Ready or not, here we go...

[GoMopar440]

The day after Christmas 2008 I bought a '73 Sovereign Land Yacht 31' TT for $1500. It had been converted into a jewelry shop by the PO and had been partially gutted and benches installed almost all the way around. This was perfect for me as I planned on doing about the same thing except I'll be using the AS for my gunsmith shop.


When I bought it they still had all their equipment and shop stuff in there so I gave them a month to clear it out. I needed to get some new tires and wheels anyway before I could move it so I wasn't in any hurry. I also had to remove the stabilizers as the AS had been sitting on flat tires for four years and the weight of the trailer had collapsed them.





The month finally went by, I got tires and wheels, removed the bad stabilizers and emptied all the excess weight out of the trailer that I could. Yesterday we had to pull the trailer out from under the PO's house and the A/C was about 1/2" taller than the lowest beam of the house with it still riding on the completely flat tires. Well, the PO said he had the same problem putting it under there and the A/C and the shroud was toast anyway, sooo, he said to just go ahead and pull it through. We did just that and noisily squeezed it out of there. The house was no worse for wear and the A/C, well, it's getting replaced anyway.


Once we had it out from under the house, we could now install the new tires and wheels. I figured that the axles were going to make this a difficult proposition and they didn't disapoint. The axle torsion arms were all either seized level or above the frame. I had to use an axe handle to get enough leverage to pull each axle arm down while the PO shoved the tire in and pulled the wheelwell skin out at the same time. The curb side was the worst, but the street side still wasn't any picnic. The rear axle had a loose bearing on one side and a broken spring and star adjuster on the other. I cleared the broken parts, greased the bearings and set the bearing preload before the tires went on.

I couldn't hitch up to my truck (2500 Ram, 4x4, CTD w/ leveling kit) as planned because the axles were sitting so low, my truck was too high and there wasn't enough adjustment in the hitch. The new tires didn't bring the AS up as much as I had hoped they would. Luckily my wife was there with me and had driven her Durango (5.9, 4x4, stock height) over to follow me home. We ended up hitching the AS up to her truck, and once we set the WD bars and sway control up, all was well. The trip to my friends place (RV repair service) was uneventful and even with the bad axles, the AS looked to be towing smoothly along. I forgot the camera at home yesterday so I don't have any pics of the tire swap or us towing the AS.

Today, I started the daunting task of completely gutting the interior so we could have access to perform the necissary floor repairs. Probably going to end up redoing the entire floor and probably some frame repair by the looks of it.




Not much to say here except I made a lot of progress today. The bulkhead walls that were still in the AS were pretty bad off so there wasn't much point in trying to be gentle with it. I'm changing everything around so there's not much that is going to be useful to me here. I'm even moving the black tank and toilet to a center bath configuration. The rear end is sagging and I want to shift more of the weight to the center to help balance it out better. I did find one good bulkhead that I'll be saving as a pattern for later. Tomorrow I need to move the swap meet and keeper stuff out of the way so I can finish removing the rest of the interior. These two pics show the current state of the teardown. I hope to have the rest of it out soon.