Building a Gooseneck Trailer From Scratch.

Hello and welcome to the channel. My name is Waldo and in this video we're going to be building a premium 14,000 pound gooseneck trailer. This is going to be awesome. With my come and swapped project truck on the road I need a trailer to tow with it. We're building a seven ton flatbed deck over gooseneck trailer. It's going to be 20 feet long with a five foot beaver tail and fold flat ramps. Click click. It'll have hydraulic jacks, a winch and solar battery charger. This trailer will enable me to annoy my spouse for years to come by bringing home more projects than I can handle. Some of you may be wondering why in the world would you build a trailer when you could just go out and buy one. Well it's fun. You can build it exactly the way you want it. You can improve your skills like welding and fabricating and you can even save some money in the process. Speaking of saving money, what does it cost to build a trailer like this? By the end of this video I'll have an estimate for you so stick around for that. I'll also include links down below to the premium parts kit that I used as well as a more budget friendly parts kit. These kits include tires, wheels, suspension and more to make it really easy to procure all the parts that you'll need to build a trailer like this. I also want to give a quick thanks to Johnson Trailer Parts. They sent us almost all of the parts needed to build this trailer and they have been amazing to work with. They sell name brand Rockwell American axles and I don't think you can find better service or better prices anywhere on the internet. This is a 10 inch I-beam. It's 20 feet long and it's going to make one of the main frame rails for the trailer. Over here is a piece of 12 inch I-beam that my steel supplier had in their scrap pile and it just so happens to be exactly what I need but only about an inch longer. It doesn't get much better than that. This beam is going to form the part of the tongue that goes up and over to the truck. As a result this joint right here is structurally one of the most important joints in the whole trailer and I won't be cutting any corners when it comes to joint preparation. Now before I weld that joint together I am going to cut this member down to size. Now I'm going to make a nice angular cut here on the top part of it which is largely for cosmetics but that is definitely worth something. I'm trying out some of these new silver welder's pencils. They're supposed to be highly visible when you're cutting with a torch so we'll see if that's the case. I also ordered some 3 16ths by 4 inch flat bar to cap off the ends in situations like this. That's going to make this look much better. So I got the joint all prepped. Everything is ground down. All the rust and mill scale down to bare steel so it's all nice and shiny so there's nothing to it but to do it. We'll do a bunch of tack welds first and then we can fully weld it somewhat strategically so that it doesn't warp too much. And then I'll just cap off this end here with another piece of flat bar. Easy peasy. This is only the beginning of the project and I'm already working into the night scrambling to get things done. We're supposed to get a ton of rain tomorrow and quite frankly these vertical posts are really tippy because these frame rails are just sitting here. I've already leveled them. I've got them all square and into position. They're the right width apart. 63 inches on center. My plan is to weld in place one of the 3 inch pieces of c-channel cross members here which will hold these frame rails in place because in the worst case these could fall over and hurt someone because they're pretty heavy. In the best case it would just be really annoying because I would have to get them in position all over again. Well I guess we'll pick this up in I don't know a couple days when it stops raining. Some of you may be wondering how did I come up with the design for this trailer to carry the loads that it needs to carry and the truth of the matter is that I'm actually copying the design of a trailer that was in stock at a nearby dealer. You see the problem is these load carrying members need to be strong enough to carry the load without breaking but on the other hand if you over build them if you go with members that are too strong your trailer ends up being quite a bit heavier than it needs to be so there's a fine balance to be found there. By copying the design of a trailer that's on the market from a reputable trailer manufacturer I can be pretty sure that it was professionally engineered and that it will be up to the job. Well that was a little spooky. So over on the end here I have a piece of 5 inch c-channel. Now the cross members are three inches tall and the deck on this is going to be pressure treated pine probably two by eights which are an inch and a half tall which means the deck is going to be four and a half inches above these frame rails and that means I'm going to need to cut out about half an inch from this piece of c-channel where it meets the frame rails. I think she heard something. What is it Aspen? Go on go get it. Is it a chipmunk? That sounds like a chipmunk to me. What you don't want to go get the chipmunk? Aspen that's your job. Looks pretty good. I think the trick now is to just get this so that it is completely