My First Production Trailer, Ep. 3: Cut to Montage

This old truck used to haul draft horses,
a toy hauler will be a piece of cake.

 Another week-and-a-half gap, and it's time for a progress report. It's a week until load-in/wheels-up on the next feature film project. Let's just say I'm taking a lot of niacin to keep from panicking. So much left to do, including getting the truck, a '98 Ford F350 diesel dually crew-cab, back up and running. Due to a snafu with the insurance company, precipitated by my forgetting that I needed to add the truck back to the insurance until day before yesterday, arranging to have it towed to the shop turned out to be a giant cluster beyond SNAFU and heading for TARFU. I get that the dispatchers for the big insurance companies are all in outer Mongolia or Florida or wherever, but would it kill them to look at a map (they have them online!) before they set up a tow job? Lynwood isn't far from me as the crow flies, but there's a wee bit of water between me, in Kitsap County, and the west side of Puget Sound (Seattle side). When I hear "Your tow will cost $250+", I know they've looked at mileage and not geography. I wonder if people in upper Michigan have the same problem with remote call centers? Anyway, yesterday's tale of woe is ultimately boring, suffice it to say that after starting the process around 0903, I finally got the truck on the way to the shop at 1730. Whee.

Thanks, again, to friend Rick, the skin and trim is back on the front of the trailer. Today I'll get it all caulked up and the lights back on. Oh, and replace the missing tank vent cap up there, too. I wish I could just cut to an "A-Team"-style montage at this point, but at least I have recorded books to listen to while I slam my way through the remaining to-do list. Still need to install new toilet, fix the fueling station, clean and paint the rusty areas on the front of the frame and propane tank pans, find the new plates (Oh, wait, they're in the file box in a folder marked "toy hauler", duh.) and put them on, and coerce somebody into cutting off one side of the mounting bracket for the new stairs and welding it back on because the stairs I bought are 2" wider than the old ones. Oops.

De-gunking front trim before re-attaching.

Then there's all the nickel and dime stuff I need to do inside: hanging peg boards, installing tie-downs for gorilla shelves...easy stuff I can do in my sleep. I've already picked away at some of it, including removing the sofa and settee(s) and finding them new homes, storing one of the drop-down queen beds in the garage (more head room in the "workshop"!), and painting the bed deck, which was raw particle board, in the forward berth.

Forward berth with new, sweep-able finish

I'm constantly amazed at how cheap a lot of the construction is on this rig. I knew travel trailers were ticky-tacky, unless you're springing for one of those NASA-grade Airstreams, but I had hoped that toy haulers would be more robust. They certainly have better frames, as in the actual bed of the trailer, since they're designed to receive a variety of sport vehicles, but the superstructure appears just as cheesy as most other trailers. Not only was the forward berth deck just raw OSB, but the little ports into the cubby hole storage "bins" was just rough-sawn edges with a coat of flat paint on them. A quick sanding, some primer, another sanding, and some satin paint I found in the garage in a matching color, and the forward berth is pretty much good to go.

Yesterday was Friday, and I decided it was time to take a break from movie prep and, um, watch a movie. I hung a white sheet off the trailer and treated the neighbor kids to their first viewing of My Neighbor Totoro, which they'd never heard of let alone seen. I sense a Miyazaki series in their future. It went over really well. The kids, from about 7 years to early teens, were mesmerized. Level unlocked. As an atmosphere booster, a giant, almost full moon crept up over the treeline at the back of the pasture during the last act. I've wanted to show movies outdoors since I was a kid, so even though it may seem banal to some folks, it was kind of a lifetime achievement for me and a great bridge into working on the biggest feature I've crewed on in years. Onward!

My First Production Trailer, Ep. 2: Pandora's Box

And lo, many ills were released, but also hope,
in the form of shiny new frames from cool neighbor.

It's been a week and a half since I took the leap and sprang for a "pre-owned" (2005) toy hauler. Might be a 2006. There's some disagreement in the paperwork. In the last chapter I outlined the rigamarole I went through negotiating the sale after discovering more damage than initially discovered. This chapter could be titled "Why people buy from a dealership, new or used".

