Is there any way that...
...can become this?
Not exactly the New Yankee Workshop
.
Although the trailer required a 9-foot box, the assembly instructions were printed in a booklet the size of a CD. 
Parts were identified by name and number but the pictures were too small to decipher and parts were not marked.
So after six hours and at least one breakdown and reassembly it doesn't look a whole lot different
than the beginning.
And a trip was made back to the store to take photographs of an assembled trailer.
This proves only marginally helpful and doesn't take into account the modifications necessary.
But after bumbling through a bunch of junk I had never done before it all comes together and I come to the very last step - attaching the tires to the axle hubs.
The only thing I had ever done before; the only thing I was sure I knew how to do. And they don't go on. I try it from the side. I try it from the top.
I try all three tires on both hubs. No way. Finally I have no choice but to disassemble the entire axle and drag it back to the store. The wrong wheels were in the kit. They have to break onto the boxes of other kits in stock (most with the wrong wheels too - there will be a few guys down the road who will be owing me a big debt that they'll never know) until they get a set of wheels to fit.
Not quite done. The chain plate still needs to be attached to the tongue after another trip to Lowe’s for washers. After all, what were the chances there was some guy over in China with an abacus counting out exactly 69 bolts, 69 nuts, 69 washers and 69 spring washers? I'm sure they just used a shovel to pour them into the bag. So I have about 20 extra bolts and need a half dozen washers.
The wooden frame bolted to the chassis... 
...and the plywood deck attached to the chassis -
secured with 22 holes tediously drilled through metal. Wait...make that 44 holes. After the holes were drilled the deck was removed, ostensibly to place a watertight adhesive seal between the two. Of course, the adhesive barely flowed in the 22-degree garage so that precaution was largely useless. When the deck was placed back on the chassis, the holes in the wood and metal had mysteriously shifted and all 22 had to be redrilled. Notice tar streaks.
The underside of the deck is coated with asphalt emulsion to prevent rotting.
There is a reason you never see anyone resealing their driveway in February - the junk does not dry in cold weather. After a week it is still not cured and the result is......tar EVERYWHERE. Tar fingerprints like these will be found on tools, clothing, walls, 
bathroom fixtures. The only thing the tar apparently does NOT stick to is...
...the foam insulation. So that is attached with those big washers called fender washers (who knew!). They are screwed in with something called deck screws. Deck screws are sold in one-pound boxes. Also available is something called "Multi-Purpose Outdoor Screws" that come in a more reasonable package of 25. What's the difference? According to the guy at Lowe's the deck screws "are galvanized so they won't rust." Really? Thanks for that. I guess the extra purpose in the "multi-purpose" screws is that, in addition to securing your outside wood they will also rust away on you. If anyone needs 7/8 of a pound of deck screws, let me know.
Teardrop sides attached during yet another snowstorm. Yes, that is tar on the cinderblocks.
Framing for the cabinets attached to help support the walls and deck.
Everything is lining up just a little too squarely - there must be a hidden catch somewhere up ahead.
Bulkhead Walls. These fit so snugly with screws and brads that the expensive polyurethane glue was overkill but since it was already bought ... 
Getting the glue to flow in yet another sub-freezing day was like trying to squeeze milk out of a coconut so I put the little plastic bottle in front of the space heater for a few minutes. This, in fact, did the trick. When I unscrewed the cap and squeezed the bottle it exploded like a fire hose. The applicator was never seen again and luckily the hurtling mass of glue was prevented from flying across the garage by splattering into a $70 piece of cherry plywood. The Bulkhead walls go on.
First Light! Edison's workshop at Menlo Park required less equipment to achieve illumination.
How many fu
ses does it take to light a light bulb? In this case - 11 (including the non-blown one). Luckily, thanks to Walmart's oppression of minimum wage workers, 
crippling economic pressure on suppliers and destruction of the Mom-and-Pop business culture in America, 5 of these babies can be had for less than a buck. At Pep Boys, Manny, Moe and Jack want $2.19. If you're willing to cast aside all values, you can build a trailer on a budget.
Homemade fuse box with a decided Honduran flavor.
The interior wiring. All works fine now. Any chance it will be that was once the interior walls are attached and these wires will be inaccessible?
