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

ever since i started building things and sharing it online i've been requested over and over and over to build some sort of an off-road trailer and actually have a couple different ones that i want to build over time so we're gonna start with the easy one little easy-ish and that is gonna be basically a gear carrier with a rooftop tent mounted on top we're gonna do a lot of this build with recycled parts and a friend of mine gave me an old harbor freight trailer to start with right away i know a bunch of you are wondering why why reuse this old harbor freight trailer instead of build a new one because you're going to see in the series it's going to cost us a few grand to build a cool trailer that is going to check all the boxes so for basically for another couple hundred dollars of material i could build a rigid straight uh rigid frame from scratch and it'll be a lot stronger than this harbor freight trailer well the short answer is that in washington right now you can't even schedule a vehicle inspection and if i built a trailer from scratch in order for me to get a vin and for it to get be approved and all that other stuff uh i would have to go get an inspection and i called you can't even schedule one and uh they don't even know when you will be able to schedule them again so is it gonna be six months a year year and a half who knows i have no idea how long it's gonna be so we have a vin on this trailer we have a um we have a title we have a clean title it it's not bent by the way it's just that flimsy that it looks crooked like that so i called the department of transportation modify i mean if it was too expensive you'd have to have a inspection and i asked them how much of this trailer can i modify before i need an inspection legally and basically the way the law reads there is some gray area here we can't modify the structure of the of the trailer when it comes to changing where things are located but we can modify it with welding we can modify it i theoretically can modify it by shortening it because we're not changing the shape or structure we are just changing like the we're removing material and that's a really big gray area but i just want this to be as legal as possible and is easy for us to go get um go just renew the license so what we're going to do is we're going to use this as a utility trailer and i do know for a fact that with utility trailer you can build sides for them in washington state um and that's completely legal so we're gonna do is we're gonna weld it in a way that's legal we're gonna make we're gonna get rid of all these flimsy joints we're gonna build a we're gonna build walls on top of it and that will be the rest of our trailer but they're still gonna be the original structure underneath the original bones and that will make it to where as soon as i'm done all i have to do is go get just go re-register it in my name because i have a clean title and i have a perfectly legal uh trailer to use on the street here so that's a long way to get around but that is why we're gonna reuse harbor freight parts instead of just building the entire thing from scratch the original design of this trailer is actually kind of cool you can fold it in half you can put it in a shed or you can put it inside your shop and have it not take up a whole lot of space but this has big pros and cons the pro is portability but the con is strength and long-term reliability i already removed the center hinge and so now we're going to try to weld everything up as to one solid unit i want to get rid of all these bolts that bolted this together not because the weld is going to be necessarily stronger but because if we can eliminate a bolt and we can replace it with a weld it means that the bolt won't be able to loosen up on us from a bunch of washboards and this trailer slowly start to come apart so this step of the process is essentially trying to turn this trailer into one big piece of steel that's all welded together and then figure out how to mount a backbone on it because i want to put a center piece that's going to run from nose to tail to make sure that this is really strong if we need to use the trailer to pull anyone out who might be stuck behind us on the trail [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] as you can see our little budget trailer is coming together so we've got a new mounting point this is gonna this goes from nose to tail and this is to make it to where if we're pulling someone out it is a nice sturdy connection from the front to back make it tour we're not gonna put any extra undue stress on this and just by adding this one beam down the middle made this a hundred times uh more rigid i couldn't believe how flimsy this thing was when i was moving around in the shop so yeah we added a little bit of weight with that center beam but we added a ton of strength which is definitely what we want to do when we build something that we're going to take off-road so the rear axle this is out of a 2003 land rover discovery when a lot of people build budget trailers they are just using stuff they have laying around that is exactly what our goal is on this trailer in the future we're going to build a very expensive essentially no budget trailer but for this first one i want to do it with stuff that i've laying around that i've been wanting to just have not sitting around and have it actually on a project so that's why we're going to reuse the land rover suspension we're going to reuse the coils the arms and all that and we're going to reuse this axle because it's a perfectly good axle and should have no problem trusting the weight of a of a lightweight trailer like this we're using 35s because these are tires that i had laying around and as much as i would have loved to have done a 37 or a 40 i don't have those laying around so 35s are what we're going to use now the footprint of this trailer right now this lower deck is like 56 inches or something like that we're going to come up at a 45 and then go to an upper deck that is going to be six foot i kind of put together a rough drawing so you guys can see what the basic plan is there's going to be a whole bunch of things that are going to change from the level we're at now to this but this is the basic idea so we're gonna have a 15 gallon water tank i want to have it nice and low because people roll these off-road trailers all the time and i don't want to be one of these people so i want to have lots of weight down low and so even though we're going to sacrifice a little bit of ground clearance it'll be higher than the rear axle and whatnot i just want to have all that weight down nice and low and then we're going to have the bat go up at a 45 like i said the upper deck is going to be six foot this lower deck is like 56 or something like that and i've got a whole bunch of plans for tube work and fenders and rear bumper and all kinds of stuff that i want to do to this in the future this is going to be kind of tall because i want the bottom of the rooftop tent to be taller than me i'm 6'1 so it needs to be like 6'3 or so it doesn't need to be super high but i want it to be higher than me and the reason for that is because when i fold this out i want it to be basically an awning that i'll be able to cook under and there's actually an awning that zips into the tent that we're going to use that's going to make this even better so that is the basic plan of