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Forgive me for going a bit off topic here but I thought some of you might find this information interesting and maybe even useful if they have to ever winch a boat and trailer across a soft beach. I know this is a forum about vintage outboards but I hope the members will allow me this one indulgence to go off-topic a bit. My hope is that the information presented here will be useful to some of the members of this forum group. I apologize in advance if I’ve offended anyone or broken some rules by doing this.
My ski boat stores in a boathouse and then gets winched in and out of the boathouse on a trailer across a beach and into the water. The beach is gravelly and sandy and when the lake recedes over the summer, there starts to be a lot of soft clay under that sandy layer and the ground surface gets pretty soft underneath. There are also places where the gravel and sand is drifted up so the ground surface is pretty soft there too.
For that reason, I needed to have a good sized pneumatic tire caster under the tongue jack but almost all tongue jacks with swivel casters come with single or double narrow hard rubber casters, They’re great for hard surfaces but suck huge on soft ground because they just sink in. I looked at the products made by the major trailer jack manufacturers and much to my surprise, no one seems to make one like what I wanted so I got on the Google and managed to find a really short YouTube video showing a custom made dual tire trailer jack. It was exactly what I wanted! The link is provided below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJgAnKQprDc
Inspired by that video and nose gear that you see on some aircraft, I sketched up a set of plans, purchased an inexpensive Chinese made swivel jack to be converted, a pair of 12 inch pneumatic wheels and all the other parts and materials that I’d need to build it. I then found a semi-retired welder/fabricator on Kijiji who had all the equipment and skills to build the project for me out of his garage. In addition to the trailer jack and the two pneumatic tires, the materials needed were as follows:
a length of 3" x 3/16" steel strapping,;
a length of 5/8" diameter cold rolled steel rod (for the axle);
a length of 7/8" o.d. x 5/8" i.d. cold rolled seamless tubing (for the axle guide tube);
2 5/8" castle nuts;
2 big 5/8" i.d. steel flat washers; and
2 cotter pins.A week later this is what I got back. He did a great job and I’m super stoked about the result. It’s exactly what I wanted with a couple of minor improvements that the welder thought up. I reckon it will work beautifully and allow the boat and trailer to go across even the softest spots without sinking into the clay. All that’s left to do is paint it up nice so it won’t rust too bad.
I don’t know why none of the mainstream trailer jack companies offer a product really similar to this but maybe there’s just not that much demand for something like this…
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