Budget Harbor Freight Off-Road Trailer Build. Episode 2. Making An Overland Trailer On The Cheap.

today's video is brought to you by empire abrasives whether you're shaping forming or cutting trimming these are the different things you need to be able to do in order to fabricate whatever project it is that you're working on empire braces is a great place to start in order to get the abrasive discs and cut off wheels and stuff that you're going to need in order to build the stuff that you want and one of my favorite things that i like about empire is that it's super budget friendly speaking of which if you want to save a little bit extra money on your next project definitely go to empire but use my coupon code dirt lifestyle for an extra 10 off i just got back from a huge camping trip with my son and i got to catch my breath get some fresh perspective and now i have some fresh ideas that we can apply to this trailer project in the last episode we explored why it makes sense to reuse an old trailer instead of building one from scratch and then we took and we modified this free to me harbor freight trailer to try to give it some sort of a backbone and make it rigid enough to successfully convert it into an overland trailer this week i want to build our walls so we're going to take this quote-unquote utility trailer we're going to build the walls uh maybe depending on the kind of time we have we might mount the roof rack or sorry the rooftop tent on it um we'll see but i at least want to get a frame i'd like to get some walls tacked on there and i actually came with some ideas this weekend as i was sitting around the campfire so it would be nice to have two different heights basically your trail height and then your camp height and i don't want to have any sort of like tubes that slide into each other that's a really common way to do this so once you get to camp you can basically like if you have two square tubes that are fitting inside of one another with a pin going through then you could just push up the whole rooftop tent and now you're higher which is nice um but with four joints like that feeling full of dirt it's gonna end up getting really nasty and really hard to push up and down yourself especially with it being a 200-pound rooftop tent and then you have to have like even force on all four sides so it doesn't bind so i'm not interested in doing that there's another way we could do this and that's gonna be airbags and in the future i might replace these coils with airbags because this is a land rover axle and this was made to go right to a set of airbags so that would be up maybe something we could do in the future but i haven't i'm not at that point yet either however if we just drive onto a set of ramps that make it taller it's going to be taller i know that sounds just like such a simple concept but i don't know why this weekend i was like man maybe i could make it to where this will be shorter while we're driving down the trail which will make it to where it's not going to be as top heavy if i could like drop it drop the drop at six inches lower than i was initially going to build it and then once i get to camp just drive up on some ramps that are six inches so i have these these ramps called easy jacks and you just drive on it and then boom it's six inches um right here at the end now if this isn't tall enough i could always build my own set and i might but for now i'm just gonna plan on bringing a set of these with me and we'll see even with even with me using these i might build my own set anyway i'm interested in building stuff like this uh actually let me know in the comments if you'd like to see uh something like that homemade but anyway you can see where i'm going with this so now what my plan is to build it a little bit shorter so it's not as top heavy when you're going down the trail um and i'm going to make it to where we can basically just drive on something taller whenever we need the extra height [Music] i think the easiest way to make sure that we have a squared up trailer is gonna be use a combination of levels and tape measures so the first thing we're gonna do is level out this trailer and take all the weight off the suspension i'm gonna use two levels on each piece of material to make sure that i can level it out as close as possible on two different axes then i throw a couple of light tacks just to hold everything in place and use a series of magnets and clamps to hold everything together they'll give me a roughly cobbled together skeleton that we can later mount our shell [Music] i made a little bit of a mistake here but i didn't want to waste any material so what i should have done is split my 45 degree angle in half and cut that angle at a 22 and a 22 then the mating surfaces of these two angles would have met a lot cleaner but instead of wasting material i'm just going to scab in a little 90 degree section weld it together and then clean it up with an angle grinder [Music] [Music] the skeleton of this thing is built out of three by one by 16 gauge rectangular tubing and the reason i chose that is i wanted to make up for i wanted to be able to save as much weight with the skeleton as possible but still be structurally sound enough to trust the weight of this thing and i have no doubts at all that this is strong enough to trust the weight the biggest caveat is that when you go as thin as 16 gauge if it takes an impact you've destroyed the structural integrity of that tube so we need to protect it i'm almost embarrassed to say how thick we're going we've got to put some thick skin on this thing because i got to be real with myself i'm going to roll this we're gonna put it on its side i'm just hard on parts at the very least it's gonna be constantly getting hit and inundated by tree branches and stuff like that so we're gonna use eighth inch for the walls which is wild that is way thick but again i have to be real i gotta think how comfortable am i rolling this over with a 16 gauge wall uh not comfortable at all how about uh you know 12 gauge i mean still pretty uncomfortable i don't want to have to rebuild this if i roll it over or let's just say every time i roll it over it could roll over more than once i'm just hard on parts so we're going to do eighth inch because i know how strong eighth inch can be and when we marry the eighth inch and we weld it to this skeleton it's gonna be a really nice rigid box and it's gonna be able to take an impact that eighth inch is gonna take a really solid impact without even denting so even though it's gonna destroy the some of the vinyl wrap that we're going to use on this it's going to be able to be a strong structure that we're able to use for a long long time to come so the next step that i want to do is i want to start to finish weld this skeleton and i i want the i want the skin to help keep things from warping any of you that have welded something like this know that it's easy to slowly turn your project into a banana so in order to resist that i'm basically going to weld little areas that