Finally... a trailer that doesn't try to kill you

Good morning. Good morning. Good morning. What a beautiful day. Yeah, it's cloudy, but I'll take stuff like this any day. We're at one of my favorite dealerships ever. top-notch equipment. I shouldn't say one of I actually don't think there's a different dealership that I like more than this anywhere. And we got some new equipment we're picking up. But yeah, just a plug. These guys ain't asking me to do this. They've never asked me to do anything. The these are just good folks. So, if you happen to be in Minnesota and you're looking for equipment, the first thing I'm going to say is check out Topn. That's my fault. All right, guys. The secret is out. I'm buying another trailer. Why am I getting another trailer? Because I have a trailer addiction. I'm an addict. I love trailers. I freaking love trailers so much that every year I go to different trailer shows. I get different trailers whether I need them or not. And this is a trailer that I've been eyeballing for a long time. But I want someone that is more of an expert on these things to tell you about them than I am. Joey. Oh man. How are you, buddy? And yes, I actually do love the people at Topnotch. All right, there's your first full view and my first full view. But in all clarity or transparency, the first time I seen this trailer was many years ago at the trailer show. And uh we got Doug. Doug is coming up. Doug, how are you doing, buddy? Good. How are you, sir? Doing excellent, guys. This is Doug from Belmont. Belmont Trailers owns Flat Track. Yes. And you guys don't talk about it, but I'm going to mention it. It's actually an Amishowned company. Yes, it is. Okay. So, this is an Amishbuilt trailer. And to some of you guys, you're not going to care, but other people are going to say to themselves, "What does that mean?" qual to me instantly. It re means a level of quality and commitment of clarity to the construction process without cutting corners. That's what it means. A level of American ingenuity that we used to experience and be used to 40, 50 years ago, but has tend to disappear in modern manufacturing. but still hold true in certain niches, and this trailer is one of them. Doug, will you hold this camera for just a second? All right. Uh, put it right on me. I'm going to go under here. Doug, I'm going to start at the bottom. Okay, you got it. This is where I was the most impressed. I came under here and I looked at the cross bracing underneath this trailer. And I don't know what to say, but there's my the breath of my hand. Here's where it's not braced. Here's the cross bracing. And the entire trailer is boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. There's almost more bracing under here, Doug, than decking than decking. And and I also want to point out, too, in this design trailer where you're going, this is a true drop deck that sits 100% flat on the ground. And what you'll notice is there's actually nothing exposed under here to become damaged in the process of dropping the trailer, which you won't find in other trailers of this making model that try to try to be drop deck trailer. I can't get my finger under there. But, you know, you have two different ways of dropping the deck on this. And I don't normally conduct my uh walkounds laying on the ground under a trailer, but hey, this is comfy. That's right. Uh, you can actually drop it 100% flat. Yes. Or you can change the attack angle and drop it at what angle from there? 4° roughly a 4° angle by leaving the front two cylinders on the knuckle frame locked in. So if you have So if a guy has a tool chest, for instance, and you got to get straight down to the ground. Yep. You lift up the safety catches and this trailer will go will lay scissorless, snorkelless, all the all the equipment with that tight tight zero ground clearance 100% to the ground. 4 in is all the height of the trailer on the frame size and that's it. And you're flat and we'll demonstrate that in a minute. It's it's 4 in. And the other thing I want to loop back too when you were talking about the company and the company for me and you know I've had a pretty story career with different things in my life. It's the core values of this company. You just can't begin to express the core values of this company and what drives I mean at any point you're talking to anybody at Belmont you're one one person away from the ownership of the brand and that's huge in this world of you know big business and I learned just recently that Belmont owns Flat Track. Yes. And it hadn't owned Flat It hadn't always owned Flat. It has. Yes. It was an in-house brand. It was an in-house product created by Belmont Engineering Team. So that started 5 years ago. It started okay so it started 5 years ago but then it was in research and development for two years. Two years research and development. The final form which what you see here then was taken out final form was done and we did an actual Navastar testing. It ran