perpendicular to that but we'll get it welded on. Now before I finish installing all of the cross members I need to figure out where the ones here in the back go so that they don't interfere with the tires. In order to figure out exactly where the wheels are going to go I'm going to go ahead and install these which are the spring hangers. These came as part of the kit with the axles and suspension. Link in the description below. So the one on the front here just has a simple hole in it for the eye bolt of the front spring. The one in the middle here has a hole in it so that we can fit this thing which will attach to both of the springs and then the one in the back has this piece of flat bar in it and this is so that the slipper spring the slipper end of it can fit over this bolt and it won't let it slip off. They give you a nice diagram of how to arrange these it makes it pretty easy to do and because I spaced these beams apart just right all I need to do is get these centered in the beam and get it aligned so that it's straight. So I got all of these solidly tacked in place. As for fully welding it the instructions call for three passes on the sides inside and outside and then a single pass on the back and the front. Before I fully weld these however I think it would be a good idea to test fit the axles just to make sure everything fits. So the axles go on top of the springs which is really nice for lowering the ride height of the trailer but that means I'm just going to install these upside down and then I'll just have to flip them over. I don't know if you can hear that the dogs are barking up and well howling up a storm in there. So I got the axles and springs fully installed and everything looks pretty good. I also threw a couple tires and wheels on here just to see how they sit. The tires come just about to the top of the frame here which is good news. In my observation I've determined that about three inches of clearance on top of the tires is necessary for this type of trailer. Once the trailer is more complete and closer to its final weight I can set it down onto the ground and we'll see how the suspension loads how much it compresses and then I can get a more accurate measurement of the clearance on top of the tire and that will help me determine if I can use wood decking over the tires or if I'm going to have to go with something like diamond plate to save some space. So my old trailer had that old-fashioned hub design where I had to disassemble the hubs in order to grease the bearings. These axles however have these nifty little caps where you can easily remove them and you can access a grease fitting in there to grease the hubs. How awesome is that? Now it's time to get back to installing the cross members. Well I just ran out of gas so this would be a good opportunity to use my new 150 cubic foot bottle. I'll keep my 80 cubic foot bottle around just so I have a spare if I run out of this on a weekend or something like that but now I will basically never run out of gas. This is great. Oh it doesn't fit. All right we'll cut this part out. Oh my goodness. Ta-da! It fits, kinda. All right we're back in business. All right so with that the framing of the deck is pretty much complete. Here let me show you. So we got all of the cross members in place and then I also put these here. These are five inch pieces of c-channel. So up next there are two obvious things that I could work on. Number one I could work on the dovetail which is obviously missing at the moment and number two the tongue also could use to be completed. Because it's starting to get dark I really have until tomorrow to decide but I think I'm gonna work on the tongue. Look at that. That is a double rainbow over there. Luckily it's not raining here. I guess we just missed it. I managed to find a helper to help me move this heavy piece of pipe. The downside is that he's in the witness protection program so I had to blur his face. Yesterday I was thinking about the stiffness of the trailer and I was worried that my original plan of not having a torque tube might come back to bite me. That once I finished building the trailer, paint it, do all of that work on it, that it might end up being too wobbly which would be really really annoying. So I called up my steel supplier yesterday, ordered a piece of four inch schedule 40 pipe, and here it is. It just showed up. This has an outside diameter of four and a half inches. The wall thickness is somewhere in the neighborhood of a quarter inch. It's very heavy and it cost almost four hundred dollars. That's the reason why I didn't originally plan on using one. Also the trailer that I'm copying, which is a low-end trailer by the way, did not have one so I figured it probably wouldn't be necessary. But you know I was thinking that a lot of the high-end trailers either have it as standard or they have it as an option and yeah I just figured it's the right thing to do. I'm just going to spend the money. We're going to install it. It's going to make the trailer stronger and a lot more stable and I think it's worth it being able to sleep better at night. Well last night I sat down and did some diagrams and some math to figure out the lengths and the angles of the cuts that I'm going to need to make to finish up this tongue. I have a 20 foot piece of 10 inch I-beam so we're going