Two Trailers Made From One

Two Trailers Made From One WAGONS/TRAILERS Miscellaneous 29-1-29 With skill and patience, brothers Jon Roy and Joel Kelty of Larned, Kansas split a 1968 double decker cattle trailer into two single deck trailers. The pair bought the trailer at an auction for $600, and then spent two months reworking it. The Keltys spent another $6,000 on materials, but in the end were able to sell one of the resulting trailers for $1,000, and were still left with a good trailer for their own use. They cut off the top half of the trailer, right under the top deck. The bottom half was sold as an open-top trailer along with the original hitch and wheels. The top deck now needed axles, wheels, and a hitch, so the brothers bought these items at a salvage yard and made a 6 by 8-in. frame out of galvanized tubing. Because the top deck was only 5 ft. tall on the inside, they decided to splice in another 18 in. of height. This made the trailer more comfortable to work in. The top deck was just 32 ft. long so the Keltys added 8 ft. of "drop down" wood floor with 4 ft. sheet metal sides. This back section is only 14 in. high so they can load without a chute. An interior ramp gets cattle up to the upper level. It folds down when in use, and against the wall when not needed. There's also a gate on the upper floor that keeps the cattle in the top. The trailer's capacity is 25 mature cows, including 6 on the back end. In addition, the Keltys installed a new, wider sliding gate on the back of the unit so an ATV could be driven in and transported on the lower level instead of the extra cows, if so desired. "We use this trailer for moving cattle to and from pasture and whenever we we go to market," he says. "We had seen someone else about 20 miles from us cut a cattle trailer into two, and thought it would also work good for us. We already had the truck to pull it." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Jon Roy Kelty, Route 1, Box 59A, Larned, Kansas 67550 (ph 620 285-7039).

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