for over simulated 75,000 mi and the trailer never failed. Okay. So tell me about that a little bit slower. I I I need to understand what does that mean? So Navastar which is a trailer testing facility, one of the world renowned trailer testing facilities for all big trailers. This trailer was sent out there. Navastar is the world testing facility. One of the world testing facilities premier for four trailers and trailers durability. So you it's a third party. It's a third party independent tested and they'll put it under various test tracks under various conditions where they have, you know, bump tracks, all those things. Then they also do full simulated load testing. So they exceeded the load testing on this trailer by over a third and it performed flawlessly. So, the this is a 14,000 lb uh rated trailer. Yes. Two 7,000lb axles. Yes. Trailer weighs 4,000 lb, giving you a 10,000 lb payload. And they put how much onto the trailer? I won't I don't want to say cuz I don't want to encourage anybody. Are you saying that they did it a third over? They exceeded the loading capacity that we rated it at by a comfortable margin. By a comfortable margin. And then you beat the snot out of it. Yes. Exactly. And you can see that in how well it's built. Absolutely. All right, guys. Uh I just put about 300 miles on with this trailer in the back. See if we can see it in the mirror right there. We've been going down the road averaging 60 to 80 miles an hour. Okay, we'll say 70 because the speed limit in Minnesota is 70. You can't even feel it back there. It might as well just not even be there. It might as well just disappear. I mean, this thing is there's nothing. You don't even know it's back there. It's hard to see. I I mean, quiet toes like a dream. Some trailers you hook up to, you can feel it in the steering wheel. You can feel this. The steering wheel does this. You know what I mean? It fights you a little bit. I've had trailers where it fights you. But watch this. completely hands off. Don't need hands to drive. The trailer is not driving the truck. The truck is driving the trailer. That I love when I get when that happens. When you get a trailer like that, you know you everything's lined up right and it's just smooth. The trailer the truck's driving the trailer. The trailer's not driving the truck. to that by a comfortable margin. By a comfortable margin and then you beat the snot out of it. Yes. Exactly. And you can see that in how well it's built. Absolutely. What do you want to show me, Doug? You started to move like you're going to show me something. Going to lock these down. Okay. All right. So, all of our cylinders are locked down. You want to use the remote control that's standard or you want to use the handheld unit? So, remote control, power on. We're going to drop it down to its ride position. So, so now we are resting on the lockouts. Running on the lockouts. And this sets it into the perfect attack angle for that trailer. Yes. But if you needed to, if you're going over a bumpy road, you're going off terrain, you got railroad tracks, you have the ability to raise this up. You can raise it up some to give yourself clearance just to get over obstacles. And then you can drop it back down onto its ride arms. Yes, it ride arms. What's important to note, too, is these are all independently locked out, which is an added safety feature and keeps the trailer, if any one of these were to fail, the trailer's still going to lock out on the road. You're not going to be stuck on the side of the road with the central lockout system that failed. Slow that down. Back that up and say that again for me. So, each one of the hydraulic cylinders has a safety lockout. Mhm. Okay. Okay. Some drop deck trailers have what is known as a central locking system where it's hydraulically activated or mechanically activated. Yep. And you do that from one location. And if that were to fail, the whole trailer goes down and there's no way to fix it other than to repair whatever is broken. This one has six. This one has six lockouts. It can ride on any of them and it will not 1 2 3 4 five six. 1 2 3 4 5 six. Now, the central locking hub means a guy can just go fling and do it. With this, you actually have to physically walk around, flip everything up. And some of you guys are going to say, "That's tedious." Well, don't be a There's a very good reason for that. I I firmly believe it's good to always do a walk around and an inspection on your trailer before you load it up and go down the road. Maybe you guys like to drive blind. I don't. So, what we've essentially done by walking around now, I've looked at the ground and I know it's safe to drop this trailer down. Mhm. I'm not going to hit any debris. I'm not going to damage anything that I didn't want to drop the trailer on. Shall we go down? Yeah. Now we're going down as flat as possible. Yes. And you can see that right there. And it's power up, gravity down. So you can always get your trailer down if you need