Thread: Trailer, trolley and dolley for Storerboats - moving boats!

Looks good, Brian.

A thread re trailers and trailering is a good idea. It'll be interesting to see how everyone gets their boats from here to there and back.

Be careful on the road and bring Trim home safely.

Bob

I bought a 8 foot folding trailer kit from Redtrailers.com and put bunks fore and aft, positioned to be right under bulkheads 2 and 4. I bolted a 2 by 12 along the center to give me stable footing during launch and retrieve.

I installed a 9 inch wide rubber roller up against the aft face of the after bunk, adjusting it to just touch the bottom of the boat in the stowed position. As soon as you lift the bow a few inches the roller takes the weight and it's a cake-walk easing her into and out of the water.



I couldn't find a bow base so I built that one out of left over okoume plywood and lumber. It's not really required but I was going to varnish the interior while on the trailer and I thought it wise to support the bow at that point. It's a convenient tie-down point, too.

For the Little Black Dog (rowboat), I'm looking at just a pair of wheels attached to the back end and a rope handle on the boat at the front. Reason? She'll be doing at least some of her travelling on the roof and so it's not feasible to carry a dolly as well - the same arrangement will work when she's carried on the trailer. The sort of use I'm envisaging is to carry her down to the beach and then get her down the pedestrian ramps to the sand. Similarly for the Onkaparinga river.

Sooooooo, any thoughts on how to achieve this feat?

Richard

Howdy Daddles,

Often the wheels at the back of the boat make it hard to lift the front end. So they do tend to be about 1/3 forward of the back as on the dolley.

One way I have always though about but never done is a simple plank with cutouts for runners across the bottom of the boat tied off to the inwale spacers. I think to stop it wiggling around you would need a plywood shape at each end of the plank that capture the chines for a foot or so (450mm).

Several types of hot racing boats use such planks, sans wheels, to hold the boats upright and off the ground when rigging ... normally cleated off through the jib cleats

MIK

home made version of this sort of thing



MIK, is it possible to amend the title to all designs. I meant to include everyone, PDR's, Eureka, RowBoat.

Brian

If you had fabricated outriggers that had a vertical thole pin that folded down to the side of the boat, the thole pin would then be horizontal and could act as an axle for a wheel.

would be really neat, built in folding trolley/outriggers. Boat can still have standard oar positions or folding outriggers with a sliding seat!

I will go and lie down now,

Brian

Howdy, I think there are two things that make wheels quite useful on dollies or jinkers or whatever.

Diameter is good and width is good, but not so much of either so that it all becomes too heavy.

Around OZ the most common size is about the size of wheelbarrow tyres. They have enough diameter to get over most obstacles, enough width not to sink in sand tooooo much but don't weigh too much either.

MIK

(from MIK
Some previous posts on roofracking or trailing small boats
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f169/single-handing-goats-ground-87344
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f169/gis-cartopping-80441
https://www.woodworkforums.com/f169/roofracking-canoes-boats-73473
and on my blog
http://boats-storerdesign.blogspot.c...-trailers.html)

Stolen from the blog article.



I like boat trailers that have other functions too.

One way is to adapt another type of trailer - like a conventional box trailer at least for smaller boats.

An alternative is to go for something very "bare bones".

One thing that makes a boat trailer more useful for different boats is to have a longer drawbar than normal on the trailer.

So if you are having a trailer made - adding a foot or two to the drawbar may make it useful for bigger boats too.

Most of the boats I design are pretty light anyhow.

With the dual puddle duck setup note how we have used a frame that fits in the top of the box trailer for the lower boat - no chance of that moving at all

- and then use two padded cross pieces with holes in the end for the ratchet tie downs to pass through. That can't move much either.

The frame trailer picture right is for the flat bottomed Goat Island Skiff that has two longitudinal runners on the bottom of the boat.

The cross pieces line up with bulkheads inside the boat.

If you are using a cross bar across the top of the top boat I would put holes in the ends of that for the tie down too.

The whole lot sat down very happily all the way to the recent Stansbury/Port Vincent Wooden Boat Festival.

PDRacer Trailers including a single trailer too

One pic and a little comment about the frame trailer
I would normally put


plywood over the trailer frame before adding the bearers that support the boat to reduce the risk of stone chipping the hull.

Found a pic of the Taser rigging board



It is sized for a Taser of course .. add wheels?

I added wheels to my "plank" using some stainless steel tube from a local metal stockist, wheel barrow wheels same as MIK, and having 3 flat metal brackets welded to tube by a local small machine shop.



Brian

Howdy,

I like the idea of any dolley being completely removable from the boat. In general, I think an adaptable system like a thole pin above will be difficult to engineer because it is cantilevered, putting big loads on the hull and the pin itself and the attachment. The plank idea is much more elegant in terms of resolving loads and it can be small enough to fit in a car boot.

MIK

Just to note the Wayfarer dinghy road base modified for the flat RAID41 complete with detachable dolly worked really well.

Balanced as a trailer and balanced with the dolly. Lifting the front of Trim and sliding her backwards the dolly wheels landed on the ground while the front was still sliding backwards on the forward support, so that was good.

Moving Trim around on the dolly she feels very light and easily moved.

Brian