sad to see a 7 go but hey at least it still has half a purpose!

 

So, Mazdasport assigned me to cover MazFest, way down in Buttonwillow, CA. Bit of a drive from Portland, OR. Thought it would be cool to take the trailer, so I have been putting in extra hours getting it ready.

A thief stole the aluminum diamond plate bed panels to either side of the center strip. They were not rivited down because I had been doing some wiring under them. I had to make a cardboard template and have my fab guy plasma cut new ones. Luckly, they fit right the first try. Then, I bolted in my PowerTank, which is a liquid CO2 tank that is the equivalent to (IIRC) a 900+ SF air tank at 125psi. It's big enough to run air tools and very handy for little things like airing up tires.



On my way to work this morning, I stopped off to pick up bungee cords and discovered that they were having a sale on foam floor matting. 12sf for $7.95. Having been crawling around inside my trailer wearing shorts, I thought about how uncomfortable it was on my knees, so it popped into my head to use the matting in the trailer bed. It will be particularly nice in the 100+ F temps at Buttonwillow!



Here is my stuff all packed in. An EZ UP tent, PowerTank, 5 Gallon Fuel Gerry Can, a couple jack stands, an aluminum racing jack, fire extinguisher, helmet, a couple tool bags, etc. A small 12V cooler in is my car, along with a few smaller items, but by-and-large the car is not crammed to the gills as it would otherwise be without the trailer.



And here is the whole rig, ready to go.




I will be leaving on the trip in a couple hours, so wish me luck!

 

luck!

 

I was wondering how is the center section held in place? I see you can takei it out to load/unload stuff. Alos it looks like an FB bumper on a SA chassis,am I right? Is that a direct bolt on? What is this dry break fitting you had the fuel tank attached to the trailer with? Is it something you custom made,or are they available? Did you ever think of running a pulley off the differential snout to run an alternator to charge a battery on the trailer? Or an Ac compressor,or similar to fill your air stoarge tank.I would think this could be pretty easy,and feasible.

Nice work! I remember you building this years ago. My friend Scott sent you a wireing harness years ago from a turboII that you needed for a challenge car I think.I spent the better part of a day helping him tear it out of the car.Did you ever use that harness?

 

That is freaking awesome.


I wish I can go. Ughh. gl. drive safely

 

You should make a bar-b-q trailer.

 

hahaha that trailers your rx's bitch.thats the first thing i thought when i saw it lol.thats a great idea though.why take a traler of parts when u can take half the car.btw the red rx7 is really neat

 

Props for making another road trip and mad luck being sent your way

 

Hope the trip went well.

 

I made it back more or less unscathed. 1704 miles at 19.22 MPG average. That includes a couple hundred miles of mountain passes each way, between Oregon and California, where I was constantly WOT climbing hills and engine braking the other side, combined with lots of passing.

The car towed the trailer like a champ. Not nearly the power of the peripheral port and it lacks the 4.88 gears the PP had, but going up 6% grades only required downshifting to 4th and keeping in the powerband. The trailer is also quite a bit lighter than when I took it to Florida...at least 200 lbs, if not more. The street/strip clutch held just fine.

The police continued to ignore me while the public-at-large acted as if they were seeing Paris Hilton -- pointing, staring, laughing, honking horns, following me off the freeway. It's fun for the first couple hundred miles but gets old after that.

The event was fun. Some new faces and some old. Wayne Graham took me for a spin in one of the Mariah EP cars. Good driver. A few of the cars were exceptional and you may be reading about them in Mazdasport shortly.

The only incident I had was 5 minutes into the trip when I had to back out of a tight space in a gas station and turned the trailer a little too far, cracking my car's tail light with the tire rack bar. D'Oh! I hadn't even left the freakin' block, yet. Seemed like a bad omen but turned out to be the only glitch in an otherwise fine trip.

 

good to hear man

 

glad to hear u made it home fine and dandy. it was great seeing that thing at mazfest. your half car sure made my full car look real scuffed up tho. :p

 

I find that every long trip with a 7 has something go wrong, Nice to have something easy like that in the first few miles.

 

The center section sits on a flange. The bottom has rods that fit into matching grooves and the drip rail sort of snaps it in place on top. Hard to describe. It works okay but I will be revisiting it in the future. And, yes, that is an FB bumper cover on it. When my car and trailer were the same color, I would just bolt the car's bumper on the trailer, because I had to remove the car's trailer for the hitch (which was then covered by a bumper cover). Now, I have another hitch bolted to the trailer and another spare bumper cover over that.

Dry break fittings are off-the-shelf components, but they are expensive. Something like $75-$80 if I recall correctly. The blue pushlock hose was also pricy. "Dry Break" refers to being able to disconnect the fittings and the lines being automatically pluged so as not to leak out. I do not advocate anyone replicating that setup and I do not believe it was strickly legal to operate the car with it hooked up. I could have set it up to automatically disconnect if the trailer were to separate, which would have been smart, but didn't have the time or motivation back then. Now, there is no fuel tank in the trailer, so nothing to worry about.

Picture of the dry break fitting:


I didn't need the harness for the Challenge car. It was pretty fried anyway, so I just kept it to salvage the OEM connectors and such.

 

this is pretty cool. to bad i couldnt make one my self iam too poor. id make it for camping tho. make a nice air bed in there lol.