Plumbing the Teardrop Trailer
I decided against having running water in the trailer. Seemed like a hassle compared to just carrying a couple jugs of water. I was going to run a propane gas line from the tongue box to the galley but that too seemed like more trouble than it was worth. I would have had to build the line, drill holes and pass inspection. Instead I have room in the galley to store it while traveling and will just pull it out when I set up. Seems like I’ll avoid having any leaking issues when I am far from home after several hundred miles of valve loosening road vibrations.
Building the Galley
Nothing better than a warm meal around the campfire. As much effort can go into the design of a teardrop kitchen as a boat Galley. Both have minimal space to work with.
This is the big effort. Designing and building a functional kitchen in a small space takes some thinking.
Overall requirements are that I need to fit a camp stove, cooler, the DC power supply and some storage. It has to fit in a 3ft x 5ft space.
I had plenty of milled maple that had been cluttering up the cluttering up the garage for a few years while it dried out and warped into its final shape. I pulled out the planer and table saw and did my best to straighten it out. I ended up with several really big piles of saw dust and wood shavings but came out with passable planks.
I ran into some problems along the build: The grill table in the door, Is pretty heavy for the hinges that I could find to fit the edging. The door sagged at the edge as well as the warpy maple I used. It just didn’t look good. Since I was coming to the end of the build, I decided to just do some sort of quick fix to get by. I ended up just putting a little block of wood the same height as the door was sgging. It will work for the first season but I really need to get better hinges.
Another issue was that the hatch door was far from tightly sealing to the cabin walls. I think it could have been fixed by realigning the hurricane hinge but I just went for worst case and assumed that the ribs went out of curve by the Seattle dampness and the stress from the skins trying to straighten out while I delayed attaching the hatch to the trailer and locking in the latch poles. (My Hypotheses). I rebuilt the door with the old hatch curve templates that I had been tripping over for the past year. I made the door lighter with just the 2 edge ribs and 3 cross beams instead of the 8 ribs with cross beams from before. I did add aluminum spanners up the ribs to ensure that they would keep their curve. I had to order a new hurricane hinge as the old one had gotten pretty bent trying to get the old hatch to fit.
When I finally attached the new hatch, it was still not tight, better but still would let water in. I decided to try readjusting the hinge position. It took a few tries but I finally got it to fit as good as it is going to get. Here’s hoping for dry towing weather.
Hatch lifters are next up.
Teardrop Trailer Tongue Box
The trailer is small and storage will definitely be at a premium. In order to have enough room for the bare essentials, I built a tongue box on the front of the trailer.
The dimensions were pretty much determined by the size of the solar panel. It is probably 15 cubic feet. I used half inch plywood for the walls hoping to save weight. I spanned the box with some curved rips and attached 1 inch hemlock firing strips for the top. Looks good. The tongue weight is creeping up so I am leaving just the open grate for the box bottom. I’ll just put everything in garbage bags to protect against the weather.
The main design issue is that the curved box top fits the front of the teardrop and can open all the way. I ended up hinging the Drivers side of the box. It works fine.
Registration
Washington state home built trailer registration was pretty easy albeit time consuming and a bit scarey.
The first step is to go to a department of licensing office to get it valued and pick up the paperwork you’ll need along the process. This is where all of your receipts are important (or Not). The state takes a percentage of the cost of your trailer as tax. The lower the value the lower the tax. I think I said it was $3000. I am not sure how low I could have gone without raising eyebrows.
I then had to get it weighed. The catch 22 is I had to tow the the unlicensed trailer to a weigh station to get it licensed. In this case, the weigh station was a gravel yard in South Seattle. I have to admit it was a bit emasculating queuing up my Ford Escape and my tiny trailer with 10 ton dump trucks. Then again, I am willing to bet there was a little bit of envy coming my way. All in all pretty easy. On the way home, the trailer hit a pot hole and the axle bounce was enough to knock a fender off. I didn’t realize until I got home, so I frantically retraced my route until I found it lying on the side of the road.
Washington State only inspects trailers on certain days of the the month and the next available was a couple of weeks out. I took the time to reattach the fenders a couple of inches higher and finish up a few little details.
