Spotty and I had a great day yesterday, replacing the trailer deck with 5mm aluminium checker plate. The two pieces that I needed were 1220x1220mm, but the best the shop could do was cut a 1200x2400mm sheet in half. The saw blade was 6mm thick, so we got two plates 1200x1197mm, which were just big enough. In hindsight it was probably a good thing, because the cut edges are quite sharp and if they hung over the curved edge of the frame rails a feller could scratch himself quite badly.
Trailer Saturday 27 January 2024 4 by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr
Trailer Saturday 27 January 2024 by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr
We ended up bolting the deck down with 6 x 10mm bolts on the rear plate, and another 6 x 10 mm bolts on the front, plus another 8 x 10mm bolts to secure the wheel chock. The chock is bolted through the front and centre frame rails and we used 3 mm thick thick 50mm OD washers under the aluminium plate where the bolts didn't go thru a frame section. We used 4 x 12mm bolts to bolt the folding section back together, and ended up only using 6 large head pop rivets in the centre section to stop the plate from rattling, and avoid a trip hazard buy using low profile pop rivets and not hex bolts. we probably could have used countersunk bolts, but I'd already been to the hardware store, so didn't think too much about it, the pop rivets are around 25mm long, so would have pulled right up with plenty of meat underneath.
I bought them years ago to fix a Yoshimura muffler and found them by chance yesterday, and quite like them. We used my big rattle gun to tighten all the bolts and pneumatic pop rivet gun to insert the rivets, so the longest job (apart from repairing the tail light wiring) was marking, measuring and drilling all the holes, then removing the aluminium plates and deburring the holes, and blowing/brushing all the swarf away so it didn't get stuck between the plate and frame rails.
Trailer Saturday 27 January 2024 1 by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr
While it was only in the 70's, working outside in the sun all day with the light reflecting off the shiny aluminium deck fried our brains, and when I got home I looked in the mirror to see an old fcuker with a really bright red (to match the frame rails) face, but after a litre or two of ginger beer and a mouthful of drugs, I was feeling no pain. We also stripped the rust from the wheel chock and gave it a coat of "Canyon satin black" Rustoleum paint, which came up nicely. We'll take it for it's test ride on Saturday to a swap meet that we thought wasn't for a couple of weeks, with a bike on the trailer, so it was good to get it finished.
Trailer Saturday 27 January 2024 3 by
Terry Prendergast, on Flickr