Chapter 4 "We Made It Home"

We arrived home with the trailer in one piece but our nerves were another story...... Fried comes to mind, or frazzled, crisp, unravelled, but you get the picture.


Our bodies shut down and we slept the greater part of two days.  By now it was Labor Day Weekend with all the previous activity occupying the past two months.

 


I shuffled out of the house to get acquainted with our little Diamond In The Rough. One set of neighbors thought it was the coolest thing ever and the other set said, "I didn't realize you were trailer........peeeople" drawing it out in a way that dripped with condescension.  Whatever.


I will share with you some background, shedding a little light on "the shock" of the other set of neighbors.  We restored and owned a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow for 14 years and sold it on eBay to make room for the new addition.  *GASP* A very nice retired man from Texas bought it and drove it home.  In it's place came this tiny vintage camper. A friend of ours, Kim, summed it up best, "You're the only people in the world that would sell a Rolls Royce and buy a trailer!"





Truth be told, we used the car a great deal in the 90's as a motorcoach picking up and dropping off  "Day of Pampering" clients in our spa business.  Over the years, our business grew in other directions and we got to where we didn't drive it very much and things with motors do not need to sit.  Plus, I needed the garage space!


I poked around the trailer for a good while.  Plugged it in.  The lights worked, good.  The air conditioner worked, good.  There was a small inverter and battery, good. We had a toilet which was one of the selling points and an ill fitting dorm refrigerator that had to go..... I went outside, the paint looked good but upon closer inspection there were bubbles and many many layers, not good. Then I crawled underneath.  From what I could tell, the framing looked nice, no rust or damage. 


The hydraulic air bag and axle system was a puzzlement.  For lack of a photo, I will attempt to describe it to you.  It was a giant letter "H" with the axle welded to one end and bolt hinges on the other attached to the frame.  The leaf springs were gone and somewhere in the middle were two large rubber air bags and plastic tubing running through the floor. I went back inside the trailer trying to trace the tubing.  I looked underneath one of the large benches and when I lifted the panel under the cushion there was a very long heavy metal cylinder like you see on welding trucks. What do we do with THAT?!  The seller told me there was a switch that regulated the pressure and would also release it.  We had not touched it all the way home so this was a good time to try it out.

I pushed the switch.


There was a loud WHOOSH/POP and the trailer with me in it jumped off the ground into what in an instant felt like low Earth orbit and bounced back down! I screamed Bloody Murder! Bolting out of the trailer and into the house, I hollered at my husband to come and see this. We were, in a word, flabbergasted!


Then, with the chirping of birds and a song in the distance, dawn rose on the situation......


This came from a Low Rider Shop in Southern California.... OMG! I'm sure the guy used this in parades and rallies bouncing that little sucker up and down while towing it down the street! Thump thump, boing! Chick a wow wow, boing!



Why had this not occurred to us before? *Traileritus* It now seemed so obvious. Oh no....... what has this done to the framing let alone the axle we had already dealt with? Cue the circus music.....


We walked around the trailer again, looking closer.  I saw something white under the edge of the wheel well.  Thinking it was foam insulation or something I grabbed it and it came off in my hand...... it was a Toad Stool. Yep. A Toad Stool. Toad Stools had grown out of the wheel wells. Another grab brought a handful of rotted wood. Uh oh.  Our donkey was in a ditch now.

Crestfallen and I do mean exactly that, in an instant came the realization, WE WERE IN OVER OUR HEADS.

We concluded that we would sell it, take the loss, and find a better trailer. So, off to burn up the internet, I went.  I ended up on eBay and there was a trailer for sale very similar to the Shasta Compact called a Cardinal.  It was sweet and had been totally redone but not in a way I would have made it.  It seemed a shame to buy something good and tear it up.  Then an idea crept into my addled brain, "I wonder if the seller would take a commission to restore our trailer?"  I decided to call.  That's how I met John.