i won't be able to reach once the skin's on and then i'll put the skin on and wherever you put the skin is going to help keep things from warping and twisting because that eighth inch skin is going to be super strong [Music] as i'm working i'm thinking about how i want to finish the rest of the layout on this trailer i mean a lot of this is still up in the air where the different doors are going to go where i want to put any sort of like drawers or cabinets and because of that i kind of changed gears and i decided to start working on just the stuff that i know i know that i want to put the roof on and i know i could put that rear lower panel on but because i don't exactly know where the rest of this is going to go yet i decided to move on and start building a roof rack [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] done [Music] [Applause] [Music] as you can see i only put two panels on i i changed my mind about putting all the panels on yet because the layout is changing in my head as i'm working on this and i'm starting to see different ideas come to life like where i would put doors and things open it's all kind of changing and forming and so i want to leave that loose for now as you can see i put a tongue box on it just to see how it would look and so i'm kind of thinking about moving the spare and using a tongue box whereas originally i wasn't going to use the tongue box so we'll see all that's up in the air i'm going to deal with that in the next episode for now we have a 15 gallon water tank that we can mount and what i did it originally it was going to go across here but i don't want to cut that main beam in order to fit it and i want it to be low it's going to be under the chassis so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to orient it this way and i checked if i uh fully compress the suspension it doesn't hit the only thing that's going to hit is there's a little bracket right there that i'm going to cut off in a future video we'll cut all the brackets we don't need off of this and we're going to modify this axle to be a trailer axle but for now i at least know that our tank can be mounted there so that's what we're gonna do we're gonna mount a tank there and then i'm gonna build a battery box because i've got this big old battery that i had sitting outside and it'll work for mocking up a dual battery box so i'm going to put that on this side so we're going to do is we're going to have really low weight all 15 gallons of water it's going to be nice and low on that side then on this side we'll have two big old batteries that are also going to hang underneath the chassis and the whole point is that we want and we're going to armor it all don't worry it's all going to have skid plates and stuff the whole point is to keep lots of weight down low we want to make sure that this can resist flipping as much as possible because once we mount the tent up there that is going to make a big difference as to where the weight is influencing the the handling characteristics of this trailer [Music] [Applause] [Music] when i bought this tank the original plan was to build some sort of a frame to hold the tank in place and then skin it with some kind of a skid plate system but once i started to check it out and actually mock it up i decided that it'd be way easier to just combine both of those ideas and build a skid plate that is also the mounting plate this means i can use less material i can mock it up even faster and even save a little bit of money in the process [Music] so [Music] i have to end the video i um well i don't have to end the video mentally i need to end the video i just made a 2500 mistake so this one lens this is my favorite lens by far it's canon rf 50 uh 2.8 15 to 35 outstanding lens for youtube stuff it's wide angle and uh i dropped the camera and and so i broke the lens so i'm just not in a good like mental mood to be creative um i'll probably pick back up tomorrow or the day day after and i'll start to continue this budget trailer it just got a lot less budget for me but it's the cost of doing business i guess the glass is always half full so even though my stomach hurts and i throw up i'm thankful that for the amount of content that i put out and the amount of money that i've invested in all this gear this is like the first really big loss for me so i uh i'm gonna end the video so i guess here right now i'll cut some b-roll of what the tank looks like it fits in there it's high clearance high clearance it looks pretty rad i'm really excited about the direction that this project is going i think that we even though i have to cut this video short um i think we made a lot of progress here you can see the direction that we're heading i've got so many cool little things that i want to add to this trailer in the next couple of videos of this series and i can't wait to share them with you but right now i need to go in and tell my wife what just happened and we need to decide how to move forward because sema is in like a week and a half and this is like my most important lens so anyway if you help support the channel we you can go to thunderlifestyle.com my wife just informed me this morning that our new t-shirts and sweatshirts just went live today holiday season is coming up these shirts are awesome her and the guy that is helping us with our website did such a great job designing these shirts i promise these are the coolest shirts we've had so far so check those out if you want to help support us in other ways we have a patreon account then that is linked on our our website as well so we do a lot with our patreon community it is great the the episode that i just launched so i try to do a video a week for patreon outside of youtube and the video that i just did this week was all about firearms it was about off-road firearms so i'm not gonna do firearms video for youtube but with a night one of the nice things about patreon is i can do cool videos like that and not worry about what the algorithm thinks or is gonna do because it's an unlisted video it's a video that's just for the patreon community so if you're into that kind of thing or if you want to come wheeling with me join that community because that's where all that stuff takes place if you want to follow me on social media i'm at lifestyle nate we'll see you next time [Music] do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] you

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 246,765

Keywords: harbor freight, harbor freight trailer, camping trailer, overland trailer, expedition trailer, off road trailer, overland trailer build, diy trailer, diy camper trailer, harbor freight trailer modifications, off road trailer build, off road trailer camper, off road trailer diy, off road trailer hitch, off road trailer kit, harbor freight trailer build, harbor freight trailer camper build, overlanding trailer, diy camper, diy teardrop, homemade trailer, camping trailer diy

Id: _-V95wxGhKc

Length: 16min 7sec (967 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 24 2021