Valiant Off-Road Teardrop Trailer Full Walkthrough

hi I'm Jordan McCullough owner of valiant expedition trailers you're here in valance new shop our production facility where we manufacture everything from small Overland trailers to large teardrop style trailers like you see behind me as well as anything else the customer can come up with all right give me less than 10 seconds before we get into this walkthrough video to say my name is drew the channels playing with sticks we are devoted to small camper trailers and helping you get outdoors in a more simple meaningful way with tips and tricks videos if that sounds like you make sure you subscribe below but let's get right into this video everybody knows what the best campsites don't have a number and take five bucks to park yet what we're trying to do is get people to get to those places where they really want to be those river banks or those mountain tops wherever they think they're really going to enjoy their weekend but also have some comforts at home over landing allows you to get to all of these extreme places but it doesn't necessarily come with all the comforts of home a nice warm bed a place to get out of the rain what have you so that's why we've created this new style of teardrop which kind of marriage is both so you get all of the off-road advantage of a traditional Overland trailer but all the comforts of a traditional teardrop so on the front of the trailer you'll see here we have our tongue storage box useful for anything from firewood to tools whatever you need to throw in there this is a really nice aluminum locking toolbox doesn't add a lot of weight but it keeps all your stuff safe you'll also notice that we put a nice large tongue platform on all of our trailers reason being once you take it you never know what you're gonna find you need to store up there so this is really easy for a customer to modify on their own bolt on whatever accessories they think they might need extra storage racks or whatever they think the other thing that you'll notice that we do on a lot of our trailers is the lock and roll articulating hitch now this is an off-road articulating hitch meaning it can spin 360 degrees without coming decoupled from the vehicle it's also a really nice theft deterrent because it's tough for somebody to come and grab on to this and drive off with your trailer unless they have the mating portion that hooks into their vehicle which is not a very common item to have running around so underneath the trailer here you'll notice that we use timbren independent axles now these are one-of-a-kind in their field because they allow you to have nice suspension set up on your trailer that gives it a few inches of travel without bouncing all over the place but the big advantage is there's no axle running underneath the trailer so that gives you full ground clearance whatever your distance is here which on this particular trailer is 22 inches that's how much ground clearance you have so if your vehicle is gonna make it over an obstacle this trailer is going to make it over that same obstacle no problem so all of our teardrops come standard with extended spindles to fit oversized off-road tires so you can fit 32 inch tires and swap it right over to your vehicle if you ever run into the situation where your vehicle has a flat and that's more important you can even scavenge a wheel right off of here roll it onto your vehicle will match the hub pattern for you and then you're off to the races so up here you'll notice we have a roof rack on top of this trailer this is a modified version of our Overland racks that we put on truck beds we've just chopped it down so it's not sitting up so high so this is really nice if you have maybe a couple of friends that want to tag along with you for the weekend you can put a rooftop tent up here and then sleep your extra couple of friends while you guys stay inside where it's nice and warm they can be up in the tent so here you see this is a piece this is a leg off of one of our Overland racks which is what we've modified to create the roof rack for this trailer its 3/16 pulled rolled steel it's extremely strong you're not going to bend this or beat it up in any way shape or form it's all been laser-cut and then it's all been bent very precisely by manufacturer in Seattle everything that we do we manufacture out of the USA so when you start talking about things like 3/16 steel a lot of people immediately will think oh my gosh this thing must weigh a ton but in fact it really doesn't I'll show you how easy it is to move one hand and then I can move it around on my own let's close the rear hatch because somebody's going to say well that rear hatch is open so it's making it seem lighter when you start talking about having a full steel frame like this a square tubing steel frame which is more robust than anybody else uses at the moment start people start to think about weight and how heavy this thing must be but really one person can grab it and move it around really easy I can move it around the shop anywhere it needs to go which is really convenient especially if you're using that you know you have a small two-car garage or whatever or if you're in a situation outside where you need to detach it from the vehicle and move it around really easy so when you're building a trailer you need to think about a couple of things tongue weight is really important which we just demonstrated but also how well it tows the greater your tongue weight the better it tows because that weight is centered forward if you have all of your weight rear biased then the trailer is going to tend to lift up your vehicle and it's going to start to wander so what we did with this is we built the frame and we built the chassis first in cash basically a 3d CAD software and then found where its center of gravity was once we had the center of gravity then we knew where to place our axles to make sure that we had just enough tongue weight to make it nice and stable going down the road but not enough to where you couldn't lift it and move it around with one person your traditional style teardrops do have a rear gate that opens up but it doesn't actually give you much of a roof area over your head so what we have done and what you'll notice with a lot of similar style square drops to this most companies manufacture a rear door that swings out to the side ours is a vertical lift on a hydraulic prop now our base model trailers come with storage standard in the rear back here all of them will have this rear lift gate which is really nice because it provides you a roof essentially so you can keep yourself out of the weather our base models include shelving back here just for storage as well as a pass-through to access your stuff from the main cabin so with the galley package you'll see right here we have a Dometic 3 burner stove as well as the stainless steel sink and faucet with a hose bib attachment here so when you're out here cooking at night we have an LED strip on the ceiling which creates a really nice warm glow around you you can see what you're doing nicely and then you also have led under cabinet lights as well so you can actually see your cooking surface you don't get any shadows cast it just makes a really nice comfortable area for you to sit out here and cook at night so with the Galle package you get this on-demand water heater that's a camp chef 5 litre water heater and then you get with that this is a shower attachment and this just attaches right to your sink faucet so you turn your hot water on and then you can come out here and you can actually have a shower which is really convenient and below you'll see we have our power supply