John is a retired architect that took quite a blow in the housing crunch. In an area of second homes everything just plain stopped. On a lark, he redid a small camper pulled out of a field, and with a friend started flipping trailers.  He seemed nice and was very friendly and helpful on the phone.  I told him all about our trailer, sent some photos, and he agreed to take it on. But, time was of the essence, as winter came early in The Rockies and they were high up outside of Aspen. I explained the axle issue that we had to get fixed first and he agreed that was good as they didn't do undercarriage work but to get it to him as soon as we could. I said we would. Progress!

Now, to find a trailer repair shop locally.  A brief search brought Liberty Trailer to my attention. Family owned for decades and nearby so, I called. I spoke with Buddy, the Manager, who said they could fix anything that could be towed.  Sounded good to me, so off we went the next Friday.  We pulled in gingerly on our semi bald tires to see a huge shop that mainly worked on 18 Wheelers but there were a couple of travel and utility trailers I could see.  They were BUSY which I took as a good sign.

After introductions and a once over Buddy said, "Yep. You're axle's bent,  you'll need a new one...... That's some custom job you've got under there."  We knew.  The axle was a full 4" out of straight. Gnarly.  I told him about the driveway leaping incident and we were shown how to regulate the pressure. We were told we didn't need such a large gas canister to do what was necessary to raise and lower the trailer.  That was fine with us!  He asked if we wanted to keep the huge tube as they were apparently a pricey item. I said, "I don't have a submarine to put it in." 


 Everyone laughed 😆


 As it turned out we had a client, Alice, who is the dearest, sweetest lady you would ever hope to meet, worked at compressed gas supply company for welders and medical facilities.  I called and she said in her lovely way, "Sure! Come on out and I'll walk you through it."  They had small containers of compressed Nitrogen perfect for our camper and would fit into our utility bay.  Things were looking up.....

The next weekend we were off to Colorado with our little camper sporting it's new straight axle, new white wall tires, and one small nitrogen canister. We drove during the day because the running lights still did not work.  There had been a depression in the ceiling and I pressed up on it while the interior lights were on and upon hearing a loud POP released my hand rather quickly.

Funny, you don't know how good your reflexes are until you actually use them. Now the interior lights didn't work, great.
We knew the interior had been painted which was not a problem as I had intended to wallpaper.  What didn't show in the pictures, remember what I said about pictures, was that it had been sprayed, almost entirely, in fleck stone.  Virtually impossible to remove. No matter, by this time we realized it was going to be a gut job so, I designed a custom interior since the original was so boogered.


There are trailer people among us that have drank the kool-aid of preservation right out of a tin can and would have you believe the only thing to do is restore a trailer to it's original state. (if you did using new materials, it wouldn't be original, hmmmmmm) I can see that, to a point.  Especially if you have something virtually untouched in the first place. That was not this trailer. I felt confident in having free reign but within that we would reuse all that we could and keep the vintage feel. But, we needed.......A THEME



Whether you have been on a Homecoming, Prom, Fourth of July Parade, or Birthday Party Decorating Committee, you are going to need a theme. You don't waver from the theme, you embrace it.  When it comes to decorating, I'm an all in kind of gal. So, within a matter of miles, while on the road to Colorado, we had named our trailer "Space Sprocket" in honor of The Jetson's cartoon (hubby's fave) and where George Jetson worked, Spacely's Space Sprockets!


 Plans were made to change our truck license to SPSPRKT....... Atomic Modern would be our theme, not uncommon, but I don't do ANYTHING in a common way.....


On the way to The Rockies we passed a widely grinning lady, somewhere north of Oklahoma City, towing a late 40's canned ham.  She toot-tooted as we wizzed by. :)


 WE ARE NOT ALONE......


The important thing here is that we passed.  After all the undercarriage work, we could tow 70mph straight as an arrow. What a relief! Although, the straight flat roads of Kansas were not to be the best test of the air bag system....


Our arrival in Colorado was met by it's early Autumnal splendor.  Our hopes rose with the altitude, soon we would be in Basalt, meet John in person, and hand over our little bundle of joy to be reborn.