The Stage Trailer!!!!

For the last 4 weeks (give or take a day) Rob and Kurt have spent about a bazillion hours building a stage trailer. We sold the stage Rob built a couple of years ago in January and we wanted life to be a little easier, so these two men designed and built this amazing stage trailer in a little over a month. I'm planning to devote an entire (huge) post to how it was built from start to finish, but it isn't exactly finished yet so, in the meantime, I'll just post a few pictures and a couple of videos. This is what it looked like about a week ago. They basically started with 4 tires and 2 axles and cut and welded all of the metal until it looked something like this:

The weather has been very uncooperative, so the paint was applied between rain storms and the decks have yet to be riveted on, but we need it this weekend, so we hitched it up and prayed that it would move. It was weird and pretty monumental since the whole thing was constructed from the ground up right behind the shop.

I'm very impressed by the design and all of the beautiful welds. . .

All of the legs are hydraulic jacks so shimming the stage will take about an eighth of the time it took us on the other stage. The legs even tuck up nice and neat next to the trailer:

It hitched up without any problem. . .

I just had to take a video of the stage trailer's maiden voyage:


Kurt said it pulled just fine and we made it out to Star without any problems.

This video shows how easily the stage is to set up. A winch is positioned on a long solid (removable) steel pole that sits in the center of the stage. It hooks onto each side with a span set and raises and lowers the hinged sides smoothly and easily:


There are 8 legs that fasten to the sides with a strong pin and they are fully adjustable and will conform to just about any surface we need to set the stage up on:

All of the legs raise and lower with a quick push of a button:

I know I'm completely amazed and impressed:

We will be using this stage Friday, Saturday and Sunday, so (hopefully!) the decks will get put on by Wednesday night. . . We went ahead and set up the canopy so even if it rains, we'll have a cover while installing the stage decks. It poured rain off and on all day on Tuesday making things very, very difficult as well as very, very puddly.

We also are using new truss on the sides and a heavier "roof" so it took much longer than usual to set it all up. .

It was dark when we were finally able to attach the roof to the top of the truss.

We finished up around 11 p.m. and, even though it's a terrible picture, the canopy is ready to be cranked up over the stage.

We were all pretty tired and Rob and Kurt still had work to do on the stage decks back at the shop. . . and to top it all off, the big truck ended up getting stuck in the mud!!!! We worked for about an hour to get it out before a 4-wheel drive truck came along and pulled Rob out! This is turning out to be another exciting (?) Mule Days adventure. . .

To be continued!!