Next project...A Wood Ben Hur

[Bill_Wolf]

Catman,

The wood that I used was purchased at Aberdeen from an individual who gave up on his Wood Ben Hur trailer due to steel frame issues. It was all precut and tongue and grooved.

I would stongly recommend doing tongue and groove or you may have a mismatch due to warps in the fender area. The fenders on the upper part are just bolted (supported) by the wood sides.

I went with standard carriage bolts instead of the larger head step bolts. a number of reasons.

1 Most of the heads are on the inside and not readily visible when tarped. (I know it won't win any awards but I deem the extra expense a waste).

2 A wider availability of lengths on the carriage bolt thus eliminating lots of cut off waste.

3. Cost...the carriage bolts were about 1/4 the cost of the original style. I did use square nuts and still had to cut some down. I bought my fastening hardware at boltdepot.com and saved at least another 50% over the local Home Depot. It still cost a little over $100 for the bolts, nuts, and washers.

Suggestions:

Use a 12 point rachet flex head wrench or 12 point socket for the square nuts. Using an Open end wrench is a big PIA.
Measure twice then cut.
As Joel once suggested pretreat before painting with Turpentine and Linseed Oil. I spray painted a coat of Gillespee 33070 prior to assembly on at least the bottom side. Bolted it up. Etch primed the bolts and then resprayed the whole trailer.

This is one HMV I really enjoyed restoring.

One note in the picture it looks like the Geneva cross is wavey. I used just masking tape as a stencil and the lines came out crisp and clean. It is just the picture optimization to reduce size that fuzzies the look.

I would love to see pictures of yours when you are done.

Bill

[armydriver]

Fantastic job Bill. You are the master.