to. Yes. It will go down so far that the actual tires start to lift off the ground. Yes. I mean, they don't lift off, but you can see them lift up. Now we're at a 4 in 4 in height. It's a full squat trailer down, deck down on the ground. Full squat. This is where you could push up anything on here. I mean, look around. I'm going to demonstrate some equipment, too, right? Oh, absolutely. So, you'll see that that low clearance system. If a guy doesn't need to go down that far, that far. All right. Wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Before we lift it, before we lift it, we'll show them the next thing. You guys got to wait because there's something I want to show you. The suspension system. Since we're already down, we can get a little better a uh view of it. Tell me about the suspension. Cuz each tire is independent, right? Each tire is independent suspension. It runs on a torsion bar suspension. So, there's a torsion bar inside this tube right here with sealed bearings that allow that when it's an up locked out position, that arm then articulates on a torsion bar. So, there's a full suspension system on this trailer on each one of them independent of each other. Now, it's not a rigid frame going down the road bouncing under load. Now, you have three models of trailers. Yes. Three. One is a car hauler. Yes. And this one is the equipment hauler. Equipment hauler. What is the difference? So, the car hauler is made with an aluminum deck to take some weight out. Okay. Okay. And then there's also a really neat feature with the car hauler in that it's able to raise up a little bit higher so the doors on a car can open. And the lockouts are a little bit different, too. They're slide lockouts so they don't interfere with the door opening and closing when we try to look. Okay. Okay. All right. But I want to show these guys real quick. I know we're going to get to the second attack angle. I get it. But if we look right here, here's where your suspension system. We were looking at that torsion suspension system goes from here to there, right Doug? Yes. Is that right? That's your That's your torsion arm that comes down and torqus right here on your torsion bar that's inside this hub assembly here. Yep. Yep. So, it's right there. Okay. And I've seen uh that's a similar suspension system to what actually Yanmar uses on their skid loaders. Oh, okay. All right. So, we're going back up now and we're going to hit the second attack angle. And you can either use the remote and it has a power jack and you can use the remote or you can actually use the central control system inside of the control box. So you can plug in for your battery tender. Okay. And couple things. We don't have the spare tire on this and we don't have the solar panel, but you can put them in. Yes. Okay. So we don't have the spare tire and this is your hard wire. This is your hard wire. So, if you don't have the remote handy, you're not out of business. You keep going. Yep. Um, can you flip this open for me real quick, Doug? I just want to take a peek under the hood. Here's what powers everything. So, you got a battery, room for extra battery, room for extra tools, uh, your motor, and your hydraulic uh, reservoir. Yes. And then you've got your antenna for your remote is right here. Now, this trailer comes stock with a 2-year warranty, but the trailer you see in this video is not pure stock. I have a few options on it, but this trailer is not loaded out by any means. I do not have the spare tire. I do not have the solar charger on it, but I did upgrade it with those custom rims and wheels. And later on in the video, we'll go over a few of the options that you can get. Some of them you can't get. But if you really want to know more about all of the options and everything that does this trailer has and doesn't have, I'm going to recommend you go to their website, flat track.com. But let's dive back into this one and see what else he's got to say about it. God, that's a gorgeous trailer, isn't it? Joey, what do you think? Is that a beautiful trailer? It's a beautiful trailer, guys. This is my buddy Joey. top notch. So if you guys I told you about topnotch, he does all their social media. Oh yeah. Always posting videos and photos of all of our equipment. So check us out. All right. Second attack angle now. Okay. We we lock out the front knuckle, right? Is that what we're going to call this? Lock out the front knuckle. Okay. And now we're going to drop it down to the second position, which doesn't go quite as low. So if you don't need to drop it low low, what are we at? About a foot now. Yeah. And it's a 4° angle. A 4° angle. So maybe a a foot and 16 in 16 in off the ground. And we've got what? 1 2 3 4 5 6 eight D- rings to tie down. Welded. Also, in another upgrade, you can get the actual drop in wench. Comes as an assembly. Slide it in. So, there is a a wench option that would go right there. Yes. And so, if you have to actually pull equipment up, you actually