1966 Caravel

This Caravel is the heart of our little fleet. It came down to us from my grandparents — it’s been in the family about thirty years, and my grandfather, a fine woodworker, took it all the way down to the skin a decade or so back: insulation out, every wire replaced AC and DC, all-new plumbing and gas, and an interior he rebuilt by hand with a proper double wall and a sliding door. So I’ve never thought of it as a restoration. The rule here is simple — make only improvements. It’s our forever small trailer, and these are the things I’ve done to keep it on the road and make it ours.

Bringing back the shine

The skin was straight but tired. It spent years as a fishing shack on the Texas coast before it ever came into the family, and a brown haze had crept back over everything since its last polish. I inherited my grandfather’s polishing kit and added a high-speed grinder and a set of Zephyr wheels. It’s a process — a primary cut with brown Tripoli, then moss-green, then a finish pass with the Cyclo and Nuvite S. The front endcaps fought me hardest; they had heavy corrosion left and ran about four hours apiece. But that haze is genuinely fun to take off. Thirty-some hours in, it was shining better than it had in a long time, and now it just gets a weekend or two every spring to keep it there.

New legs

The one thing under there that wasn’t new was the axle — and a single-axle trailer rides on exactly one of them. I ordered a new Dexter with a higher 33-degree start angle, partly for the ride and partly for the inch and a half of ground clearance it would hand back. Getting the old one out was the kind of job that makes you sweat: three bolts came loose with a breaker bar and a torch, and the fourth only gave up to a sawzall. I cut the vertical shock mounts off the old axle and welded them onto the new one, drilled four fresh holes, and floated it up under the frame on a motorcycle jack. Ten miles around the block, then three hundred to our first rally — I can feel how much smoother it tows.

A bigger tank, and a winter in pieces

Capacity is what lets you stay put a while — and the factory black tank was a sad seven gallons. Over a winter I pulled the closet, the gaucho, and the walls to make room, then built a platform for a corner-cut tank from Vintage Trailer Supply that nearly doubled what we had, with a second tank up high to catch shower water for the times we camp somewhere urban. While it was all apart I re-ran everything in crimped PEX, set the drains on a HEPVO trap, and raised the sewer outlet a couple of inches so it tucks up inside the frame instead of hanging below. A fresh sheet of .032 aluminum replaced the saggy steel belly pan the factory bolted on in the early 2000s — my first real rivet job.

Woodwork to match

My grandfather set a high bar inside this trailer, so the new tank couldn’t just be a box bolted to the floor. I built a surround for it out of veneered panel, prefinished in the shop to match the original cabinetry, with a piano-hinged lid so the whole top becomes storage. The fresh veneer is about a decade behind the rest of the interior on ambering, but it’ll catch up. While I was in there I added the year-of-manufacture plate, a carbon-monoxide detector, and a tank monitor.

A new floor

The floor that was in it was click-together vinyl, which has no business in a trailer. I pulled it, cut Marmoleum from a paper template, and rolled it down with a hundred-pound roller, running it right up onto the shower pan so the step into the bath finally reads as one surface. Doing it with the interior in place was the hard way, but I love how it came out.

The details

A hide-away sewer-hose caddy in the rear bumper. Eventually a tool box will go on top.