Trailer

 

    A lot of people ask me about my trailer, so I thought I'd make a page telling my story.

    I do a lot of track days, so I have to move my bike from place to place a lot. I used to borrow, then rent trucks. Renting costs about $175 a day. That adds up very quickly.  One day at Home Depot I saw a 4' x 8' utility trailer kit for sale. The nice thing was it folded in half for easy storage. Since I was driving a 4-cylinder Volkswagen at the time, I didn't want a big thing. It was $225 when I purchased it in 1995. (I haven't seen them at Hope Depot, but they can be found online here.)

    It wasn't hard to build. Once built you have to get it inspected, which was $30. Here in Maryland non-commercial vehicles don't have annual inspections, so all I do is renew my tags once a year.

    I elected not to install the plywood bed to save weight. Initially I used a pine board bolted to the middle to put my bike on.

    This worked fine for a while, but the more track days you do, the more stuff you want to carry. Also, I couldn't use the trailer just to haul stuff.  We had a building materials catalog laying around the office, so I ordered some expanded metal and had a friend weld it onto the bed. Now I can hook bungees to it, as well as carry furniture and stuff.

 

 

September 2003 Update: I had my friend Andy weld on a couple of pieces of ¼" allthread for a spare tire mount. Came out pretty slick (and pretty cheap!)