The walls are insulated. Apparently your body gives off a cup of water each night and that type of moisture would ruin the wooden trailer without insulation. After buying enough of these strange foam board panels to keep an igloo from melting in the Mojave, I finally found the rigid insulation I was supposed to buy. It was one shelf over at Home Depot.
Then, the inside walls are attached.The switch for the outside light. This was supposed to be a double switch but 
when it was installed it worked the first time and then never again so that plan was scrapped.
Framing for the roof installed. Sometime in the future I will probably look back at this point as the last thing I really knew how to do.
The roof vent framed out. Sleeping in an enclosed trailer will court death, as will the following step...
...when the interior roof is installed. The entire instruction for this critical step reads as follows: "The 8' skin is not long enough to stretch the whole length of the cabin, so make sure the joint falls on a spar inside the cabinet. Install the front long piece first and then measure for the short rear piece. Attach them with brads only, then go to the outside and run a bead of polyurethane glue between the spar and the skin." That is it. For weeks I have been wondering how a 4' x 8' piece of 1/8" 
plywood will bend like a question mark. The answer is - it won't. No way. I cut a narrow 2" strip and was able to see how the skin should be attached in theory. But a 46" wide piece? Sure. That was going to happen. And held on by a row of brads as it was being torqued like a corkscrew? Sure. That was going to happen. The choice was to install strips of flexible plywood like a wood floor that would leave seams across the roof or try and force three pieces of plywood around the inside circle. I went with the force. I needed screws to hold the wood in place as I went and this cause the plywood to crack like thin ice on an early spring morn. It eventually went on but now the most important parts of this trailer will be big moldings and judicious use of birch-colored wood putty.
That crack in the ceiling should be able to be hidden in a cabinet and I'll think of something to do with that random strip of fir that is hiding an enormous fault line in the construction of the roof.
Time to skin the outside with aluminum, requiring a 4x12 sheet. The closest specialty metal store A) would not deliver to a residence and B) for safety reasons would not roll up aluminum sheets for pick up so you would need a truck with at least a 12-foot bed. After exploring endless local options I finally ordered from an aircraft parts manufacturer in Indiana who had no qualms about rolling up aluminum sheet and shipping via UPS - for about the cost of a used Cessna. It was about this point the project became officially "a rolling money pit.”
Aluminum sheet attached - sort of. Contact cement is used for this step, pressed together when "tacky." I must have misjudged "sticky" for "tacky" because there are several places where it hardly 
adheres at all. Just as well, since the final sentence in the chapter explains that you don't want it glued too tight or expansion will rip the plywood apart. I might have put that tidbit at the front of the chapter but that's just me. Notice the tires have been removed from the trailer at this point and I was never able to get the jack stands level so all work at this point resembled George Clooney working his doomed fishing boat in the Perfect Storm - roll left, roll right, roll left...
The aluminum must be cut to fit the plywood. The tool of choice for this operation is pneumatic air shears. Those aren't in my toolbox and apparently they don't rent them at Home Depot. 
Although there is a small ego boost in requesting a tool Home Depot doesn't have and watching them stumble through an apology, you'd rather have the tool. I had to tackle this slab of aluminum with a jig saw, not the most exacting of weapons, especially when it came to cutting out the doors.
Theoretically, this piece of rigid aluminum trim can be made to bend around a horseshoe curve through heating with a torch, a process known as 
annealing. If you heat it too much the metal will, however, blister, melt and crack. How do you know when you heat it too much? Well, it will blister, melt and crack. You want to heat it up to the point just BEFORE it blisters, melts and cracks. Not that it comes with a pop-up thermometer like a Butterball or anything to know when that is.
There are places where the trim detail would earn an "A" in metal shop. There are places where it wouldn't...
The teardrop makes its first appearance outside.
After hacking through two sheets of plywood and one sheet of aluminum with a jig saw these door openings looked about as smooth as your average limestone cave opening but they trimmed out amazingly well.
These openings looked so bad and cleaned up so well when trimmed out I could have sat and stared at it for hours. The door trim is likely to be remembered as the high point of craftmanship on this project because up ahead lurks...
