I'm a 4th year Electrical apprentice, back yard mechanic and avid tinkerer. I'm also an avid off-road enthusiast and I enjoy camping as well, I have a 2009 Ford ranger FX4 that will be undergoing some major surgery this summer to get a solid axle transplant under the front to become more capable off road than the factory IFS junk
I also happen to have a 14 foot enclosed trailer, well more of a shed on wheels, that I threw together to move back to PEI from Alberta back in November. It will be my base for a larger off-road style about teardrop! The frame is from a 1976 starcraft tent trailer that had hydraulic surge brakes, I welded the coupler solid, removed the hydraulic brake backing plates and then installed electric brake backing plates. I flipped the axle to spring over to gain some ground clearance but when it was all said and done the trailer was (and still is) very tipsy. The plan as of right now is to strip the whole thing back down to the frame and start fresh. I plan to remove the stock axle and replace it with an 80" WMS to WMS 3500lb axle from princess auto since the stock axle is only about 56" or so. The new axle will be put back to spring under and I will install sligthly longer shackles to make up for some of the lost height, the rest will be made up by new cross-members that the springs and shackles mount to as the springs have to be moved out in order to fit the new axle. The stock springs mount inside a cross-member made of channel steel but my new ones will have hangers welded to the underside of square tubing. I chose the 80" axle because the width of the trailer frame is around 75" and I plan on running either 31x10.5" or 33x10.5" tires as my truck will be on 35" tires. I plan on tracking down another set of the factory rims that my truck has so the trailer theme will match the truck. The backspacing on the rims is 4.5" so the inboard edges of the tires will stick back in toward the body about 6", the outside frame rail will most likely have to be modified around the tire but i don't mind doing that. I will try to upload a couple of pictures off my phone here shortly. One is of what the trailer currently looks like and the other is of a rough floor plan that I drew out the other night when I was bored.