to cut it up and make a tongue. I think we're going to fire up the plasma cutter and cut this thing down to size. So this first segment is going to be 68 and a half inches but I need to add an inch and 5 16ths to it in order to accommodate the angled cut that's going to be at the upright member. And then from that point I'm going to measure another 29 and three quarters of an inch. This is the part that's going to slope downwards to the actual coupler itself. Yeah I had this thing turned up to 24 amps and it did a really nice job of slicing through that. Fantastic. So to make this piece bend down towards the bed of the truck, this is actually upside down, but I'm going to cut a wedge out of this. So it's five inches here on the bottom and then as for this piece which is actually the top, this I'm going to leave intact. So I'm just going to cut from here all the way to here. Afterwards I can bend it and weld it back together and leaving this piece up here intact will, you know, it'll help with strength but it'll also look good as well. A little while later. Look at that. Those welds are mint. So this side of this member is going to be under tension and so I'm going to use this diamond shaped piece of flat bar here to strengthen this joint. And I'm kind of thinking I'm going to try to get away with bending it into shape with a hammer. That's kind of working. So I got this thing all welded in and here's a pro tip for you budding fabric cobblers out there. So I used a piece of three inch flat bar to do this and as you can see I cut the corners off to turn it into a diamond shape like this. Now I could have taken this flat bar and just welded it on like this. It would have a lot easier actually and there would have been more material but the problem is that if I welded this flat bar on like this it would be really strong up until this point where it would all of a sudden become really weak or at least significantly weaker and a lot of stress would be put on the metal right here and would make this prone to cracking. If you cut your corners off into something like a diamond shape or you could also make it rounded as well that would be okay. What it does is this actually is a lot less strong than this is over here and it helps to distribute that force and it makes it so there's not one single point where it's likely to crack. Well so I got the main rails of the tongue all welded in and also the coupler all welded in with these nice looking welds here. These vertical welds here in the back I did a passive vertical up followed by a passive vertical down which makes it look a lot nicer and it also gives you plenty of penetration so it'll be a nice strong weld. So up next for the tongue it needs a lot of reinforcement because of the weird design that's inherent to gooseneck trailer tongues. So I'm going to be putting in some really big gussets right in here. Those are going to be copied off the trailer that I'm basing this on and then there are going to be a bunch of cross members going across the two rails. I did already get one of them in. I've got a piece of five inch c-channel here. Next coming right along here is going to be a piece of six inch c-channel and then there'll be another five piece of five inch c-channel at the back and then kind of more like around here there'll be some maybe some tubing that will hold the spare tire. That's the rough idea. It's always fun to weld on flammable objects like this. I think his blades might be starting to get a little bit dull. All right it is gusset time. Well I got the gussets all welded in. Now the trailer that I'm basing my trailer on, and improving in almost every way, they used an eighth inch plate here and they rolled the edges to make it a bit stronger on the edge here. Now I don't have the equipment to do that so I just took a piece of quarter inch flat bar, fully welded it in here on both sides and that should make it nice and strong. Now I don't remember if they fully welded this over here or if they stitch welded it so I'm going to leave it stitch welded for now. I feel like that's probably what they did and that's probably the way to go. As for the cross members, I'm going to leave out the ones in the back here because I think right in here is where I'm going to want to put the winch and the hydraulic pump and the hydraulic reservoir and the battery for those and I think I want to put some thought into it to figure out how I want to package it and so I'm going to save that for later. So now I think it's time to get this torque tube installed. That should be exciting. Moving on to the torque tube, I'm going to use this six inch piece of c-channel here at the front to connect the torque tube to the main frame rails. Other than serving as an attachment point for the torque tube this piece of c-channel is also going to provide quite a bit of strength to the main frame rails so that they can't wobble so much like this. That's not too bad. I want to lift this thing just a little bit and I think a ratchet strap will be just the right tool for the job. Farther out I have this strapped the more adjustment I have. Oh yeah, no I definitely am going to want that adjustment. That is actually like exactly four and a half inches from the top of the pipe to the bottom of the cross member so I guess I'll make sure the back is the same as well. Well, I've