...the construction of the hatch - "The hatch is the single most complicated piece of engineering on the trailer." This does not bode well since my father's engineering genes were left on the platform when that train pulled out of the station. I remember well those 8th Grade aptitude tests and scoring 
in the 10th percentile in Mechanical Reasoning making the chart of my overall results resemble a sonograph of the Mariana Trench. The creation of the hatch becomes even more foreboding when the 4-foot "hurricane hinge" I need for my 4-foot hatch opening arrives. Aside from being too long, it begs the question: who designs a project requiring a 48 9/16 inch hinge that would make this a stock item?
Once again the construction of the hatch required sheets of plywood to be bent into unnatural shapes. Instructions again called for glue and brads to hold the shape but unless they are making tiny brads somewhere with the gripping power of an angry wolverine I defy anyone to get those little nails to hold down a lively piece of plywood. Greater minds than mine were brought in to study the problem.
Testing the aluminum skin.
Testing the hatch for fit. The hinge attached so smoothly and tightly the first time I decided it was not necessary to unscrew it and reinforce it with glue. And Custer thought there were only a few Indians on the Montana plains that early summer morning in 1876, too.
When I attached the completed hatch it hung OK. It was fine - but it wasn't perfect. So I shaved a little off the bottom and ground a little off the side and forced it a little and...the beam holding the hinge 
broke loose from the three screws holding it to the side, sliding forward about a half inch. The screws were buried beneath the attached aluminum and there would be no way of re-attaching the beam in its original position without cutting a hole in the side. Aside from calling the functional integrity of the trailer forever into question, this caused two immediate problems...
1) The hatch was now one half inch too long.
I could either shorten the hatch (left) or lower the floor (right). I chose both.
2) The hatch would never hang straight again because the beam was no longer square. To cover the new gaps I needed to increase the size of the trim from one inch to two inches. Anyone who ever 
claimed there is no way to bend 2-inch aluminum angle around a beach ball certainly knew what they were talking about (see photo). To get that two-inch wide trim I would need to build it up in strips. There won't be any hiding the fact that this is a homemade trailer anymore.
Expect to see Lowe’s report a spike in third quarter earnings.
It would have been helpful if they sold these soldiers by the dozen.
Inside the hatch.
If you are unlucky enough to be stuck behind this contraption tooling down I-80, this is what you'll see.
What is harder to believe? That the little two inch piece of metal latch costs north of $10 or that, all by itself, it holds the entire weighty hatch tighter than the bark on a river birch?
That license plate light will be mostly for show. After carefully lining up the hole in the aluminum skin with the concealed wiring I discovered the hole wasn't really big enough for the job. As I pulled 
the two wires through the tight hole one retracted and disappeared like a Whack-A-Mole deep into the inaccessible reaches of the finished hatch, never to be seen again.
After the hatch, installing the sunroof was a gimme.
Door construction. Wondering where the wood backing is to hold screws for the door handle? So was I when the door was finished and it came time to attach it. It wasn't like it was the first time I had done it - I'd already done it on the first door...
Completed doors. Well, at least in theory. They have to somehow fit into the trailer.
But fit they do. Notice the fender. Months ago T-nuts were installed deep inside the walls to accept bolts for the fenders. Raise your hand if you think there was any chance of that working. I forced a couple of bolts through the frame and let the wonders of adhesive do the rest. So what has a better chance of falling off first - a fender or...
...the spare tire? This should be a tip to all you out there writing instruction manuals - BE SPECIFIC. You never know what moron will pick up your book and try to follow along. Months ago, during frame construction, came the step: "Glue a 3/4" reinforcing panel of plywood underneath the deck to mount the spare tire from." The size wasn't specified and I just happened to have a spare piece lying around so on it 
went. Only now that mounting time has arrived do I realize that piece of plywood should have been AS BIG AS THE TIRE STUPID. So there was only enough wood to attach the tire with one bolt instead of two.
View from the inside.
In the "What Else Could Possibly Go Wrong" department this could be my favorite. After a balmy October work day the garage door broke in the down position, trapping the Teardrop outside. The immediate consequence was that I 
was now shut off from my workshop that was sequestered on the other side of the door but that turned out to be only a one-day inconvenience because the next day the temperature dropped 20 degrees, a cold front crossed the Alleghenies and met the remnants of Hurricane Wilma and biblical rains descended in the great Northeastern United States. 
