Adventioneering

Grand Trunk Road (teaser) from Rover Films on Vimeo.

A grand adventure on grand trunk road. Keep exploring!

It’s so easy “a 17 girl could do it”.

I suppose as personal drones proliferate we’re going to see an increased number of rescue drones built… drones with grapples and a heavy lift capability. It was clever what they did here, since they avoided having to lift the stranded drone off its perch.

I picked up a free trailer from a friend whose simplifying. It’s an ancient 1950s/1960s Heilite aluminum trailer with a box back. It looks like it was designed by an aircraft engineer in the Airstream sort of mentality. It’s tiny, and probably weighs 300-400 lbs although I haven’t gotten it on a scale yet. I can certainly pick it up off the ground.

There are memories with this trailer because I borrowed it a couple of years ago when I moved a motorcycle up from Tacoma. Tiny 8″ wheels, we had this huge motorcycle strapped into the back, after it had flopped over on its side. Totally safe.

The trailer sits narrower than the track of my TJ and pulls straight, even when it’s empty. I frequently find myself looking back there to see if it’s even still attached, because other than a bang now and then, I can’t even tell it’s back there. On grades, it’s nearly unnoticeable.

I got to wondering what the trailer is. This one has seen better days – the sides used to fold down, and someone has riveted them closed, and it’s banged up a bit, although in remarkably good shape for the age and hard-user as an abused utility trailer.

After some digging around on the Internet it turns out that these were in-fact camping trailers of the popup tent variety. Heilite got its start with a one-wheeled trailer on the mid 50s – talk about safety third, pulling a one wheel trailer – and they produced through the late 60s until the company was sold. They are primarily known on the Internet anyways for 3 different models, although mine looks like none of those.

Looking at the trailer now I can see that the bottoms of the bows for the tent are still installed at the corners of the trailer, they were just cut off at some point when the tent was removed. It’s sad in a way because I think the trailer would have made a good pop-up trailer. It’s hard to imagine what happened, perhaps the tent became damaged and rather than repairing it whoever owned it at the time cut it off, or perhaps they simply needed a utility trailer more.

Also a little bit to my surprise these trailers were big with the Vanagon community – almost all the pictures I find of them, they are being pulled by VW vans of various kinds. Since you have living in your Westy already I am not sure what the point of this was – maybe something for the kids or your friends, and at least one guy with a van turned it into a rolling kitchen.

All things considered they seem to be pretty rare now, but there are a few people doing projects with them. At least a handful of people have lifted them and put them on real wheels (and probably axle swaps) to turn them into expedition-style campers.

Photos.

Tried to get out to Spada Lake today, but it’s still snowed in. The snow is coming along nicely though – you get stopped just barely short of the lake at N47 57.705 W121 39.986. Probably another couple of weeks.

After the poor showing of my dipole – all noise all the time – the other week when MC and I went up towards Spada, I decided to measure out and cut another one. I went for a 20M monoband since the size is reasonable and we seem to be having decent luck with that band. Before I was using a heavier solid core wire, like for house wiring. That’s all I had at the time and it worked well enough, but this time I went with a braided wire of a lighter gauge.

One problem I ran into is that with my LDG tuner hooked up I was pushing S7 for noise, but I was

I dug up some of my tripods from my studio photography days and it wasn't difficult to guy those down and get the antenna up. They were higher than I remembered, and it worked great. Heard the deepest southern Alabama, some guy in the middle of Kansas, Florida, a few guys in Arizona, N9LB in Oregon WI.

Photos