got this thing leveled and centered so it's time to tack it into place. Those tacks aren't going to be enough to hold it in place on its own without these straps but at least it'll help keep it from moving around too much. So to tie this torque tube in at the middle sections of the trailer I think I'm going to take some pieces of three inch c-channel and just tie this in like this and then once I have these welded in I'll probably take a short piece of five or six inch c-channel and just run it up from here to here and that'll tie it in with this cross member up here and I think that'll be strong enough. Nice, that is a nice and snug fit. Well, I got the torque tube all installed. We've got multiple passes of welds on there just to burn it in really good. Now the next step is to build a dovetail. Now to do this I'm going to manufacture my own I-beams because that way I can get the geometry just right. In order to get the material needed for these I-beams it's time for me to cut up my trusty workbench here. This is a piece of 3 16th inch plate that's left over from my truck's flatbed build. This is going to be used for the webbing of the I-beams and then I have some quarter inch flat bar that I'm going to use for the flanges of the I-beams. Just to kind of give you guys an idea this is approximately what this is going to look like well after I turn this into an I-beam that is. So manufacturing a beam is not particularly difficult. The trick is to hold it in place with magnets or clamps or really whatever you have. Get it nice and straight at 90 degrees and then you tack weld it securely in place evenly across the whole length of the beam and then when you weld it you weld it in short segments which helps to reduce the possibility of warping as it cools. So I have a piece of 8 inch c-channel here that I'm going to use as the rear member of the trailer. This is where the lights will be and the ramps will attach to this. Now the bottom corner here is one of the weakest parts of the trailer and it's the most likely to bottom out when I'm going over uneven terrain and it looks really bad when this hits the ground and it bends. So what I'm actually going to do is I'm going to cut out a little wedge shape here, bend this up, weld it back together and that'll make this a lot less likely to bottom out and it'll be more likely to bottom out down here but this is going to be a lot stronger down here. So I think it'll keep the back of the trailer looking good for many years to come. I don't think that's going to do very much. I bent it a little. Look at that. That's beautiful. So I'm doing a little bit of experimentation here getting the layout and trying to figure out what the arrangement of lights and stuff is on this back member here. So for lighting we're actually going to be doing Technic LED lighting. We have two stop turn tails here. We're going to have a reverse light because that's really nice to have. These seven pin wiring connectors are wired for that so it'll be nice being able to see behind. After that we have room for a license plate. It can go on either side and then there's going to be the identification bar here in the middle and then the other side is going to be just like this side except for the license plate. To cut the holes for these lights I get to break open my plasma cutter stencils that I bought for my flatbed build but because I'm using the same standard type of trailer light I can use the same stencil. It's pretty neat. The size of this stencil is just right to accommodate the spacing of my plasma torch so it cuts the perfect size hole. You can get these on Amazon. I'll put a link in the description. Well I have all the structural members of the dovetail fully welded and it's all looking pretty good so I am ready now to start installing the angle iron cross members that are going to serve as treads for the dovetail. So underneath here I need a little bit more support for these pieces of angle iron. They are three sixteenths inch thick in their two by two angle but they're not quite strong enough to take a ton of weight here but if I support them with this piece of three inch c channel right about here that should make them a lot stronger. Sometimes you got to be a little creative with ratchet straps and whatnot to hold these things in place so you can weld them because I don't have enough hands to do it all by myself. Yeah so the dovetail is largely complete and looking pretty good if I do say so myself and so I think the next task is to be working on the rub rails which go right here. So for the rub rails themselves I have this right here which is a piece of two inch by three eighths inch flat bar that's going to be the rub rail. I have this right here which is a piece of three sixteenths I don't know if that's plate or flat bar that I had my steel supplier form into this shape form into a piece of c channel. This is going to separate the flat bar from the frame of the trailer itself and then I also have these pieces of pipe I think this is probably what is it inch and a half schedule 40 pipe it's 1.9 inches outside diameter that's what really matters here. This is really useful because if you have chain you can wrap the chain around the pieces of pipe which is a nice way of doing it and distributing that force. So I'm going to get these cut up into small