Hey Mike -

I went to a trailer manufacturer in Jacksonville with some pretty crude drawings - I'm pretty happy with what I got; 2,500-pound capacity aluminum I-beam frame with 3"x3" aluminum x-bars and 2"x2" aluminum mast stands and Trax stand. Lessons learned:

The Good: I don't particularly like the double-stacks I've seen where the top boat rests on the bottom boat. I had the x-beams on the trailer placed slightly fore and aft of the x-beams on the boat and added a "second story" to the trailer with stands that support another pair of x-beams. The pics here are just for reference - I don't have the cradles on and it's just resting on the beam for illustration. The stands bolt on with U-bolts.



The Bad: I didn't take into account the height of the hull cradles and attaching hardware when doing the fore and aft mast stands. As a result, they aren't quite tall enough to get over both boats. What I discovered, however, is that the masts ride very well between the two boats. I'm cutting the current stands down to that height sometime in the next few weeks or so. This requires, however, that you have a long trailer - mine's 25-feet. I built it long to go on the back of a motorhome.



The Ugly: See how tall that mast stand is? What is the truism about welded aluminum? After one year, I found that the weld at the base of the forward mast stand had cracked. I took it to a shop in Jax that specializes in welding aluminum and they re-did the weld - looked great. Last year as I was driving across the continent, the weld cracked again - in fact the whole base plate cracked... fortunately I saw the failure developing and was able to jury-rig it well enough to get me to Nationals in Texas, where Kirk Newkirk shipped me a new galvanized mast stand to get me the rest of the way to California. I think the stand was just too tall (wide sway-arc) for the base it had. As I said, I plan to shorten it and give it another go with a different sort of attachment to the frame.

Jake says it best - aluminum will break at stress points. It is just a matter of time.

Also, I made the Cat-Trax stand a wee bit too tall - it could be shorter and still not be in the way of anything.

Good luck - you won't be dissapointed with a purpose-built double-stack trailer. But you will get a lot of phone calls before big events. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" />

By the way - none of the features on this trailer were my original ideas. I looked around a long time before deciding what I wanted in a trailer. Thanks go principally to Alex Shafer and Jake Kohl.