Finally, some photos from the March S-250 road trip!
I'm posting these to close out this road trip thread, and will document my ongoing conversion of this shelter to a working mobile HAM shack on a new, more appropriate thread heading (any suggestions as to which?). This project is for my own personal use, as well as ( I hope) an emergency services communications platform, for community work. The latter reflects the "service" aspect of the Amateur Radio Service.
First Pic shows my 15 year old son, and navigator, coffee pourer, and mirror watcher, Taylor, outside of the Chicago Art Institute on our one dedicated "play day".
Traveling 1200 miles with an empty trailer, soon broke two out of three welds on each fender by the time we arrived in Webster, NY. We woke up to some white stuff before heading to Ontario Surplus, after a trip that was thankfully devoid of snow, or any bad weather for that matter.
My little trailer with it's 1700# capacity and 12" tires went "Oomph!" when Ben loaded the estimated 1400# shelter on it. Amazingly the brackets and bunks I had welded to the frame were a perfect fit! Ben's pretty amazing with his forklift--dropped it right into place the first time. We removed the rear mounted heater/AC unit, with a little difficulty, and placed it inside for better weight distribution. Also inside was a set of stairs, a crank-up antenna mast, and a Jerry can holder. We had added some cinder-blocks near the tongue to balance the AC unit before we moved it inside, but decided to leave them to prevent any negative tongue weight issues. I've had trailers start to fish-tail at highway speed for that reason, and it aint' pretty!
We secured the shelter with four 2000# test cable/turnbuckle sets I had rigged beforehand, and clamped to length at loading. I went with a cross pattern used for rail transport of CUCV shelter rigs. These tied into some enormous D-rings my welder, Brian had added to my trailer frame. You can sort of see the fender resting on the wheel in the one photo, so my first stop after we left Ben's was to find someone that could repair the welds. Pulling this thing down the road for the first time with my 4 cylinder Jeep felt awful. I began to have second thoughts about whether this was going to be safe, or even do-able. After finding a muffler place that raised and welded the fenders back on, things started looking up again. Using fourth gear on the hills, the turnpikes weren't that bad after all, and I averaged around 55 mph--no worries about speeding tickets!
The next day, just outside the garden-spot of Gary, Indiana, my left fender went out--just hanging on by the front weld. The thought of jerry-rigging it with bungees, and having it come off in traffic sent shivers down my spine, so I broke the last weld and threw it in the shelter for the trip back. I was waiting to get stopped by a trooper for no fender, and kept an eye out for rain that would have made quite a rooster tail behind me. Made it the rest of the way home the next day just 45 minutes before the rain started and kept up for the next 5 days. God must like US Army green!