It towed great with my friend Sarah's pickup. Definitely needs a solid rig to pull it. We have a Ford F350 dually that's going to fill the bill nicely after a few repairs, but that's another story. When we got it home and parked it in the back yard, the real inspection began. The first thing we found was that there was more than one leak in the front end. Not only was there damage down the front right corner, but the front left, where the ladder

Damage under ladder

attached to the roof, was even worse. Instead of lifting the skin and doing some minor repairs, we ended up removing the ladder and stripping the entire skin off the front end. Pretty much about 75% of the frames and a good portion of the inner skin were mush. That alone means I still paid more than I should have, but I doubt the guys in Tacoma would have gone lower. We ripped out the insulation batting over the sad areas, and friend Rick, who had some time, went to work ripping out the spongy frames.

Neighbor Marcel, who basically has an entire woodworking facility and machine shop in his garage, ripped me some nice cedar frames and cut a piece of steel to patch the bad corner of the roof where the ladder will be reattached. The weather has been cooperating, and the whole area is dry now, especially since we parked the trailer with the nose facing south. It's rained a bit on a couple of nights, but I just threw a tarp over the front end and that worked fine. Today I'll be pulling staples so Rick can finish the framing on Monday and stick in new insulation. Marcel suggested the pink rigid foam stuff, so I picked up a couple of sheets. The water damage seems to have only affected the nose of the rig, so that's a blessing.

Crumbling water heater is crumbly.

The second area of woe was the water heater. I don't think any of the previous owners had ever done a lick of maintenance on it. The zinc was down to a skewer, and the faceplate was rusted away at the bottom. I found one on Craigslist for $175 (they retail for over $300) from a guy parting out a trailer down in Belfair, and with a modicum of struggle we switched it out. A new anode/zinc was $18 from the RV parts place in Silverdale.

Third surprise was in the head. When we turned on the water pump the back of the toilet started spraying water. Looked like a bad gasket at the intake, which is fixable, but...I found almost the exact same model on Craigslist (again), new in box, from a guy right here in Kingston for $100 (they retail for around $135). I figured by the time I bought parts to fix the old one I'd be halfway to a bill, anyway, and the crusty unit in the head looks like it hasn't been cleaned in years so...bye.

Fuleing station box: wee bit precarious.

Fourth item on this list, and not a surprise since it was so obvious when we looked at the rig in Tacoma, is the fueling station. This is a nice feature on toy haulers: a gas tank with a hose and spigot for fueling your ATVs or whatever. The box that houses the hose and spigot is falling away from the frame, and the spigot is missing parts. Again: previous owners just didn't care, apparently. It's a project I can do easily, just not a #1 priority.

Shiny new frames almost done.

The rest is nickel and dime stuff: replace wobbly pedestal legs on the table with folding ones, remove dinette chairs, replace burnt-out light bulbs, fix the one broken window blind, clean and line drawers and shelves, and just a general overall cleaning. Found a couple of office chairs at Goodwill for two bucks a pop, and I've been collecting other little things to furnish the place over the past few months. Now I just have to make space in the garage to store the folding sofa, chairs, and extra queen bed. Or maybe I'll sell them...I don't know. Am I going to sell this trailer someday? Probably. If I sell it to another film industry worker they probably won't want that other stuff, either. I'll think about it.

The good news is the AC seems to work, the sound system functions, the generator fires right up, and there are no soft floor spots. I think we're on the way to a functional Props/Armorer/Scripty trailer.

My First Production Trailer, Ep. 1: Biting the Bullet

Last year (2018) I worked on a couple of film projects for my brother. One was a guerilla-style, run-n-gun deal where I wore a stack of hats (Script Super, wardrobe, utility PA, etc.). The other one was an indie feature where I...ended up wearing another stack of hats (Script Super, wardrobe, crafty, etc.) Lessons were learned. #1 lesson: Script Supervisor is a full-time job. It is not humanly possible, in this current linear space-time dimension in which we dwell, to do anything but Scripty and do it right. And not lose your mind. #2 lesson: trying to do a feature film by working out of the back of an SUV or the trunk of a car is for the young and fit, and possibly insane.

When approached to work on another feature this year, one thing that the Producer and I agreed on was that we were never going to work out of our car, or as she put it "From under a tree somewhere", again.

 "I'll be in my trailer!" 