Ordinarily this would have been of no problem but there was one little exposed part of the back hinge that I had not yet sealed as I was waiting for a reply to my SOS letter to engineers at NASA.
When the rains stopped five days later it was apparent that my towel-and-brick stopgap had not worked and I had what appeared to be deadly black mold growing all over the back of the trailer. If this thing doesn't kill me one way, it will kill me another.
Interior shots of the cabin front cabinet...
...and the cabin rear cabinets.
Drawers finished with three coats of oil and four coats of bowling alley wax. The bone-shaped turnbuckle will keep the drawers closed as I careen down Adirondack mountainsides.
When the lower cabinet doors are open they support the large upper cabinet door to create a tabletop. Clever, huh? How many times do I expect to use this feature? About zero.
All lit up for the night. Boy, how many nights will those lights burn boondocking in a WalMart parking lot reading Kafka and Marx and Gibbons...
Before setting out to build the galley it is necessary to build an icebox out of scrap aluminum. The idea is to put the ice in the top (where it sits on an unpictured shelf) and as it melts the water runs out through a hose leaving 
the food stored below cold and dry. If anyone ever comes up and points out helpfully that they know where to buy an icebox like this, no jury in America would convict me of what I would do next.
The galley framed out. On the far right side you can see what appears to be a gas intake line but is in fact the starting point 
for the water delivery system. That way-bigger-than necessary plastic hoses takes the hosed-in water to the...
...water tank located on the bottom of the teardrop. As I waited for weeks for my E-BAY polypropelene tank I worried how this was going to happen, waiting but, in fact, those hand -cut aluminum straps attached rather easily and actually hold the tank snugly. Which can only mean one thing - this water tank becomes the odds-on favorite to be the first trailer component to wind up sitting in the slow lane of the New York State Thruway.
The water is pumped from the tank to be delivered from the brass spigot...
...that slides out for ease of filling. Clever, huh? But wait. Take another look. Unless you live in Lilliputia or are only interested in filling a saucer, the system is useless. You can't even fit a cup under the spigot.
Galley unfinished...
... and galley finished.
Let's take a tour of the kitchen. The upper left cabinet houses the fuse box from long ago.
The lower cabinet drawers. This is where it all comes back to roost. The trailer not being perfectly level, the walls not being perfectly square, Jupiter not being aligned with Mars - but most of all we return to when the hatch broke and slipped an inch forward. So that 
repositioned hatch will now close, the cabinets had to be made one inch less deep - 12 inches rather than 13 inches. Unfortunately the shortest they make drawer slides is 12 inches, which doesn't leave much room for things like drawer faces. After much shaving and sanding and forcing and hacking, this is the sorry result. But the drawers open and close and hold stuff. What more can you hope for from a drawer?
The icebox hatch in the countertop.
Icebox hatch off, ready for ice.
Food compartment.
Stove.
Lower Cabinet.
The flooring is a true linoleum product called Marnoleum, all natural and hypo-allergenic. It is costly but the bill could have come in at less than $6 a square foot, including the several
spoonfuls of special adhesive that it required and could only be had for $32 a gallon. But while dawdling in the flooring store I picked up one of those insidious design booklets and I couldn’t live any longer without that border stripe. The final tab was now $14.83 per square foot.
The tiny 1/4-inch trim came from a doll supply store on the Internet.
The instructions for the bolt-on trailer hitch rated the difficulty of assembly as 3 on a scale of 1-10 (1 being easiest). Estimated time: 20 minutes. Actual assembly required two of us working for over two joyous hours.
All hooked up. The first good sign was that the little Ford Focus didn’t rear up on two back wheels like a wild stallion when the trailer was attached. Test drive - there were some positives. The Focus pulled the teardrop along like a champ and in the first three minutes some guy in a pickup truck pointed at it went by and I believe he mouthed the words, “Wow, look at that,” to his buddy.
On the negative side, the fenders didn’t make it one mile. For all those who had FENDER in the What Falls Off First Derby, I had to suspend betting before the test drive. Come on, the things were held on with crazy glue and the right one didn’t even have a nut on its lone bolt. Fair is fair.
The fenders get to ride home in comfort.
Take a look at some more nifty teardrops:
