Our UH-18SP Fly On, Fly Off Trailer - Page 3

To keep the trailer as low to the ground as possible we made the tops of the tires even witht he bottom of the plywood, so we had to make some kind of wheel wells, so I figured out how much room we had between the trailer and the bottom of the plow plane on the hovercraft and made the wheel wells a little shorter than that.

To make the wheel well first we cut out 4 curved shaped pieces of wood.

THen we covered the wood with some sheet metal and we had a wheel well that we could easly hover over. P>

We thought we figured out a good ramp system, it was two 2x12's hinged so they could fold down for a ramp or up for a tail gate.

Here is a picture of the first time we tired to put the 18sp on the trailer, we didn't have the sides on it yet but we wanted to take it up to the fire house to paint it. The ramp/tailgate didn't work, it was two steep of an angle, even with the 3' dovetail and the tilt, but with 8 people we convinced it that it wanted to go onto the trailer LOL. It also didn't want to back off of the trailer so we knew that we had to design a long ramp that it could hover up and also we needed to do somthing so that it could hover off of the front of the trailer.

Here is the 18sp on the trailer after we got the sides put on it, they are 2x8's and they are a little bit two sort, we might put taller sides on it later.

Here is the ramp system that we ended up making. It is four 2'x8' ramps, which are made from 1/2" plywood and they have a 2x4 frame under them. and the tops of the ramps there are pieces of 2' angle iron which will drop into a slot on the back of the trailer. These same ramps are also used for unloading except we had to make one more piece because the trailer isn't square up front, this piece of plywood has a slot in it to accept the ramps and the piece of plywood then gets screwed and pined onto the front of the trailer This system works really good, When we want to hover off of the trailer we just drop the toung to the ground and put the ramps down and we fly right off, I have watched a bunch of other people who back there hovers off and this was faster than even the dual engine hovers. Then when we want to load the 18sp back on the trailer we drop the ramps into the slots on the back of the trailer and we hover right up with no problems, we don't even need to use the tilt, but we keep it on there incase we were ever loading up a hill or something and the 18sp couldn't fly up it. THen when the 18sp is on the trailer we just stack the ramps on the dovetail and strap everything down and we are ready to go.

Our UH-18SP Fly On, Fly Off Trailer - Page 3

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