I've been lurking on the forums for a while getting ideas for my
Beachcomber that I am restoring. The back story is that I was looking at buying a backcomber in Cochrane AB. After taking it for a test drive I was about to go in a make the guy an offer when another guy was walking down the alley and commented that he had the same trailer. We chatted for a bit and he said he would sell me his (for a lot less than the one I was looking at). I took a look at the other one and after pulling up some of the flooring determined that the floor was rotten at least in the front section under the front bench seat. I wasn't sure I wanted to take on that big of a project unless the price was right and it turned out.. it was.
I started out by gutting the entire thing, the closet had been bolted right through the belly band to stop the shell from bowing out so that the door fit properly. The lock was broken so the door had to be bungeed shut for the drive along with a few other interesting mods. While gutting the trailer I noticed some interesting things. There was no leaking abve the belly band but the belly band had leaked very badly, about 50% of the wood that secures the top and bottom shells together was so rotten it was basically dust. Those
leaks in the belly band caused the entire floor to be saturated so the floor basically came up as chunks of rotten wet wood and crumbs. Basically all the bolts holding it to the frame were rusted and hardly doing anything.
The floor had 2 big holes in it that you can see in other
beachcomber rebuilds. So far I've gutted and cleaned the whole thing and patched all the holes in the floor with
Fiberglass. On top of that i have fiberglassed the top and bottom shells together on the inside and outside with 3 layers each to make sure that my rebuild will never suffer the same fate. I think the fact that the shells were not originally fiberglassed togther is a huge downfall in the design and has led to a lot of the leaking problems you see in these trailers.
My next step is to take the shell off the frame and fix all the exterior rock chips and body damage on the bottom. I'll clean the frame up,
paint it, inspect the
axle and weld a trailer hitch to the back for a bike rack.
I'll try to get some pictures up here soon for you all.
Kyle