Death of the old tractor trailer

	Alas, poor tractor trailer!  I knew it well.  It hath borne me on its deck a dozen times when I was a young lad, and my grandpa pulled it with his tractors.  The metal was probably fabricated in the 1930s and the (old growth) redwood was made into a trailer in the 1950s.  It sits here near the old tractor garage, laden with some apple boxes.  I think it is still mostly functional at this point, July 24, 2003.  The boards on top were added by my cousin Mike a few years back.  He applied polyurathane "liquid plastic" to them, but it wore off in the weather and wear before long.
	Here it is in April 2004, sitting near the applehouse.  Notice the wheels are now rubbing against the back of their wells.  The tongue metal's isn't attached, and the tongue's wood is no longer parallel with the wood of the deck.
	The next two are from July 10, 2004; it has been sitting here for many months because the tongue has not been repaired.    There is a log sitting just behind it that is used as a wheel-stop for cars that park here when buying apples.  The log has been sitting there for years and is rotten and infested with termites/carpenter ants.

Rebirth

On August 23, 2004, I decided to reattach the metal hitch to the tongue wood, since apples needed to be brought in from the orchards to be sold the following weekend.  My mom and I went to Pierson's hardware store in Eureka and bought some stainless steel screws and galvanized metal plates to reinforce the wood on the tongues.  I started to install them, but noticed that I wasn't able to push the trailer very far because the wheels were rubbing so much.  I figured I would patch that too and flipped the trailer perpendicular, so it stood on the face of a wheel.  Unfortunately, I discovered the central beam was broken and all three beams were rotten and infested with termites, particularly the ones near the infested rotten log.  I resolved to replace them, and tore them off with ease using a crowbar.  That only exposed more consumed wood — now more air and termite turds than cellulose — so I continued removing more decay.  And more...

	When I finished removing the decayed wood, only the rusted metal remained.

An old friend of my aunt and mom, Faye Mendinhall (sp?) was visting at farm, and with her big SUV she kindly helped me buy some wood at Pierson's to replace the big beams. The beams consisted of two 4x4s and a 4x6, all untreated since the treated ones contain arsnic, which is inappropriate for organic farming, as my aunt wants to do.

I wanted to try and reuse the top planks that Mike had made, but I kept finding insect holes and their evil residents crawling about them. I feared they would infect the new wood. To my good luck, I found some wood near Jessie's band mill that had been sawed but not planed, and it was fair game.

I decided to redesign the top to hold more apple boxes, but the night before I was to cut it up, I talked to my aunt and found she didn't like the way I intended the boxes to be carried, and preferred it slighly smaller. (The old trailer had some unused space which was too small to hold another row of boxes.) The new design holds 4 in the front, then 3, another row of 3, and a row of 4 in the back with a couple inches to spare.

Ralph Krauss, my aunt's neighbor, helped by planing the wood from 1.5-2 inches to a constant 1.5 inches and sawed it up in his wood shop. I coated the wood with Black Jasco Termin-8 Wood Perservative, which contains copper naphthenate to prevent termites, carpenter ants, mildew, fungus, warping, and rot.

We (mostly my mom) made four trips to Pierson's hardware picking up hardware, paint, etc., due to the changing design and scope of the project.  The total expense was around $100, about $44 for the wood and the rest for paint and hardware.

	Andy, a friend of my aunt, came by after the wood was ready to be assembled.  He helped in drilling, inserting screws, assembling the wood.  Handy Andy had experience fixing old cars, and he convinced me that we should clean up the rusted metal and paint it (rather than replace it in 5-10 years, as I was thinking).
	Using a pick hammer, he beat the lose rust off.  We also used steel and brass wire brushes, either by hand or on a wheel for an electric drill.
	I neglected to photo it just before the primer went on.  We coated it in a product called Ospho, which contains phosphoric acid.  The acid turns the rust back into steel (somewhat) and protects it.  After the coating it looked dark brown.  Next, wearing a white CalTrans outfit, Andy spray-painted Rust-Stop brand metal primer and paint.  We ran out of yellow, so a can of white primer finished it.
	There are holes through the metal beam for lag screws, but the water collected near them and rusted the metal away.  So what was about a half-inch diameter hole is now an inch and a half.
	I wanted the old pitted metal panted black.  (The new metal is shiny stainless steel or galvanized.)
	The rubber was masked mainly to keep the primer off it.
	I didn't hold the camera very still, but you can see the freshly painted hitch metal and two giant black washers hanging to the right.  The washers were probably from an old saw mill that my Great Grandfather Wrigley serviced.  They are used to spread the lag screws' force over more metal where it has rusted away underneath.  In my infinite clumsiness, I  dropped the hitches on the garage floor after they had been drying for only 6 hours or so, causing some small  imperfections in the paint job.
	Here we see the trailer nearly assembled.  Andy is under tightening the 6 big stainless steel lag screws.
	I was able to make an alternating pattern of the wood, which is redwood heartwood and redwood sapwood from trees on the farm.  The main beams as well as a couple top planks are probably fir.  My aunt wanted about a half inch lip on the front; the front board also protects the front plank if the tractor turns to sharply and the wheels rub, but I think the tongue is long enough so that won't happen.
	Monday, August 30, 2004.  We were in a rush to put the wood back on the metal this morning because we needed to drive for 11 hours back to Seattle.  We put the deck on the metal but the lag screws didn't want to go in the holes straight.  I realized then that we had the orientation of the wheels backwards from how we initially assembled it.  So the lag screws were undone, the wheels' metal axel was rotated 180 degrees, and the lag screws went in properly.  I had the bottom hitch upside down here, which I remedied while Andy was beneath.
	Here is Andy, after finishing tightening.  Finito!