Trailer & Tools

 Busy day yesterday morning. The roofers showed up, started unloading the truck, and then loaded back up, took off and showed back up about 1:30. In the meantime, I was busy piddling around with some small items.

I welded up a couple of the things for the guy at the CSA. In the foreground is a wire weeder that's going to take a little work. He gobbed it up with JB Weld. Not much I can do with it until I get that out of it. The other two weeders were a straight-forward weld repair. The round bar is a jack handle that I didn't know I had that was buried in the bottom of the roll-around box that I ran across the wire wheel to clean it up. That's also where the 3/4" drive socket stuff was, along with the bearing drivers. Definitely need to get that organized and make a mental inventory of what I've got down there. I also made myself a little scraper out of a power hacksaw blade. I had one about the same size that I've misplaced or lost - got that cured.

I welded the stops on the stakes for the trailer. Not much to that - sand off the anodizing, clamp the stop piece onto the stake and weld away. Then came the fun stuff.

I drug the cutting torch outside after putting in a bigger tip and started chopping away at the stub axle. After cutting off the axle, I trimmed the weld as close to the end of the outer axle as I could. I could see a crack all the way around, so I drove the remaining part of the stub axle inward until it popped out. I now had a big fat bushing stuck in the outer axle with a bored hole through the center. I figured I could split that with the torch and it would pull out easily enough. No such luck. The big fat bushing is made out of stainless, so you can't cut it with a torch. I ground around the end of the outer axle to get the remaining weld off and I could see the crack all the way around. I gave it a couple of whacks with the big hammer and it moved in a little. I was going to weld something to the bushing that I could bang on to pull it out, but I thought I might have something I could use on my slide hammer that would work. I got lucky and had a jaw that gripped the back of the bushing, so I soaked it down with some Kroil penetrating oil, bumped it back and forth and it finally came out.

As you can see from the photo, The axle was some sort of bolt concoction. Total bullshit, but not like I've never run across that before. Next step is to clean up the inside of the outer axle and drill a couple of holes for plug welds when the new stub axle assembly goes together. I don't think I've got a piece of stock with a large enough OD to make the bushing, so I'll have to go shopping. After I get things cleaned up, the fix should be pretty straight forward after that, unlike the roof. After they pulled the shingles up, things are looking worse than I figured. I don't know what the extra work and material is going to cost me, but no way out other than through now.