[ChuckDickerson]

No, not the kind we all hooked to our robots this year but the real kind that you put stuff in and drag behind your vehicle down the road! We had a nice 2 year old 6’x10’ standard type cargo trailer DONATED to the team about a week ago. It is in excellent condition EXCEPT the guy that had it before us ran a pressure washing business out of it and must have had a big tank of water strapped to the floor in the middle of it. The floor must have stayed soaked and due to the weight of the water tank bouncing on the floor driving down the road 3 of the floor cross supports were slightly bowed down and starting to rust. Well, being a robotics team it took us about 2 hours after being given the trailer before we had assessed the situation and completely gutted the cheap luan paneling interior and warped wet flooring and cut out the bent rusty cross supports. What’s left is nearly perfect and will allow us to “customize” the trailer to our specific needs. The steel trailer floor support structure has now been replaced better than new and after some good priming and painting the floor itself will be re-decked hopefully with some high quality HDO plywood if we can locate a few sheets. HDO is pretty hard to find around here. Once that is complete we will be ready to redo the interior sides and “customize” it for the specific needs of our robotics team. Which brings me to my question. I know many teams have there own team trailers. For those of you in this situation what advice can you give on how best to use a cargo trailer and specifically “set it up” for a FRC team use? Our trailer is a tad bit short inside height wise to fully stand up in for most people and a bit small to really even consider setting up any sort of “mini mobile machine shop” so that is pretty much ruled out. We plan to use it more to haul our pit stuff to competition, demos, etc. How do you keep your team “stuff” organized and secured while driving down the road? We have searched around and found some cargo restraining systems called “E-Track” that looks like it would work well for securing carts, crates, boxes, etc. inside the trailer for transport. Does anyone have any experience with “E-Track”? I guess I’m asking for advice on how to get the absolute best use from this generous donation. If you were given a 6’x10’ white box on wheels for your robotics team to do whatever you want with, what would you do with it? If you have a team trailer that you have customized with neat features you find helpful please post some pictures here. We have some ideas ourselves but are looking for advice from others that may have traveled this road before. Thanks!