Restoration Blog--Monkey Business--the '68 Caravel

Originally Posted by docflyboy

About a year and a half ago, a 64 Globetrotter got away from me that was going to be my semi-retirement project. That's an interesting story, but I'll save it for later.

There was enough to this that I got real serious about finding the right short mid-60's trailer. I passed by an RV shop about 45 miles from my house that's about 10 miles from a small farm that I have. He often had an Airstream or two in his gravel lot. One trip to the farm, I noticed enough of one to guess it was 22' or shorter and a 5 panel. I guessed his overhead was low, and I stopped in one day to discuss a short punch list on my '05 Safari to get it ready for a tip to the East Coast. He was friendly and let me look around. The short trailer was a Safari, but he didn't know the year. It was pretty rough with dents in three of 4 upper endcap corners, but everything was intact inside. He said he was doing work for a lady who bought it to fix up and she was hoping to make a little money on it. It was pretty easy to pass on it, since I didn't think the perfectionist in me could live with the big dents, though patina didn't bother me.

Then one Friday around 2 pm, I searched RV Trader and just minutes before, a '68 Caravel was posted for sale, with just 4 blurry pictures.
A text to the number "is this trailer still available" returned a "yes"
More pics were sent and the price wasn't cheap, but wasn't out of line for what it was. It was pretty much intact and looked original, though the pics are never what it looks like up close.

I didn't think it would stay on the market more than a day, so the old guy who owned it had me talk to his daughter to put a deposit on it. We could have issued a credit on his credit card and maybe had a little recourse if things went south, but we ended up sending a few hundred electronically to his closest Walmart after getting a pic of a drivers license and a physical address where the trailer was.

I was planning on hopping a Southwest flight on Wednesday the next week on my day off, but just thought it wouldn't be there by then.

So here's where the trailer name came from. Friday before the bank closed, my office manager went to two bank branches and got the Benjamins and I double wrapped them into aluminum foil and was off at dawn in my little tweety bird, as if to make a drug deal. The owner and his son pulled into the FBO where I landed with the tiny trailer pulled behind an F-450 Dually. That was a mismatch of all TVs.

I had purchased a plane before that I wasn't prepared to fly home and there are procedures to make sure you get what you paid for, but this wasn't quite the same. There wasn't a hangar that I could rent for a week to stash it away and then retrieve it a few days later. So, I left with the title and all the original paperwork in the plane, and he went home with my trailer and my brick of cash, but with as many things to have recourse as I could think of. The owner had been dabbling in fishing boats and Airstreams for some time and suggested Ushipit.com, which worked out better than I thought it might, but that's a story for a later time. He was just a little shady, but just enough legit. After sleeping on edge Sunday through Tuesday night, Wednesday around Midnight, about 5 hrs after the eta, Monkey Business was in my circle drive.

Many people have commented that they wished they had chronicled their restoration, so, forgive me for being a newbie, but I'm going to go back to all my PM's and saved favorites and over a few posts that aren't as long bring things to where the project stands today.

Monkey Business is back from a shell off, new frame with the addition of a fresh water tank below the floor forward of the axle and a grey water tank aft of that. The rest will be what my talented helper Dustin and I do from here. Comments and suggestions are always welcome. Here's how it started.