Trailer built from recycled parts

Built like a tank

By Ray Ford

Ken Ballard’s gleaming silver trailer pays tribute to two great icons of the petroleum age: the Airstream trailer and the oil tank. The homemade job “has that streamlined look, but when I put it together back in the ’70s, we never worried about that,” he says. “Gasoline was 39 cents a gallon.”

Yeah, and a Blue box was a 2-4 of Labatt’s. But even in that disposable decade, Ballard was a dedicated recycler. He scrounged the axle, springs, and 15" wheels from a junkyard Dodge, and welded a frame from 3" angle iron he had lying around his construction company’s shop. The tongue was fashioned from a reinforced 2" pipe. Finally, Ballard needed a box or deck, but what to use?

Inspiration came when he spotted an old, 900-litre furnace oil tank at the junkyard. After corralling another surplus tank from a friend, he had them steam-cleaned to remove fumes, then cut the tanks and welded them together, adding a tailgate, lights, and fenders, and slapped on a coat of aluminum paint.

The final touch was a piece of plastic waterline, painted, bent into an arch, and bolted to the front of the trailer. “When you’re looking out the rear window of the car, you can’t see the trailer, so I put that on to help me aim,” Ballard says.

Whether it’s hauling an ATV  to Ballard’s Madawaska hunt camp, or firewood to a friend’s Sturgeon Lake cottage, the trailer “creates a lot of conversation at stops,” he says. “People always want to know, ‘What is that?’"

- Ray Ford

Published in the October 2008 issue of Cottage Life magazine.

Copyright © 2008 by Cottage Life. All rights reserved. Reproduction of any article, photograph, or artwork, for other than personal use, in whole or in part, without the written permission of the publisher is strictly forbidden.