July 28, 2017 – Trailer chassis is delivered, right on time. The day before, I got a phone call from the manufacturer alerting me to an incident at a gas station 200 miles away – evidently, someone backed in to the corner of the trailer and damaged the tail light.
You could call it an inauspicious beginning or you could roll with it and recognize that shit happens and that’s just par for the course of being alive, nothing more.
Yonder tail light bracket, bent. I checked the chassis for square and found it perfectly true, as I expected. The vendor has already contacted a local mobile chassis technician to come out and weld on a new bracket and install the light, both of which they will ship to me directly. That will probably get done next week, in the first few days of August.
There were a couple of “hey, you weren’t paying full attention” things I noticed, too. The trailer itself seems quite sound in all the important ways. It’s the little details that whoever did the final check seems to have missed.
For example: this running light wire should have been routed through the outer hole (green arrow) so the facing lumber (magenta box) which I will add would not interfere with it. This is easy to get right and easy to fix (and easy to ignore, but I won’t). I pointed this out to the manufacturer, too, whose rep said she forwarded my notes to the mobile technician to correct this, too.
Okay, if they didn’t get it right, at least they own it and are going to make it right. That’ll do.
Hey, speaking of vendor rep, for those of you who know me well, you may find significance in the name of my contact and, for that matter, the name of her employer, the chassis subcontractor who built it:
Vendor/Agent: Tumbleweed Tiny House
Chassis subcontractor: Wolfpack Chassis
Chassis contact name: Misty Crow
#2 on the “hey, you missed something” — paint on this pass-through. Misty said she’ll send me some paint to touch it up (as well as the bracket, after welding). Again, no big deal, really, and even I missed it until my third inspection of the chassis. Still, it’s their job to get this right.
There were a few other very minor but still dumb things, such as using electrician’s tape not suitable for direct exposure to the weather or not securing it properly. Note the opening at the red arrow. What’s the point of taping it if you’re not going to use tape that can stand up to the expected environment? Truth is, it doesn’t even need to be taped – the conduit is slotted and will drain any water that gets in, but still… if you’re gonna, do it right, eh?
No doubt I’ll make my own share of mistakes, too. Of course, I’m not a professional manufacturer, either…
To protect my investment, behold the 12-pound cast steel hitch lock (gray nose piece and shank C). There is a massive internal rod that locks the shank to the nose. The shank has a ball hitch top which occupies the receiver, preventing somebody else’s hitch ball from occupying it. The release lever (A) won’t let it release, either, as the nose piece also engages the flange (B) such that there’s no way to get the shank and nose piece off (which are solidly locked together) without destroying the hitch receiver to t he point of it being unsuitable for use.
Of course no lock will prevent the most determined of thieves, but anything you can that makes it harder / slows them down greatly increases your chances of not getting the thing thieved.
Should the hitch lock fail to prevent theft, I have thief identification and vehicle recovery schemes in place, too, the nature of which I am not going to publish.