can. Yes. Okay. So, this is more than a standard skiddy trail. Yes. So, let's just I don't know if I want to say this, but if all you're going to do is haul a Skddy, you don't need this trailer. Probably not. No. No. This is overbuilt. It's more than what you need. Yes. But if you have other equipment and it's you're not just hauling one piece of of gear. Yes. And then then this is where this comes this comes into play because you can haul anything on it, including a low angle, high angle, whatever it is as far as ground clearance is concerned up to 10,000 lb. So, Mhm. Yeah, it's it's really a wellbuilt really. And that's the big thing too is just trying to convey to people, you know, you you got to see and touch it and feel it to get the the actual quality of it and see how rigid it. So, we have a standard still well hydraulic jack and they do something different that I have not seen before. You actually have a control valve right here. So, the central hydraulics can operate the trailer or it can operate the jack. So, we're not wash, rinse, and repeating the same hydraulics and double doubling down. We're just simply It's not changing the flow. Exactly. Just redirecting. Super smooth, super quick. Yeah. All right. And battery tender standard as we talked about. Uh again, in the room for a second, even third battery, you shouldn't need it. But it charges either plug it on the side at night or it charges off of your truck trailer. Mhm. The battery. Okay. Demco latches. Yep. Diamond plating as normal. Right. There's is the only upgrade on this trailer cuz I want to be very clear. If guys are going to go buy one of these, I don't want them going, "Oh, wait a minute. That's not what I seen in the video. The only difference that they could get is they don't need the the fancy rims." Fancy rims. That's exactly right. The aluminum rims are an upgrade. Um, couple upgrades that you may want. We actually have a solar panel that goes on top of the box that you can actually charge the battery tender with also. Okay. So, uh spare tire is an add-on too along with the winch assembly. What about the deck sizes, Doug? So, we have a 22 ft, which is what this is. We have an 18 ft in this same dual axle design. We also have a 14T in the single axle design. And we alluded to the knuckle frame design, the rigid frame design, and the car hauler. Yes. Um, but we're eliminate, but you guys are leaning more towards concentrating on the on the knuckle frame is really what's really prevailed in the marketplace. We do offer this trailer without any disassembly where it's a rigid frame. So, you eliminate these hydraulics. You only get that you get this load angle then of 4° with the rigid frame. You don't get the complete drop then. You don't get the complete drop then. you know that it's really shown itself to be the cost savings of eliminating this bit of hydraulics and extra work here isn't really cost effective in the price point. So I would tell you emphatically that you know the drop deck knuckle frame is where you want to be. The knuckle frame is frame cuz you get you get the best of both worlds. You absolutely do. Yes. At this point cuz right here this is the rigid frame attack angle. You lift that up and now you can go all the way down if you ever need to. And there are times when if you do just general stuff like I do, it's nice to have that ability for sure. All right. What about a website? Where do guys find out more information, Doug? So, wwflatrack.com. That's t r a k without a c.com. Fully loaded. There's a media tab on the top of the web page and you click on that, you can get a full brochure. You get the spec on each one of these trailers. So, we have the cart hauler. We have the equipment version, which is what's here. And then we also have a newly released uh enclosed trailer which is really slick. It's a full enclosed trailer and it's a drop deck that goes completely down. So you're in an urban environment, you want to offload any kind of pallets or you're you know anything where you need to keep it secure and closed. It's a really nice trailer. Really nice. You can drop it and leave it. You can drop it and leave them. Absolutely. So think tent planning, party planning, um job site job site job site security. You got all your stuff in the trailer. pull it off with a with a hand truck. Drop it, you leave it and go and go. Yep. It's really nice. And then you can just hook right back up and uh off down the road. What is the price point on a trailer like this? So, this retails just under 25. It's around 246 for fully loaded equipment out to 22 foot. Okay. And if guys have an issue with the price, what are you going to say to them? You know, we're certainly the best. I would say in my humble opinion, you know, this is the best drop deck you can buy for the money. There's no other comparison. And that's really what I have to say about the price point. I I hear it all the time. A lot of people say, "Oh, I want to get one of those. Wow, that's a lot of…