Who's the worst BLOGger?

I would probably be in line for that honor if it wasn’t for Mark, whose last BLOG was back in the olden days when a young couple bought a bicycle built for two. Still, I have reason for shame with my own. Oh well.

Joe kindly offered to weld up some reinforcement on my beat-up old trailer, so I could put nice, wooden sides on it and make it a thing of honor. He said something about a day or two, about 2 weeks ago. He did a TON of welding on it and it still needed work, so I asked him for some pointers and endeavored to undertake the task myself. Now, back in the olden days when I last welded, the equipment was a bit simpler. In fact, in those days, the Harbor Freight solution to welding was to take a used-up D-cell battery apart to remove the carbon core. You’d sharpen one end of the carbon rod in a pencil sharpener and hook the other end up to a car battery. Ground what you want welded to the other battery terminal and you’d get a welding spark. If you needed to add steel, you’d grab some baling wire. It took a lot of practice to get a decent weld with that level of equipment. But that was then. Joe has a neat, updated welder and it is a lot easier and more forgiving than back in the day. After a few minutes of instruction I took off welding and was able to finish it up. Now, some of my welds are ugly, make that UGLY! But they have steel where they need to be and none of them have broken (so far). So, the trailer is now about a thousand times stronger than it was, it has metal tubing to keep the tail-light wires safe as they run along the bottom, and it isn’t much wider than my Jeep (reducing the chances of collision), even though it has just as much floor area as it did before. I paid $200 and change for it and I bought about $200 worth of steel and parts, but it is now worth something over $1,000. Joe had some MDO which is a weatherproof, high quality plywood used for highway signs. I am making sides from that material and when I’m done it will have arches in the large side pieces with my company logo on it. I have gotten several jobs from people who have seen me at home centers, so I figure if it is easier to see my sign, I will get more of those.

In the photo of the back of the trailer, where I don’t have the deck mounted, yet, you can see the steel tubing we used to build the frame. It is all welded up tight and a coat of primer paint has been applied so it won’t rust if it gets rain on it.

The photo of the front shows how the front panel is arched above the frame. The two sides will also be like that, and I’ll have signs made up that say “Clear Sky Handy Men” and my phone number right under the arches. That way, it will match my Logo.

Yeah, I know. It doesn’t look like much with all the excess MDO piled in the back and the used signs looking like - well, used signs, but paint covers many ills and it will be looking awesome very soon. I’ll post more photos then.