Stereo and Hitch

Slowly making progress.  This is my hubby and his best friend Jake.  They will both be my camping buddies once she is ready.  These pictures are actually from 6 weeks ago so I have some catching up to do on my posts.  This post will cover installing the stereo and cleaning up the hitch.  I will only have one drawer in the whole trailer.  You can see in this first picture where I cut out the holes for the speakers and the drawer under the bed.

I have never built a drawer before but of course you can find anything on utube.  I found a good little tutorial and the only tools I had to use were my air stapler and table saw.  Oh, and my hand sander to make it smooth.  I found the drawer slides at my local Goodwill of course!  They work great.

Here is a final shot with the drawer pull.  The speakers will need a woofer though....they are average speakers so in the future I will boost up the sound with a little more base.  It just isn't a priority right now.  I'm pushing toward my October camping deadline and time is slipping by fast.

OK, so here is a picture of the stereo controls under the dinette.  It has a place to hook up my ipod or my iphone and listen to Pandora.  LOVE it! I added a 12 volt outlet as well.  It will come in handy if I need to charge my cell phone.

Oh boy.  The hitch was a hot mess.  The original owner had the battery inside the trailer and two propane tanks on the hitch.  I don't want to sleep in the same room with a battery so I needed to make some alterations to put the battery on the hitch.  I friend gave me the idea to modify a battery box to rest on one side and mount just one tank for propane.  So that was the plan.

But before I could tackle the hitch itself I had to take care of this tow cord situation.  It was a patched together mess.  I'm shocked it worked at all.  I had to rewire a new 7-way tow cord  into a new junction box located under the trailer close to the hitch.  I contacted my guru friend and she walked me through the process with lots of pictures and directions.  She is awesome!

So here is a preliminary picture of the new junction box.  It was a tight fit with all the different wires and grounds but everything worked when it was done so I was a happy soon-to-be-camper!

Back to the hitch.  There is this stuff called POR15 that is amazing for painting ANYTHING rusted.  Apparently it reacts with the rust and once it is cured it is guaranteed not to rust anymore.  I will tell you though.....it is some toxic stuff when you are putting it on.  They have big time warnings all over the can to make sure you wear a heavy duty mask/respirator when you apply it.  I used three coats and it took about 48 hours to dry completely.  You can hit it with a hammer now and it won't chip!  I added the brace on the left to hold the single tank.

So here is what the hitch looks like now.  The battery box is held onto the bottom plate with screws and then I plan to have a chain and lock around it because that battery cost a LOT of money and I don't want anyone getting any ideas of jacking it while I'm sleeping.  The new tow cord is on the ground to the right....much neater than the original don't you think?  The two posts sticking out of the battery box are there if I want to charge the battery without taking off the lid.  Just for convenience.  I actually don't need it because I have a battery tender/converter mounted under the dinette which will do the same thing when I am plugged up to shore power at the campground or at home. I also bought a break away switch that I still have to install and mount.  It will apply the brakes to the trailer if the trailer should happen to depart suddenly from my tow vehicle.  Nifty little device that I hope I never have the opportunity to test out.