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Old 09-02-2015, 06:50 PM   #11 (permalink)
freebeard
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I'm taking this semi-seriously. The biggest intellectual hurdle is figuring out where I would park the thing.

I want to put a hitch on my car and restore the Westy trailer anyway, and it has a steel frame supporting a plywood box. The tongue and axle bolt together and there is a 2x2" wooden joist supporting the back of the box. Deleting the box would make it a dolly. The tongue is 3' and the axle is 53" to the outside of the trailing arms. The wheels are 16x5".

Your wheels are smaller, and you plan on four, right? I was thinking of a towable model but to match your dimensions it would have to be trailerable.

My thought experiment is hang a flag on a long pole off the back of a short trailer. When the tow vehicle turns the trailer will follow, but the flag will be tangent to the curve and outside it. The steps would be:
  1. Add a trailer hitch (and take the chatter out of the clutch)
  2. Restore the Westy trailer frame (new elastomeric snubbers and bearings)
  3. An asymmetrical pyramid made out of angle iron from Hollywood bed frames
  4. A two frequency geodesic made of luan plywood and aluminum taped edges
  5. Over that—a removable thin 4v shell
  6. Bonus: finally a sock over that that could inflate to a compound curve.
If the front wheels were in blisters a 4x10ft model would be half-scale. A Vespa front fork would be a good match for the Westphalia wheel size.

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