: Since I am starting over I am thinking what would be better? How could I
: improve it? Any good ideas?

My best contribution is to show you my trailer and tell you why it is how
it is and what is wrong with it...

I needed a trailer which would carry a minimum of eight sea kayaks with a
maximum height of 2m so it would fit on the car (as opposed to the commercial
vehicle) deck of a UK-Norway ferry. The lorry deck is twice as expensive...

The trailer materialised from ebay, at £250 and needed some work. I totally
replaced the paddle box, did a load of welding on the frame (there were some
stress points that were inadequately reinforced and failing), and added a
lighting gantry at the back (so that sea boats overhung less than 1m, which
is the legal limit in the UK and much of Europe) to replace the original and
disintegrating lights. The lighting gantry can be removed and the lights
attached directly to the trailer frame for carrying shorter boats. As it was
going to be towed for three thousand miles through fairly remote country,
I added mounts for two spare wheels.

What did I do wrong ?

1) I made a choice to have the lights slightly wider than the trailer body.
This made the construction slightly easier and seemed like a good idea at
the time, but it makes the lights very vulnerable to catching on things
when turning - I split the right hand side plastic tube on a post when
tight into a passing place on a narrow road in Arctic Norway. Next time,
I'd make sure no vulnerable plastic bits stuck out wider than the trailer
body, and that the outside component would be steel !

2) The WBP plywood I made the paddle box out of has not proved to be quite
as weatherproof as I had hoped, and a bit at the front of the trailer is
now delaminating. It'll still last a good few years without attention, though.

3) A lot of the boats we use in the winter for white water are too short
to rest on the bars. We don't often use the trailer for white water trips,
but do need to carry short boats for club come-and-try-it days, so I'm
still trying to figure out a way to address this deficiency.

4) The boats, particularly on the bottom deck, are poorly protected from
road chips and salt spray.

5) I would have preferred a braked trailer - having it unbraked in Norway
meant I was nominally limited to 40 mph, although since speed cameras don't
know technical details this wasn't an issue in practice, and a lot of the
roads round fjord shores are bendy enough that I couldn't have gone over
the 50 limit 90% of the time anyway.

6) There are welded-on tie down points. These are a pain, and completely
unnecessary, as straps round the cross bars are more secure anyway. A
couple of the tie-downs had failed, and I will, in time, take the angle
grinder to the rest.

On the plus side - if I don't have the 2m height restriction I can use the
top layer and get 11 sea boats on, or a big open boat on the top deck, or
two double sea kayaks, and still get singles on the car roof rack without
the boats bashing into each other on turns. I've also added removeable
frames to turn the trailer into a reception tent for our annual charity
paddle event. I bought the bits to fit a trailer stabiliser, but have
never actually got round to fitting this, as it has not proved to be
unstable even when driven quite fast and/or heavily loaded.

I think the basic design is good - better in many ways than the central
pillar "christmas tree" designs as the boats are all inside the steel
frame which is going to take any impact before the boats do (since each
boat is worth more than the trailer...)

and the final plus point is that the trailer gave me the excuse I needed
to teach myself welding :-)

Andy