The Little Things Go A Long Way
Seven Key Upgrades To Make Your Road Box Ready For Anything
Story and Photos By: Staff of UTV Sports Magazine
Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” This rings true for the team at the UTV Sports Magazine office. We certainly love what we do, but let’s be honest, we know this work isn’t easy without the right tools. We get paid to drive UTVs and travel to awesome destinations throughout the world, all the while meeting new and interesting characters along the way, and that is why we do this. It took a massive amount of work to get here, but we are all fortunate and thankful to be doing what we love. We often find ourselves cruising the open road, UTV in tow, to get to our next adventure. As the number of our adventures began to grow and our UTV and gear needs started to increase, so did our demand for a larger and more secure trailer. We’ve shared our story about locating a nice enclosed trailer that would suit our needs, but realizing everything we found was out of our budget. Finding the right deal from a friend in Washington on a less than brand new trailer left us enough budget to upgrade it to fit our needs. Here are the upgrades we’ve made along the way and how we put them to good use.
Road Worthy With Carlisle Wheels and Tires
When you put as many miles on a trailer as we do, it’s imperative to have a solid set of wheels and tires bolted on. The tire being the only part contacting the grueling highway, we can’t settle for subpar or we’ll end up on the side of the road changing them out. Knowing that we don’t have the time for frequent tire changes, we went on the hunt. With countless options, it took some time to decide, but we opted to go with Carlisle Wheels and Tires. A quick Google search and a few phone calls later, we quickly learned the importance of having trailer rated tires on the hauler and that Carlisle offered great trailer tires at a good price, the Radial Trail HD ST225/75R15 stood out to us due to its heat resistant technology. The mismatched and worn out wheels also had to go for a new matching set of their 15” Highway Eight Spoke Galvanized Trailer Wheel. At the end of the day, this may be the most important upgrade we did to the trailer with the least amount of recognition.
A Full River Battery In The Floor
Our budget was starting to run thin when it came time to power all these great new accessories. Instead of buying a generator and figuring out how and where to mount it, we called Full River Battery. These guys make some massive batteries that can seemingly run a small city. They recommended the DC260-12 for our application. At 172.4 lbs, there would need to be a special compartment built, making sure this behemoth was secure. Willing to invest a little labor to not hear a generator run was well worth it. Full River Battery also guided us down the right path for the proper solar panel setup that we sourced through Amazon.com. This surprisingly cost effective system has kept this massive powerhouse charged, in use, in tow, and even in storage, freeing us of chargers, cables, and most importantly a dead battery.
Shedding Light On The Subject with KC HiLiTES
Running down the road, you don’t think about lighting for your enclosed trailer. Usually, it’s the middle of the day when you use it, or maybe you have a flashlight handy at night. But when you use the trailer as a home base, a workshop and a charging station around the clock like we do, lighting is imperative. First call was to our friends at KC HiLiTES, they recommended their iconic 2” Cyclone LED Single Light for the project. Drawing only 0.42 amps each while producing a whopping 516 lumens, we knew these would work great running off remote stand alone battery power. We lined the ceiling with eight of these mighty pucks, but we didn’t stop there. Since the interior lights were so easy to install, we decided to hang 8 more lights on the underside of the trailer to give us the needed ground light around the trailer. The light around the base of the trailer truly illuminates for function, safety, plus it looks cool! But the real muscle comes in the form of the 2″ C-Series C2 LED Area Flood Light System. Mounted on both the driver and passenger sides, the compact yet bright lights provide more than enough light to work into the wee hours of the night thanks to just a 1.6 amp draw yielding 2200 lumens per light. Let there be light, where we need it and when we need it!
Holding Down The Fort With Mac’s Custom Tie Downs
What good is an enclosed trailer if you can’t strap anything down? Having all your gear improperly strapped down and bouncing around while going down the road seems like a recipe for disaster. No thanks! Yet again we hit the Google machine, and after a bit of research, we found Mac’s Custom Tie Downs as our best option. Mac’s was the one-stop-shop for everything we needed to secure our load. The VersaTie Track system was slim, strong and was easy to run the entire length of the trailer. It would give us almost unlimited tie-down points for cars, gear, or virtually any load you could imagine. We also ordered some extra VersaTie Track and ran it up the walls in the back of the trailer for additional secured storage. The ability to easily strap tables, canopies, toolboxes and BBQs safely makes life so much easier. To compliment the VersaTie Track, we were outfitted with a UTV Wheel Net Pack and a 2” UTV Tie Down Pack to ensure that any side by side stayed right in place. Both products came in a USA-made quality carrying case that makes storing them easy and moving them from trailer to trailer a breeze. This has been the most time-saving and most noticed convenience upgrade that we have done. We are now always prepared with a minutes notice to tie down any load, quickly, and with peace of mind.
More Info: http://www.macscustomtiedowns.com/
Push Button Control Thanks To Switch Pros
Conventionally a modern enclosed trailer would have 12V rocker switches or even pole switches that you would see in your house. Big surprise, but we are far from conventional here. When we started looking at ways to control all the lights and some of the other accessories we had planned, the only logical route in our minds was a Switch Pros SP-9100 Power System. This solid state switch panel system would allow us to run every area of lighting separate from each other while keeping a clean and sweet looking switch panel right at the man entry door. With four 35A circuits and four 20A circuits, there is more than enough power to run anything we would throw at this hauler. Tripping over equipment or fumbling in the dark is no longer a problem as the LED backlit panel is distinct, simple to locate in the dark, and easy to read the switch legends. Installation is a snap and operation is flawless every time, and don’t forget the panel includes a Bluetooth transmitter, which allows you to program AND operate your system from any wireless device. Disco baby!
The Warn Winch Pulls Its Weight And Then Some
Having a winch is a no-brainer in any trailer that hauls off-road cars. It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when something will break; and if you ride in a small group, like us, then you already know it’s not easy to push the limping car into the trailer without an army. Thankfully, having the Warn Axon 55 Powersports Winch in the nose of the trailer is a commanding safety net. Whether it’s a broken belt or a cleaned off corner, the 5500 lbs of pull capacity is plenty to get the damaged unit loaded in the trailer without breaking a sweat or more than what you already have. The Warn Axon 55 is a compact package, so it doesn’t add a lot of weight to the trailer or require a bunch of space. Another ideal trait is that it can be pulled off it’s mounting plate and taken into the field to recover a vehicle. Since the contactor is integrated into the housing, it’s a 1pc self contained system, making it more versatile than ever. For convenience, we mounted the remote control port right under the Switch Pros panel. This allows us to walk the entire length of the trailer, and even outside of it, holding the remote to maintain perfect control at any viewing angle of the load. Let’s be honest, this is one upgrade we hope we never have to use!
More Info: https://www.warn.com/warn-industries-101155
Though it’s far from perfect, we’ve made massive strides toward the completion of our 20ft enclosed trailer in the last few months. Each one of the upgrades was meticulously thought out and the parts were carefully chosen. Keeping budget and practicality in mind was key to this project. With a little remaining budget left over, we installed a power inverter to get us 110V AC for our camera chargers and select small power tools. Right below that we wall mounted a collapsible stainless folding work bench. This workbench would take up zero space while in tow, yet fold out to provide accommodating working surface when needed. There are still many small details that need to be handled, but the bulk of the trailer work is done. With that being said, now we can pull off the bulk of the creative work we do while on the road.
