Re: Ugghh... buckled trailer tongue
Well, I thought about starting a new thread to say this, but decided against it...
After 2 days of crawling around, over, under and in between this stupid trailer, I PRAY I am finally done with everything I wanted to get done. So after I got the new tongue on the other night, I decided to go ahead and fab up some guide-ons as I mentioned a few posts ago. Well, in the process, even though it turned into a PIA I'm glad I thought to check to make sure the boat was sitting perfectly centered and level with the trailer before I bent my pipe for the guide-ons.
Once I got the trailer dead-center level, I ended up having to jack up both sides of the boat at the same time. I had to do this because at this point, I realized that I needed to completely readjust my bunk height as well as my keel rollers. Once I had the boat raised off the trailer, I removed the bunk mounts and set them off to the side. Then I slowly lowered the boat until it was sitting dead level, and had probably 80% of the weight resting on the rollers. I then had to re-attach the bunks, and turns out that where I had to mount them was about 1 1/2" difference from where they were before. Since I was working by myself on this, it turned into a royal PIA mainly because I had to keep going side to side to inch the jacks either lower or higher until it was level.
Once I had all that done, I finally got my guide-ons fabbed up and installed. I used 1 1/4" O.D. galvanized pipe that I had tucked away after the trampoline it was used for got blown into some trees a few years ago. I used my home-made pipe bender to bend these tubes, which I then put a bracket on the bottom of the frame channel, then put another bolt going from the 'outside' into the channel to firm it up. I then used some 1 1/4" I.D. sched. 40 pvc pipe that slides down over the galv. The pvc was a tight fit, but still loose enough to allow them to spin on the galv. pipe, acting as rollers. I put caps on the top, drilled holes in them, and ran a section of SS wire down through the pipe, with clamps on top and bottom so that the pvc doesn't float up or bounch up on the galv.
I'll apologize now as I didn't get to take any pics of this whole process as my phone (that I JUST got two weeks ago) decided to retire this morning. I'm SUPPOSED to recieve my new phone tomorrow sometime, so I'll get some pics then to post of the completed project. All-in-all, I'm very happy with how the guide-ons turned out. They are about 3/8" away from the hull, and I ran them up about 2" past the gunwails. Now I'm pretty anxious to head to the river tomorrow with it to try out the guide-ons and see if maybe it's easier to launch/load!
Wow, didn't plan on making that that long, guess I could have just started a new thread for that novel! lmao