power supply on board here is 290 amp hour deep cycle RV batteries it's enough power to run all of the equipment in here for a full weekend without needing a recharge down here we also have a thousand watt inverter so that's enough to run a coffee maker and small appliances like that and for those creature comforts we also have an onboard genius smart charger it's the best charger available on the market you plug it in and no matter what the charge is it takes care of it if it needs an emergency recharge the charger knows how to handle that no switches buttons to press just plug it in so one thing a lot of our customers asked for is a trailer hitch on the back and there's a couple of different uses for that a lot of people end up using it for mountain bike racks that's a very popular use it's really nice to be able to throw your bikes on the back go out for a weekend biking trip also for storage baskets so you can get a large cargo basket to slide in there and then you can throw your firewood or whatever else on there have yourself a little bit of extra storage for going down the road because even it doesn't matter how big your trailer is you always find that you're taking more stuff than you have room for so another thing that people ask us a lot about is our D rings that we put on the frame now there's two back here and there's also two up front on the tongue the D rings are extremely useful if you get yourself into a situation where you're stuck in the mud or whatever you can hook up a tow strap to it and you can pull your whole trailer out of mud the other reason we put these D rings on here is we need a way to hang the frame in the oven when we powder coat so the entire frame as well as the body panels of the trailer are all powder coated the frame is powder coated steel and the body panels are all powder coated aluminum now that creates an extremely durable finish and our goal is that this trailer should look the same in ten years as it does today it is much more durable than paint which is what traditional RV manufacturers use so the warranty on our teardrops is the same as anything that we build it's a lifetime manufacturer warranty meaning if you have a defect that's a product of manufacturing we will take care of it for as long as the trailer is in existence doesn't matter if you were the original owner or if you purchase it secondhand if it's one of our trailers and it's got an issue we'll take care of it so one of the big complaints that we hear from customers that have owned traditional style of teardrops in the past is how cramped they feel inside and how difficult it can be to get in and out of it feels like you're crawling into a coffin sometimes so what we've done is put an extra large door on this and makes it really easy to climb in and out of even with the mattress laid down you've got plenty of room you're not going to hit your head yeah so you're 6:1 just to give folks a idea the height here so like in the pictures this looks like a pretty small trailer but in real life it is you'll see that we have a trifold queen-size mattress so what that means is it folds up into three different sections and right now when it's folded up like this it forms a bench up against the back wall you'll also notice that there's a table on the back wall which folds down and then folds back up for use and it's really nice because if you're a couple you can sit on each side of the table and you can sit there and have your meal or whatever g64 will have to build you an extra inch and can you do that sure of course you do anything but all of this is totally customizable to the customer we meet and plan all this stuff out before build ever begins so inside you'll also notice we have a 3,000 BTU heater mounted on the wall back there that's a propane heater that thing really cranks up the heat in this place you turn it on low for just a little bit and then leave it on pilot after that these inch-and-a-half insulated walls really help to keep in the heat the floor is insulated walls ceiling even the back door is also insulated so the whole thing is totally set up for nice model trailer includes one window and one door and it's completely up to you where you want those if you want to add an additional window we can do that you've probably seen that this one has a window on both sides and it has one door there are benefits and pitfalls to both less windows means more interior room for cabinet space and things like that but also less natural light coming in all of our windows have a sliding pane as well as a screen and the door does the same this door this bottom panel slides up and there's a screen and then we also have a roof vent so with that open with all this stuff open if it's a hot summer day you can really get a nice airflow going through there so one thing I get asked a lot about is the trim work on the outside because people say that looks a lot different than anything I've ever seen and traditional RV manufacturers use a seam that relies on glue as well as screws to hold there their wall material to the actual framework of the body what we do before we lay any siding or aluminum on we take double-sided putty tape and lay that inside over the framework apply our wall material which in this case is aluminum and then we put another layer of single sided putty tape over the top of that so you have two sealing surfaces one on the inside one on the outside so this aluminum then this is black angled aluminum this is just to cap over the top of that putty tape this doesn't do any of the sealing all the ceiling as far as weather proofing is done by that putty tape we then rivet through the outside of this aluminum to secure everything together and these rivets are all sealed rivets so although you'll see a hole they're not actually open to the inside they are watertight sealed rivets which are also passing through two layers of putty tape so you're not going to get any water inside this thing and you also don't have to worry about having to reseal your camper later like you do in traditional style construction so we've had a lot of interest in a ton of requests for builds on these teardrops so we're gonna be cranking those out over the coming months but we also have a lot of our small Overland trailers to build as well it still hits home for a lot of people to have a small utilitarian package that they can throw in a small storage space but they can also take anywhere throw a rooftop tent on it and it'll go anywhere that they need to so I'm gonna start on my next one this week so if you enjoyed that video right up here we have another video of traditional tear drop versus off-road tear drop helping you find which tear drop best fits your lifestyle and then right here we have that small expedition trailer from valiant trailers that Jordan was talking about in the video if you want to see icebergs and glaciers and great Alaska scenery check this one out otherwise check our playlists and subscribe below if you haven't for more small camper trailer videos

Channel: Playing with Sticks

Views: 878,198

Rating: 4.9086952 out of 5

Keywords: teardrop trailer off road, camping overland trailer, off grid trailers, offroad 4X4 trailer, teardrop trailer offroad, offroad trailers, overland trailer, teardrop trailer, overland, camping, offroad camper, timbren suspension, offroad campers, compact trailer, teardrop overland trailer, expedition trailer, camper trailer off road, 2020 overland, teardrop camper, best teardrop trailer, off grid trailer, playing with sticks, small camper, off road teardrop, off road, off-road

Id: iMCbT1XxV-w

Length: 14min 7sec (847 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 05 2020