Man, I’ll be sleeping good tonight!: Sunday, April 11, 2010
We had a really enjoyable weekend, I can’t say I got a lot of work related things done but it was the variety of things that made it exciting. For one Alberic was here this weekend and as always we did our typical fun stuff.
One project I’d been working on for awhile is the restoration of a beautiful utility trailer that I had begun last year but never gotten to finish. At five foot wide and eight and a half feet long, this trailer is sort of like a small rack truck. All four sides, or and combination of can be removed for hauling just about any size or type of load from a stack of hay bales to a small tractor. I also have a pair of ramps for it in the event you have to drive something up on it, to load it.
Last year I had completed stripped the frame down, sandblasted the frame, painted it, and then re-wired all the electrical stuff, new tires, greased all the bearing and axles … the whole nine yards. I also replaced the old floor deck with all new three-quarter inch outdoor plywood flooring. Then I hooked up my spray guns and paint that with the toughest outdoor enamels money could buy. All that was painted in black.
The last thing to be done was to refinish the actual racks that go around the trailer. I took one rack at a time, dis-assembled it, painted the slats John Deere green, wire-wheeled all the carriage bolts of rust and painted those black. There were four of these racks and I had finished two of them, so I had two more to go.
Al and I started on one of them this weekend. He did most of the painting and I did most of the dis-assembling. When we’re all finished (maybe two weeks from now), I’ll probably put it up for sale. I don’t think I’ll be using like I had once planned too. The only other thing I want to do, is some pin stripping on it, again, probably in John Deere green and yellow. It’s the strongest and sharpest looking utility trailer you’ve ever seen! … and felt so good getting it to the point where it’s finally getting back together again.
I have this great workshop that I haven’t used much in the past year and felt so good to be back out in the shop doing something physical like that … especially with this great weather we’ve been having. I’d been thinking of turning it into a wheelchair repair and rebuilding shop. I love to work on things like that … always gives back a sense of accomplishment. I have great spray painting and sand blasting equipment … so it makes the whole job do-able right from within my shop.
I got carried away with that story … anyway, while we were waiting for some of the paints to dry, Alberic spotted our “RS Salamander”! That’s the small dingy that we use to go out in our ponds and maintain them. When Al was younger those ponds were like lakes to him, but now that he’s older, I let him out by himself. He usually takes a hook with him and sort of dredges the bottom for branches and stuff that have fallen in over the winter.