Inspection day finally came. Another day on the road unlicensed though. That.s nerve wracking and worse yet, this would be the first time at highway speeds. I was glad to pull into the inspection bay without anything flying off on the way. The inspection took a couple of hours but I am nit sure what all was inspected. The nice inspector man seemed more concerned about having everything described correctly for the title so that my insurance would cover everything. There didn’t seem to be any road worthiness evaluation going on. I would have loved another set of eyes on my work but that wasn’t part of the service. In the end, the inspector hammered a VIN number into the trailer tongue signed the papers and I was off to get plates.
Back to the licensing office with a couple of hundred dollars and a folder full of forms and before long, I was the proud owner of a street legal Teardrop Trailer.
Epilogue for the build
Since, I didn’t get the opportunity to have a few test runs, my little trailer was tested in production, to coin an old software development phrase. The brake lights stopped working a few days into the trip. I spent a hot day in Salmon Idaho trouble shooting and finally tracked down a loose wire.
That does remind me, I was never able to get the electric brake wires to stay attached. The connections at the wheel would come loose the first time I hit even minor road bumps.
The biggest problem, the one that could have been catastrophic was axle attachment to the frame. I tightened the hanger supports as much as I could and even had someone way stronger than me give them a final twist. but after 20 or 30 miles on a bumpy side road, The axle had slipped to one side of the trailer causing the wheel to rub against the trailer wall. I dangerously jacked the trailer up on the side of the road to fix that but it it kept happening. I ended up having to weld the hanger to the axle.
I also had a wheel hub overheat. Not sure why because it was greased up per the manufacture specs. It ended up cooking the entire assembly and was just short of catching fire when I pulled into a tire store.
With the tire rubbing the trailer wall as much as it had been before the axle got fixed, it was damaged and needed to be replaced. I upgraded to radial tires and the trailer rolled fine after that.
The remote control for my Fantastic Fan went out and without an address, it was a challenge to get it replaced. The Fantastic Fan folks were really great about fixing the problem, I just didn’t have an address for them to sent the new remote to. I didn’t know from one day to the next what a forwarding address would be so I spent a good bit of the summer without a fan. A fan probably would have helped much in the 115 degree heat of a Death Valley night anyway.
Water was a problem. I sealed the trailer as best as I could and the dry western summer weather helped. One afternoon I was driving on I80 between Cheyenne and Laramie and a torrential rainstorm came through. That stretch of I80 is notorious for bad weather. I should have pulled over but there really wasn’t anywhere safe to do that, so I was for all intents and purposes, in a hurricane for an hour. The door seals didn’t not hold up to the deluge at 65 miles per hour. The bed was soaked with road dirty rain. I dried everything out but over the next couple of days but it didn’t foretell a dry future as fall weather approached.
Luckily, it was a dry summer. But as expected I woke up in Arkansas one fall morning with black clouds blocking out the sunrise. I went back to sleep only to be awoken by lightning, thunder and a drip on my head. The seal on the skylight I had put in, had failed. I had recaulked it once before when when I noticed it was a little wet. This time though, it was a steady stream.
It was time to do some major rework on the trailer seals. I was heading towards Cleveland Oh for a few months so was hoping to get some time to work on it there. I was coming into a Cleveland Winter, had no real tools or a place to work, so the work never happened.
I parked the trailer in a storage yard, covered it and took on some other projects. I visited a couple of times and the tarp was barely covering it most times from the wind.
When I finally pulled it out of there for warmer lattitudes, It was under a foot of snow,
I parked it in a trailer/boat storage yard in Georgia and went off to Europe for a couple of months. Over time water had leaked between the wall and the skin where the back door hinge notch was cut out. The Georgia sun had been cooking it and made the inside a playground for mold. The trailer was in need of a complete overhaul.
I however didn’t have a place to do the work so it sat in the field waiting for better days. In the end, a customer at the storage yard saw the trailer and offered me $500 for it. The trailer frame itself was worth twice that. Plus the power distribution, Fantastic Fan and the battery. I realized I was never going to get to fixing it up, so I am now an ex-teardrop trailer owner.
It served it purpose. I learned how to weld, some cool carpentry techniques, DC wiring and how to reverse a trailer. So I can’t really complain. All is good.