I don't know if this trailer is worth saving.

[Music] do you see that all right you guys well before we kick the year off too hardcore we're going to rebuild our biggest equipment trailer that's the one we haul the excavators on and the backhoes and big loaders and when we need to take multiple pieces of equipment all at once it's the next size up for us from that one but she needs some love so let's get into it [Music] this is our oldest trailer and also our biggest and this trailer was in a major accident years ago and was already rebuilt one [Applause] [Music] for the decking we use two and a half inch true measurements thick oak and you can't pick up that at just any place in a perfect world we'd replace every single board but finding two and a half inch thick oak is difficult at best so we're going to only replace the wood that we absolutely have to and i'm going to head over to reuben's custom saw milling and mill the rest of the wood that we need to complete this project [Music] yeah i know this is the trailer we use to haul our big excavator except nobody's been comfortable hauling our big excavator on it until it gets rebuilt so i want to get the big excavator rebuilt which means i gotta get this rebuilt with the boards off it's a good opportunity to give it a washing of a lifetime plus that's gonna make welding and putting on a new suspension system a lot easier in a few minutes you're going to see me pay close attention to the hit and that's for a very particular reason if you look in the background you're going to see a big cabalco excavator well that trailer and kobelco excavator are basically married together except that little tiny hitch one day decided to snap while we were going down the road and the cabalco and the trailer flew into the air and started to go upside down and i watched this whole thing unfold as i was driving down the road the excavator and trailer rotated 180 degrees all the way upside down and the worst part was there was a car coming right at it the car the excavator flew so high into the air that the car actually and i seen this drove underneath the equipment while it was in the air and then the excavator and trailer smashed onto the freeway the trailer was completely rebuilt and the excavator was completely rebuilt and i completely changed my pants after that day okay that one's got a little bit of a twist to her doesn't she how's the beams on the sides though all right a couple spots that could be like uh that right there could be patched up for sure oh yeah there's a little spot right here and then even this spot right here where it's kind of crippling in oh yeah i mean you can see that it looks like something might hit it here pushing kind of see it looks like it's already patched mm-hmm yeah we've got complete rust separation here what oh i said it was pretty well pressure washed oh pretty well okay uh let's see that's not as disconcerting as this don't think you're supposed to see through no no i don't think you're supposed to see through the i mean these tires too also are look at that so we need some new meat on them so these two got to be switched out you can't switch you can't switch one tire in a set yeah did you know that zach no i didn't know i never used okay so what happens is if you just put like this tire is bad and this tire's yeah you put a brand new tire on this tire is going to wear down until the tread evens out with the entire way faster i mean not like immediately but just you when you replace one you replace both i want to show these guys too i want to show you guys the the tongue needs to be the hitch so you see that i've never even seen one worn down like that see how she's wore right there oh yeah right there she's missing right here so this can't be thanked we can pull it down to the repair shop but we can't put a load on it spots coming through you know there's a good chance he probably just channeled this to you know cut that bad stuff out just like they did with the gate on the box yeah so this side you can't see all the way through but i think that's gonna get rebuilt underneath she's okay [Music] so we need oak planking i think a lot of those can be reused yeah we'll reuse them but we're going to need some new ones what is that two inch oak or what is that three inch seems thicker than two we want to get that welded too yup they're gonna look at the ramps and then tim was saying we can even get some springs for them yes let's get some springs put on them some new heavier duty springs put on them all right let's let's finish up the power washing a lot of the damage you see here wasn't from the accident because the trailer was completely rebuilt after it flipped upside down this is from hauling salt there was a winner where we had a contract to haul bulk salt out to one of our snow plowing accounts and just driving the trailer down the road and getting that salt splashed up from underneath and then having salt on the decking even though it was contained and kind of just walking down on top of it just basically encapsulated this trailer and salt and this is where i want to really take some time and get all of it cleaned off and never do that again here hey hey hey don't aim it at my face you'll knock my eyes out don't even aim it for those of you who aren't as familiar with pressure washers they will peel your skin right off they will peel your flesh off underneath you've got to be careful pressure washers look fun but they're actually a little bit more dangerous than most people realize [Music] the first time we rebuilt the trailer we completely repainted it and it cost us an extra five grand i don't feel like spending five grand just to make it look pretty i'm worried about putting the money into the structural parts of the trailer and the more we wash it the more crap we find wrong with it i haven't priced a trailer like this out in a very long time so i got a question for you guys what do you think it would cost to buy a trailer like this brand new if you could even get it [Music] so with the boards removed the next step is to bring it down to the welding shop and have it gone over and then once we've done once we're done with that we'll put brand new boards on we'll see what we got we got some junk but some of these could still be reused they're not all bad and that's oak so i gotta find that oak they won't carry that at the local hardware store or home improvement out the trailer went from a welding shop to a suspension shop back to a welding shop but then it finally came back to us ready to go minus the wood but while it was in all those different repair shops that gave me a chance to locate some true two and a half inch thick oh and by locate i mean find a giant oak tree and then mill the wood down to the size we need we needed 14 boards to completely redeck the trailer we were able to get five so the five good boards that we got we put them in the high wear areas so [Music] all right so we finally got some of the boards we needed we wanted some more but we got five of them for our trailer here so we're putting them in on the uh replacing the worst boards with the with the new ones and making the old ones work sometimes you just get what you get what you need right so alex here is putting this skid steer bucket on here because some of these boards are so uh you can see they're pretty warped so uh putting some weight on there so we can get them all bolted down and get this thing ready to rock and roll again it's about time need to start hauling some our equipment around on this thing we use carriage bolts to secure the wood to the trailer but tim wants a thicker washer system something with a bigger bite so we're gonna custom make our own [Music] i guess i'm filming so oh here we go we got to make our own blanks up for uh what are these called brackets or whatever i don't know what are they eric alex i got you on camera what are they called man i don't know i don't know what they're called washers yeah we're doing some homemade washers to hold the bores down but we couldn't find any like that so we're just gonna make our own having this vise makes things a little easier for these fasteners huh yeah with the new suspension system put in place and the boards all online we can now then get the truck the trailer brought into the shop and have new tires put on it so that we can ultimately start hauling the excavator now there isn't a whole lot wrong with the excavator but the varmints did get into it over the course of the winter and they chewed up the wiring so we've got to replace the computer system to get it to the point where we can safely use it out on our job sites so that'll be coming down the pipeline hope you enjoyed today's video if you did smash that like button hit that subscribe button and hopefully we will see you guys on another one god bless and go get him you guys