The great trailer hunt began last November, not long after we wrapped principal photography on Burn it All, the aforementioned indie. It's in post now, by the way, and looks like it's going to be pretty amazing, if I do say so myself. Hats off to my brother Brady, also of many hats, who has spent his adult life as a kind of one-man-band of film making and is actually quite good at it. Anyway, after much consideration I decided a toy hauler type trailer was what I would ultimately want to plunk down several grand on. Sturdy, roomy, and fairly modular, plus a nice big gate in the back to lower into another deck cum work space. Having spent time on some big sets back in the 90s, I know how handy the right kind of trailer can be. It's also very Hoplite-esque to have trailers on location that all open the same way (from the back) for ease of base camp organization.

I went to the usual places: Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace, Offer Up, etc. Big ticket stuff like trailers is a first for me, and I discovered some new scams, including the too-good-to-be-true price with a "Send me a deposit through this escrow service, usually eBay, and then pay me the rest when you come get the trailer in Idaho/Montana/Arizona" pitch. Um, no, I want to look at it first. "It's in storage." Can I see it? "I'm out of state right now." Uh huh. K thnx bye. The most popular scam seems to be the fairly typical, sadly, method of putting up an ad without full disclosure of issues. "Usual wear and tear" can be anything from UV hazing on the vent covers, faded decals, and stained carpeting, to full-on major damage that wasn't repaired until after rot set in, missing or non-functional generator, smoke and or pet smells, and Frankenstein-grade "improvements" too numerous to list. 

Not my exact model, but close enough to get the picture.

The long and the short of it is that, with the help of financing from Bank of Dad, I now have a 24' 2005 Tahoe Transport parked next to my garage. It fell in to the "too good to be true" category of non-disclosure of problems, but not to a degree that it triggered my Spidey Senses. I was willing to deal with some problems because 5k was a reasonable amount for a decent condition hauler of this type and size. It turned out, of course, to have more than just "the skin peeling up a bit in the front right corner". And the "that just happened while we towed it back from California" was a wee falsehood unless these guys are really unobservant. Yeah, there's some water damage (soft wall) in the lower front right corner, but no perceptible mold, and it's dry now. I left a $500 deposit, on advice from Dad, and told them I'd be back to pick it up the next day.

Spouse Gordon and Biker Dude friend Rick
survey new toy. Duct tape was to keep
things from flapping in the breeze on
the tow home.

Luckily, my friend Rick, an experienced toy hauler-er went with me to finish sealing the deal, because he discovered more issues that totally missed. It helps when you know what to look for. He's the one who discovered the soft wall..and also the external fueling station with the dysfunctional spigot, the missing propane tanks replaced with a little after-market/non-RV tank, the broken door lock, the excessive rust on the leveling jacks, etc. It's all stuff that can be fixed, but...yeah.

I'd already gotten the sellers down to $4,700 from $5,000, but the issues were starting to pile up, including the fact that they'd made no attempt to tidy up after living in it for a couple of months on a job in Bodega Bay (excessive rust explained: salt air). Moldy food in cupboard, dirty carpet. They'd told me they had ONLY slept in it but not used any of the appliances or the bathroom, but Rick did a quick control panel check and found the sewage tank 3/4 full.

Looking forward.

I had offered $4,500 the previous day but they said they'd already had several offers for that much, and we settled on $4,700. Now I went back to $4,500, and got "We already have an offer for that." First though: Now it's just "an" offer, singular? Second thought: Why didn't you take one of those offers, then?

Dave Ramsey says "Pay cash, and be prepared to walk away." I was prepared. I also had Rick's superpower of Biker Dude Hard Stare negotiating skills in my corner. They backed down to $4,200. I called for a conference with Rick. Conclusion: List of problems was getting too long. 4k or we walk. Production start date had been bumped out a couple of weeks, which gave me time to keep hunting even though we were getting down to the wire. Middle man sadly said no, and went to get my $500 deposit back. Then he came back with the paperwork and, "OK, 4k is fine."

Looking aft: ramp down.

I hate haggling, but dang if it didn't save me a chunk of change.

Now I need to find a hitch that will take sway bars, and install a brake-assist thingy in the Suburban, but...no more working under a tree! Now comes the fun part: turning it into my starter production trailer.