The old trailer has had its day. It was too hard to get the launching trolley on and off the road base, leading to lots of extra stress. The downside is the cost – the trailer is worth (a lot) more than the boat!

Anyway, I ordered a combi trailer from Mersea Trailers. They’d got aluminium launch trolleys for the same price as a steel version. I rang up to check and they said that wasn’t correct but they’d honour the price. They aren’t close so it took a good few months to arrive – we had to wait for a lorry coming in the right direction. It arrived before we needed the boat anyway.

When it did arrive the launch trolley didn’t fit on top of the road base. No one had checked that it did fit.

They checked against another aluminium launch trolley they had and decided that it was because a couple of welds on the trolley were too big, pushing the sides out. So, under their guidance I got a mini-belt sander out, dismantled the trolley and ground the welds down a bit.

There were a few other issues to fix:

The pin that holds the front of the trolley to the road base had lots of vertical play. This was fixed with car radiator hose from eBay and a big washer from the local country store.

The road base has a couple of lights fitted to the front of the mudguards. The wiring for these runs inside the tubes of the trailer, and the ends of the tubes were very rough and sharp – lots of burrs and sharp edges. I filed these down the best I could and fitted chaffing tubes around the wires – I don’t want blown fuses in the car when towing.

The trailer was fitted with a 7-pin plug. The advice was to use a converter for 13 pin; however the socket on the Tesla is underneath the car facing down. There isn’t much vertical clearance and the plug will fall out without the better locking mechanism for the 13pin. 7-pin plugs are held in by good vibes rather than a locking mechanism. So this plug needed changing. However, it turned out that the cable wasn’t wired up with the standard colour code, so I had to undo the other end too and make sure both ends used the standard colour code. I could have left it non-standard but I had visions of trying to sort out a problem stranded on the side of a wet dark road, so making it standard now made sense. I took the opportunity to cover the terminals in silicone grease to keep the water out.

There is very little clearance (20mm?) under the trolley wheels when the trolley is on the road base. This means I have to take them off. Fortunately, the trolley balances on the base in a position where I can unclip the wheels. The low clearance does mean that it is easy to get the trolley on the base.

Rust on the hubs. I have been assured that the bearings are well sealed and

Overall impressions of the trailer?

Its ok – the basic design is good, it loads onto the road base easily. It was let down by details. With those fixed it should be good.

Mersea have promised to send me a spare wheel and bracket to make up for the issues. Hopefully it arrives before we need the boat!

Transferring the boat between trolleys

This is easy if near water. On land with 120kg of boat it is rather harder. Lots of thinking was done.

Other Custard Jobs

I found that the pintles were loose – I knew they had been leaking. Fortunately it looks like the wood reinforcement embedded into the GRP is ok (phew) so fixing was an easy job.

I normally use butyl tape for sealing boats, but for the rudder I wanted something with adhesive properties to help take the rudder loads. Sikaflex was the obvious choice.

Having (finally) cleaned the back of the boat for gluing the pintles on, I took the opportunity to get a name badge made up. This was done by CDP Printing in Telford – highly recommended. Allan did a lot of work to help me get this right for a very low price job.