pieces and then I can start welding them on to the frame. Sometimes a big hammer is just the right tool for the job. So a weld like this calls for a pass of vertical up for good penetration followed by a pass of vertical down to make it look nice and also it helps you get better paint coverage I think. So the trailer here is largely structurally complete of course there are odds and ends here and there that still need to be finished in order to complete the trailer however I really want to know what the trailer looks like when I hook it up to my truck but first let's measure it and make sure it's not too wide there is a legal limit of 102 inches and we are at 101 and a half that is exactly what I was going for so that is really good news. I'm off by a little bit well the trailer drove down here very well I couldn't even feel it behind me which is not too surprising it'll be interesting to see when I actually drive it on the road and report back to you in a future video. I owe you an estimate of the cost to build this trailer but before I start getting into prices let me just say that things are pretty crazy right now in terms of inflation and supply chain issues so the cost that you see when you build your trailer if you choose to build one may be wildly different from my cost that being said let's get into it. So let's start out with one of the largest items and that is the cost of steel I paid $4,224 for my steel and I guess I should say I didn't shop around I just went to my local steel supplier where I usually go. They have pretty good prices I think but that being said steel is one of those things that has gone up a lot in price lately. The next big thing on the list is the parts kit from Johnson Trailer Parts the link of which is in the description below and it cost $4,950. Now I should say this is a premium parts kit that includes hydraulic jacks and it also includes things like the axles, the suspension, the tires, the lighting, almost everything that you need and if you were to go price out all of these items individually on the internet I think you'll find that all of those parts come to a lot more than this price so buying the parts kit definitely saves you quite a bit of money. Now if you are on a budget they also have a parts kit that does not have the hydraulic jacks it does save a fair amount of money and that's also in the description below. Going down the list we have smaller items like paint and primer was $402, lumber I'm estimating at $260 but it actually might end up being a little bit more, the winch I bought a Harbor Freight winch that was $333 and then I have a miscellaneous line item of $370 which is just a bunch of other miscellaneous stuff. That brings the total cost of the trailer to $10,539. If you go with a more budget-friendly parts kit that has mechanical jacks it ends up coming to $8,764 which let's be honest is really cheap. Now let's compare the cost to build this trailer with the cost to buy a brand new trailer and we'll start with the 20 foot long SureTrack trailer that I based my design on. This trailer was a very basic trailer it had mechanical jacks it had a basic dovetail with basic ramps really nothing special it also didn't have a torque tube. The price of this trailer was over $10,000 and that brought the cost of it to be right about the same as the cost for me to build my trailer. Now as for the cost to buy a trailer that has all the options that mine has it's really hard to know for sure how much it would cost because trailer manufacturers don't publish their prices generally and I couldn't find anything comparable at a local dealer but it's not uncommon for high-end trailers to cost $14,000 $15,000 or more and I think that's a decent comparison so I think we can say that I probably saved around $4,000 to $5,000 by building my own trailer. So not only did I save money but I had fun and I got exactly what I wanted in my trailer. Oh and one last thing about the parts kits from Johnson Trailer Parts they can customize those if you want so if there's anything in the parts kit that you want to substitute anything you don't need or anything you want to add they can do that for you. So coming up next I have a bunch of things left to do to the trailer before it's complete Number one I have to make some ramps. Now a lot of trailer manufacturers have their own proprietary names for their fold flat full width ramps some call them max ramps or mega ramps or whatever but that's exactly what they are they are full width fold flat ramps it's a really nice way to go. I also have to install hydraulic jacks I have to install the winch I have to paint the trailer install the deck there's wiring there's lights there's all sorts of good stuff to do. So this the end of part one stay tuned for part two of what I think is going to be a four part series I really have to get this thing finished so that I can paint it before it gets too cold to paint anything. This reminds me of last year I was in the same position painting my truck except that I'm about a month behind on the trailer so who knows if I'll actually get it painted in time or if I'll have to wait until spring. Thank you so much for watching and I will catch you in the next one. Oh that sun is really right this is the weakest point right here oh that's really hot what are you rolling around in right now