SimonP wrote:
OK, I'll bite. Please enlighten us as to your protection methods. We all know of Magnum protection, but CVS doesn't have the same availability of SE or SX protection.
..... and no armour plated hovercrafts - too obvious!
I like the armor plated hovercraft idea.... At the very least an APC would be nice.
First off, I'm a road warrior. I put on probably 15k miles last year pulling boats around. Which is excessive and out of the norm for me, but 7500 miles a year isn't out of the question.
My first catamaran, (an 85' H16), came with a very worn out Trailex trailer, that I sold with that boat. My next trailer was a pretty standard steel framed cat trailer that came with a H14, and it served double duty with my H16. In 2008 I had an aluminum trailer built. It was frickin' sweet, held my jetski and the boat nice but then I started looking at it, and thinking about how the bows are just hanging out in space catching everything that the vehicle kicked up, and how there was nothing to prevent a blown trailer tire from knocking a hole in the bottom of the boat, and I do hear of that happening on a fairly regular basis. Plus the trailer I had built was so loaded with composite decking that there wasn't a comfortable amount of weight capacity left on the axle to handle a rack and a second boat.
I wanted a trailer that had tandem axles for a couple of reasons. Tandems track much nicer, and if you nuke a bearing a long ways from anywhere, on a holiday weekend, in the middle of the night, at least you can limp somewhere on three tires. I ended up buying a 20' flatbed with a 5k pound capacity, tandem torsion axles, and I had an aluminum rack for the double/triple stack with a rear mast stand. The masts lay flat, so there's lest windage.
I haven't gotten around to building a proper sailbox yet. I kept wanting to have an aluminum one built, but I'm ballparking it to cost around $3k, and I'm just too poor for that. The box is going to make a "T" shape, and follow the v at the front of the trailer. It'll end up being 13' long, 8-1/2' ft wide at the front. The front section is going to be a bit more than 3' tall and that's where the real protection is going to come from. It would take something pretty dang serious to injure the bottom boat. These frickin' things are $25,000 and don't like mis-treatment, so why risk it with inadequate trailer?