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!