Bloom Lake Farms

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This is our Small Trailer

Our home built 8 ton dredge trailer

	WOW what did you buy! We needed a trailer to launch our dredge. It needed to be 32 feet long, and to buy one was too expensive! What I needed was a mobile home, and throw away the house part! This seemed like a lot of work, so I found a company that already does that work, and sells the frames! It's a wonder I didn't get a ticket towing this thing. The axles are near the rear so turning was nearly impossible! It shook at anything over 40 MPH, it seemed to take days to get the 20 miles back home. But we made it, and started cutting it up right in the street
This thing is 65 feet long, the truck is another 24 feet. The neighbors where out today! They always see me out in the drive making something, this is the same summer we rebuilt the dredge too
	The first order of business was to cut it in half to get it in the driveway. We chained the 2 cut sections together and backed it up the drive to start the real work. If you notice, the top picture has wire stringers. We needed heavy steel stringer between the frame rails to carry the 8 ton dredge.
One by one, we cut out the wire stringers and tacked in solid ones. We built a wooden jig to help flip the frame over to make welding easier. We used a bumper jack to get it started and a winch to finish the job getting it upright. Then we'd push it over center, and lower it the other way to flip it.
	With all of the stringers done, we need to re-do the axles. The frame originally had 3 axles near the rear. We wanted 4 axles near the center, so we flipped the frame to make it easier to weld the axle supports in. Then we carefully flipped it back and installed the axles.
We're almost finished, we covered the ends of the frame rails with buckets. They where just inches from the sidewalk, and very sharp.
	To finish the project, we needed to built a tongue to tow with, a removable set of lights for the rear, and wire the brakes. We finished everything about 4 days after the city inspector told us we couldn't fabricate a trailer in our driveway.. oops, who knew we couldn't do that?
Nothing looked bad with all 4 axles under 8 tons of dredge.
	We finished the trailer and used it to haul the dredge pipe up north that summer.
We pulled it with my F-350 truck, we estimated the trailer and load at 6 tons. The trailer and load tracked fine at 70 MPH. Not bad for our first trailer!
	We towed the pipe up north the summer before, with an estimated weight of 4 tons of pipe. But now we needed to carry the 8 ton dredge. We bought new tires for this trip so we didn't have blowouts. The axles and springs are rated for 8 tons, but they where old and rusty. I got a bad feeling about this load!
A scary moment when the crane set almost 8 tons on top of a that homebrew trailer. I half expected the springs to collapse or something to break. Wow, it worked fine!
	No time to celebrate, off we go!
back to the top Wow, this one was a mess, we needed a way to get our Mudcat dredge from the storage yard to the lake. We didn't have a way to unload a semi truck at the lake, so we needed something that we could work with ourselves. A trailer big enough for our needs was out of the question ($$budget) so in the summer of 1999 we bought a 65 foot mobile home trailer and built our own! We found a local guy that bought and sold used mobile home. He scrapped out the bad one, selling the parts for repairs. We found a straight frame with 3 good axles, paid our money and towed it home, it was 65 x 12. When I pulled up in front of the house it went from one end of our lot to the other end, plus a few feet on the neighbors. We made another run for some more frame steel for the stringers and another axle. We got 4 axles and all of the steel we could want for $350, then the fun started. After work and weekends we toiled non-stop for a month to get it ready. Everyday cutting, grinding, welding until dark, hoping this would work. My neighbor does structural analysis for a living, everyday he came over to take a look at the progress. He offered many suggestions that we used to make it road worthy, thanks Dave! Later that summer as the project was near complete, the city inspectors finally caught on to us and made us quit working. We begged 4 more days to finish the axles, wire the lights and brakes, they gave us 3! Frantic, we took some vacation days and finished the work. Then we moved it to the local storage lot where we also kept our dredge pipe. We loaded up the pipe at the lot, and later headed north with it that same summer. It pulled fine at 70 MPH! It stayed the winter up north loaded with pipe. In the spring of 2000, we unloaded the pipe at Bloom Lake and brought the empty trailer home again. For the dredge trip, we decided to put new tires on it, we re-checked the bearing and wheel lugs and took it up to the crane yard where we had the dredge stored during the rebuild. We loaded it up and drove it north with a rented 5 yard dump truck. I miss-calculated something, and had the weight too far back on the trailer. Anything over 45 MPH would start to sway the trailer (and the truck too!) that made me want to pee my pants! So I slowed down, and accepted the drive at 45, and once out of the city it was fine driving. We stopped for fuel 3 times on the way up, mostly to stretch a bit, it was a very tense drive that took all day. So many things could go wrong along the way, I was a wreck for that 6 hour trip, welds could break, tires blowout, springs collapse, axle fall off, who knows. It all worked as planned, and I learned a lot from this project, welding, fabrication, structural stuff, multi-axle design and the bounds of city ordinances.

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