how we're going to move forward and now i need to connect this suspension to the trailer and i've got a i gotta spend some time thinking of the best way to do that [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so [Music] ladies and gentlemen we have a roller which is what i wanted i wanted to have a roller because i don't want this to stop progress in the shop meaning if this is in the way and i can't you know i can't pull out the land rover or i can't work on something pull something in to get it ready for a trip i want to be able to just scoot this out of the way and then back into the way to work on it in the future so right now we have a very lightweight roller that i can just move around and work on it as i need to we have a set of wheel spacers well they're actually wheel adapters because 5 on 5 is way easier to find cheap wheels and so i bought some wheel adapters that i'm going to have to modify to work the way we need it but either way i've got wheel adapters on there that go from land rover to five on five and uh yeah five on five just to make it easy to get a decent set of wheels for a really inexpensive price the suspension the way we mounted this needs gusseting and there's gonna be like a whole frame behind it that's gonna support it so this i just had enough gas in my welder basically to get this system mounted it's gonna it's super strong and all but it's not gonna be good in an impact so we're going to add some big gussets out of the front and then once we build the frame behind it that's going to hold our water tank that is going to make this super rigid and super strong give us a lot of weight down low which is what we're looking for so yeah we'll we'll start tackling that in the next one so we'll mount our water tank we'll start building up in the next one um we need to mount some shocks and possibly either panhard bar or i can go get another one of the this came with a watts link so if i go to a junkyard i could get the stuff to do the watts link and then that would help it with the side to side because we i mean we've got a little bit of side to side it's probably not going to be too bad but i want this to ride super stable and smooth so we'll either do a watts link or we're going to do a track bar also we're going to mount shocks and i'll show you why that bounce that happens with leaf springs too if we've got no shocks but now weight helps that a lot but you can still get in a rhythm off-road if you go to a through a few bumps that are just the right just the right height and you do it at just the right speed you can get a buck and bronco back here and shocks will help that tremendously so we're going to add shocks and a few of the things and in the future videos i think we did pretty good today this was believe it or not you know this is like a week of filming to get here and uh a lot of it the the filming takes time but a lot of it when i'm building something like this like i didn't draw anything out really i just there's lots of moments that you don't see on the video where i just kind of stand back and i look at it and i just think where is going to be the best way to go from here so there's a lot of ideas that get formulated as we go but now that we have a game plan and we have like a foundation the next episode i think is going to be a huge one i think we're gonna make a ton of progress in the next episode and uh i'm really looking forward to it and i gotta come clean i have a lot of anticipation for how negative the comments are gonna be in this series i think these are gonna be the worst that i've ever had my comments on the fabrication videos are so much worse than the comments and uh adventure videos if you're having fun out in the woods it's hard for people to criticize but when you're in the shop and you're building stuff and you're being creative it's non-stop people telling you you did it wrong um and it's not always intended to be bad a lot of times it is constructive criticism but as someone who used to manage people for a living and i was a foreman plumber for many years i can tell you that it's hard to find a person who's good at getting constructive criticism from one boss as someone who used to be boss to many different people over the years and those of you who are in management you know exactly what i'm talking about so if i'm a little bit more dormant on the uh on the comment section for these videos it's because i anticipate this is going to be it's just so overwhelming even when the criticism is constructive to take in hundreds of people's recommendations and hundreds of people saying why didn't you do it this way i can't believe you used a dis disco axle i can't believe you used a harbor freight trailer um why would you paint it when you could use raptor liner i mean it's it is just way overwhelming so i don't want to be insulting or anything like that i know that this doesn't come from a place of negativity for most of you so it's not being received that way however if i feel like i'm overwhelmed and the computer is making me feel bad feelings i'm just going to go back in the shop and build so if you see me a little more dormant in the comments for these videos it is simply because it's very overwhelming to have uh constructive criticism from hundreds of people it you can only digest so much before you have to just walk away because it'll be people also that are giving you recommendations that completely are at opposite ends so i i hope that that doesn't come off whiny or anything that's not at all i know the the youtube space is just full of this and uh i am more than willing to take in as much as i can but just understand that if i'm i'm gonna answer as many of you as i can before i can't digest anymore and i just have to come out here and build because this is my happy place so i hope you enjoyed the video if you did give it a thumbs up i appreciate all of you guys who give these videos a thumbs up it helps a ton with the algorithm those of you that subscribe it is huge it's the only reason that we can continue to do these videos is about you guys helping this channel grow and and just continue to go on this dirt this direction and this trajectory if you want to help support the channel and go to the lifestyle.com we have t-shirts hats neck gators sweatshirts all kinds of stuff we even have beanies and stuff i believe double check that my wife handles that side of this and we have a link to our patreon account um tomorrow actually i'm leaving for our next patreon fan ride we're going over to eastern washington and spending a couple days exploring over there so if you're into any of that kind of stuff and you want to join that community we have a link to our patreon account on our website as well if you want to follow me on social media i'm at dirt lifestyle nate we'll see you next time you

Channel: Dirt Lifestyle

Views: 450,618

Keywords: harbor freight, overland trailer, diy camper, camping trailer, overlanding trailer, expedition trailer, diy teardrop, offroad trailer, homemade trailer, off road trailer, overland trailer build, diy trailer, harbor freight trailer, overland trailer diy, overland trailer setup, overland trailer build diy, diy camper trailer, diy camper build, camping trailer build, camping trailer ideas, camping trailers under $10 000, off road camper trailer, roof top tent trailer build

Id: sucLm4sv4WA

Length: 15min 58sec (958 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 17 2021