Of Trailer Stands and Flare Mounts…
Nov/Dec 2000 Issue #6
My articles in the last two issues have covered the basics of epoxy and such. This issue we're going to jump into two actual projects, one for outside the boat and one for inside. They're fairly quick and easy and require minimal investment of time and material. The outside project is a trailer stand while the inside one is a rack or mount for your flare canister.
Trailer stand:
I still remember the day clearly. I had just backed our new (to us) Matilda 20 down our drive and unhitched it from the pickup. I cranked the tongue jack up then climbed onboard. I opened up the cabin and poked around. Then it was time to walk aft and check out the outboard mount and stern lockers. As I walked aft I had a sinking feeling, literally. My weight in the aft part of the cockpit was enough to lift the trailer tongue off the ground!
So there I was, stern on the ground and the trailer tongue pointed toward the sky. Fast forward to the next spring. Taking the cover off on the first nice day, I discovered that, even with the trailer tongue jacked up all the way, water and then ice had collected in the cockpit. Luckily, it hadn't reached the level of the drains or it would have expanded in them and split them.
My solution to both these problems was to build a trailer stand for our boat. When we trailered her home from the lake, we unhitched her and placed the trailer tongue on the new trailer stand. It was just high enough to give the cockpit floor a downward slant to drain it completely and was heavy enough to allow us to walk around the cockpit with impunity.
The trailer stand was made of 4"x6" and 1"x4" pieces of treated lumber left over from a deck project. Galvanized deck nails and a trailer ball of the appropriate size are the only other things you'll need to complete this project.
The first step is to determine the correct height for your stand. Pour a bucket of water into the cockpit and raise the trailer tongue until all the water drains out. Measure this height. If you can't lift the trailer tongue, you may have to have someone hang on the stern while you raise the tongue. If you can't raise it then, you'll need to rebalance your trailer or forget this project.
With the height of the center post known, you can lay out the rest of the stand on a piece of graph paper and scale off the dimensions. Nothing is terribly critical as long as all sides are symmetrical. I used two pieces of 4"x6" for the base, one on edge and one laying flat. I notched the two pieces to fit together securely. The dimension of the center post should be equal to your required height, less the height of the vertical 4"x6" and the height of the trailer ball.
A long lag bolt was screwed up from the bottom through the two base pieces into the center post. Pieces of 1"x4" lumber were nailed from the base pieces to the center post as braces. The trailer ball was fastened in place by drilling a hole in the top of the center post deep enough to receive the threaded portion of the trailer ball. Drill it slightly oversize, fill the hole with epoxy and drop the ball into place. Ours has held for over 10 years.
I also chamfered the edges of the center post to allow water to drain off quickly. You could seal it with a deck sealer/waterproofer but we just left our natural and unfinished. It has held up fine. It's not a piece of furniture, after all.
Well that completes this project. You could make it from lighter stock if you don't need the weight to counterbalance someone standing in the stern.
Or you could buy one at your local boating store. I bought one such stand for one of our videos. It turned out to be the right height but was way too light to do any counterbalancing, plus the base was pretty narrow and unstable.
