How do you get serious about bringing a brand new fiberglass trailer  to market?  There are two ways.   One way requires someone to sit down at a high end 3-D CAD station for countless hours and design and redesign until you have a shape that appeals to you.  Then the computer takes a series of vertical slices through the 3-D image, scales the dimensions up to actual size, and produces drawings for each slice.  Drawings which can be used used to fabricate a skeleton out of plywood, a skeleton which can be overlaid with foam or wood to build a rough facsimile of your design.   Gallons and gallons of bondo and primer, many square yards of sandpaper, and hundreds of hours of hand sanding later, you wind up with a facsimile so precise that you can take a mold directly off it.  This is the high budget way that many well known high volume boats companies currently use to design boats.

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But after a year of doodling, we had a pretty good idea of what we wanted the WideBody to look like and what its dimensions would be.  What we didn’t have was the kind of capital that today’s high volume boat manufacturers have.  So we took a much more direct route, much like boat manufacturers before 3-D CAD came along.  First we fabricated a metal chassis.  Then we built a wooden box on that chassis the length, width and height of the motorcycle carrying part of the trailer.  Next we took a top from one of our fliptops, split it down the middle and inserted a new panel a couple of feet wide between the two sides of the top and front.  At that point our approach and the CAD approach converged.  We glued foam on the fender and handle areas we wanted to add bulk to and shaped it with knives and sandpaper.  After that, we bondo’d and sanded until we wound up with a facsimile for the body, top and tailgate that met our dimensional requirements and looked like the picture we had in our heads.  We colored the actual photos of the facsimile we’re using to announce the WideBody simply because Bondo isn’t all that attractive.

We’ve had our about 2.5 people committed to this project since Sturgis but the end is finally in sight. As soon as the eight gallons of special purpose primer we ordered a couple of weeks ago arrive, we will spray it on the facsimile—then sand it with progressively finer sandpaper until its surface is mirror smooth. Then and only then will we be able to apply the tooling gelcoat, fiberglass and superstructure that we’ll use to make the actual mold.