Spartan Trailer Restoration

Sometime back in the Mid 2000’s one of my buddies, we shall for the sake of this story call him Tony, since that is his name, had/ still has a business that he runs out of an airplane hanger.  One day he said to me anybody can throw up some drywall and have an office. I want to get a vintage travel trailer for mine. If we find a big one we can put your edit bay in it too. I was hooked! I had always wanted to restore a vintage trailer, so he had me vintage travel trailer. We had also had a couple of beers, but I’m sure that bears no factor into my excitement.

Everybody knows Airstream, so we were really hoping to find something different. A movie called The Wendell Baker Story had just finished shooting and had left a Spartan Royal Manor at the Austin Studios.  We happened to be out there one day and went to check it out. The trailer was completely gutted with amazing hardwood floors.  It was super awesome! This was way before Pintrest or many other sites we now have to share ideas and get inspiration.  There were a few online communities, and I immediately started doing some research.

There happens to be an amazing website on the history of Spartan Trailers and their restoration.  Oddly enough it can be found at http://www.spartantrailer.com/.  After a very strenuous and exhaustive google search I found it at the top of the first page.  Spartan was founded in Oklahoma, and being it Texas we didn’t hold that against them.  Spartan started as an aircraft manufacturer, but after World War II the aircraft industry had become so competitive they realized they were going to have to reinvent themselves.  The need for housing was great and were able to convert themselves into an amazing luxury trailer manufacturer.

We began to scour Ebay relentlessly.  Spartan made several models, and even though we loved the Royal Manor we were open to other models.  He was in Texas and I was working on a show in Los Angeles at the time.  So we could look around a couple of large metropolitan areas without having to travel too far.  After months of looking I ran across a 1951 Royal Spartanette in Ocotillo, CA.  Ocotillo is about 3 hours away from LA, and I figured that wouldn’t be too far to get it road worthy over the course of a couple weekends for the trip back to good ol’ Texas.

I emailed the seller, and he said he was selling it for a family member and gave me their phone number, Siggy.  I called up Siggy to have a chat. He seemed like a cool guy, and I felt comfortable making a bid.  This was just as the vintage trailer craze so only one person was bidding against me. After a couple of back and forth bids I won the trailer for an amazing price.  Now for the hard part, driving 3 hours into the middle of nowhere desert California to get this thing road worthy.  They weren’t sure when the last time it had moved was so I wasn’t 100% sure what I was getting into.

I called my best friend Shawn, who loves all things on wheels, to ask if he wouldn’t mind coming to help.  Before I finished asking, he told me what time to come pick him up in the morning and where we were going to have breakfast.  This is one of the many reasons he’s my best friend.

Ocotillo, CA is just off the 8 freeway a good ways west of San Diego. Siggy’s address is on Ocotillo Blvd, so I figure it should be easy to find since it’s on a main street right?  I mean is says boulevard, and it’s named after the city.  Should be huge.  After a little looking, remember before GPS and smartphone, just printed out maps that we brought with us, find Ocotillo Blve a huge one paved block before you’re on a dirt road for two more.  Siggy, of course, lived in the last house on the left.

It was a small house with a several travel trailers in the yard surrounding it with a small cinder block building that housed a workshop on one side and the most immaculately clean weird random desert bathroom. A giant man with a huge beard and really tiny woman come out to greet us.  Siggy introduces himself and his wife, Rita, flashes us the biggest grin his face could have before splitting in two, and lets out one of the biggest and best laughs I’ve ever heard.  This guy is awesome.  He leads us to the trailer and says it’s all yours.  Your going to need to at least grease the bearings to make the thing roll and you’ll for sure need some new tires.  We checked out the inside and it looked really good.  She’s going to need some work, but looks like a promising start.  Shawn has pounced on the jack and was pulling the tires off before I had a chance to lower the gate on my pickup. There’s no BS with Shawn when it comes to this sort of thing.

 

The trailer was in the desert, sunk into the sand for however many years, so we were going to need to lift the trailer really high to get them off.  This was not awesome at all or what we had remotely expected to deal with.  Siggy said maybe he could move it out of the sand ruts it had dug with his dune buggy.  Siggy wandered off and came back with his insane 4 wheel drive dune buggy straight out of the Road Warrior.  It took us a while to hook the dune buggy up to the trailer because we were too busy racing it through the desert which was super awesome!

Once the dune buggy was hooked up to the trailer, we fired that bad boy up and it let her rip! It didn’t move an inch. What happened was the dune buggy dug in so much it got stuck. We are off to a great start let me tell you.  Shawn and I said screw it and went to work.  Siggy said if we needed anything he’d be inside.  I guess that was that.  After about 3 hours we had the tires off and the trailer up on blocks.  We throw the tires in the truck and tell Siggy we’ll be back next weekend to put the tires back on and grease up the axels.  Siggy and I had discussed me needing to leave the trailer at his place for another month until my job finished.  He said no problem, but as we were leaving Siggy says to us, now about this storage fee. Shawn leans in to me and said, “Great, here it comes.” When Siggy points to his can of Bud Select (which is a fact, not an endorsement) and says, “I’m going to need at least 12 more of these when you come to pick it up.” This guy is totally awesome!  I tell him,”You got it buddy!”, and Shawn and I leave exhausted to head back to LA.

I get the new tires put on that week and we head back to finish the job.  It was someone’s birthday that weekend and they living were living it up. Slapped the new tires on and greased her up real good in no time.  It was a party so we had to have a couple of beers with them. We both had things to do that night so we had to leave pretty quick for the long drive home.

A few weeks later Tony and our buddy Hillbilly show up with an F250 to haul this beautiful piece of American history back to Texas. When we arrived at Siggy’s no one was there, but he had moved the trailer into a spot where we could just hook up and drive away.  Super cool of him. While Tony and Hillbilly hooked up the trailer I dropped of two 18 packs of the finest Bud Select that Tony could find into Siggy’s outdoor beer cooler.  Siggy gets home while we are finishing up, says hi and goes straight to the cooler.  I hear him from the other side of the building screaming, “Will, you’re the man!”  He really cracks me up.  As we were leaving Siggy said we were always welcome to come back and visit.  We could stay in the new trailer they were going to buy with the money from this one.

We stopped to play some desert bocce ball, but very quickly learned why you don’t do that after one broke very quickly.  We made it back without incidence, and parked her outside the hanger.

We cleared the spot inside and it was time to get to work.  It was time ripping up the interior.  First things first we pulled out the bathroom.  The pant was to gut it and turn it into a camera closet.  The bedroom would be the edit bay and the living room/ kitchen’s going to be Tony’s office. Once we had all the furniture, carpet, and whatnot that had to go we noticed there was some water damage.  We pulled of those pieces of wall paneling and cut up any of the floor that needed to be replace.

Next, came the challenge of matching the wood stain to one from the 50’s.  Fortunately, Tony’s hanger is around the corner from a Home Depot and Lowe’s. Talk about convenience! After a few tries the guys at the Home Depot (they won because Lowe’s is on the other side of the freeway and was more of a pain to get to) nailed it.

There was one big issue that we hadn’t really considered in our excitement.  The front and back have the crazy curved walls.  Neither one of us had ever dealt with anything like that before.  We decided to get some thing birch plywood and see what happens.  We pressed got it, stained it, and put it in to place.  With the 2 of us holding it down we were able to get it into place. One of us would grab a 2×4 and some sandbags to hold it into place hoping to anchor it.  We only broke 1 piece trying to do this, so I feel pretty good about it.

Once the curves were redone we put the end cabinets back up. Then it was on to finish out the camera closet. We put up a couple of walls and some shelves.  It was great. Of course every edit bay needs a velvet Elvis, oh yeah, and an awesome custom desk.  The desk we came up with was an L shape that was made of the same birch as the walls.  It blended in perfectly.  It looked like Fanciest trailer edit bay human civilization could possibly create so it should probably just stop trying.  I might be biased. I don’t see how though.

Tony got a Steelcase tanker desk for his office because if you have a tailer from the 50’s, shouldn’t you should really have a desk from the 50’s? It’s all about the details, and we ran across someone that needed to get rid of one for free.  At this point we had everything up and running on the interior.  It was time to polish the exterior.

If you haven’t ever polished a big ass aluminum trailer, it’s a whole new kind of hell you’re going to be entering.  It’s awful.  It should be a punishment for children, and they should fear it. I’ll break it down for you.  After putting on your goggles, rubber gloves, dust mask (or respirator if you’re not cheap), something to cover your bald head, you get to spread the polish, we shall call it the hate goop, on the trailer and rub it a real heavy polisher.  The hate goop smells terrible, flies all over the place, and never completely rubs in.  Then you have rub the excess off with a rag.  You end up filthy and smelling like a hobo the had a party with some Maddog 20/20 in a dumpster. It’s a slow process that is not in anyway full of joy or happiness.

The good news is it makes the trailer look a million times better in an instant.  The bad news is it only makes it cloudy, not that mirror finish that we all want. So, you get to do it all again with a finer polish. Yay! At that point it will look really good.  It takes a 3rd and final coat of even finer polish to get the super mirror shine.  I have no idea how long the shine lasts.  This trailer was in an airplane hanger so it never really had to deal with the weather.

I couldn’t be happier with how everything turned out.

Now that property has been purchased for the Elgin Tiny House Project the trailer has been moved out there to become part of the awesomeness, and so people can have a place to sleep and an A/C.  Since the trailer was moved into the hanger the normal airplane hanger doors were replaced with garage doors and there was a chainlink fence around the hanger.  It’s was tricky, but we got the old girl out. It took some furniture dollies, a wench and some tense moments. We jacked it up and put the tire on the furniture dollies Tony and I pushed it off the wall with all our might and it actually moved.

Once we got it off the wall, we took an electric wench and bolted it to a fence post, hooked up the trailer and pulled real real slow.  We a little luck she rolled out there like a champ, and the pair of bolt cutter that were some reason on the top of the trailer for who knows how long didn’t fly off and kill me as I followed Tony out to the property to totally not cover the fact that the trailer was absolutely 100% street legal in every way shape and form and we would never break the law ever.

I can’t wait to see what the future of this awesome trailer holds.  Stay tuned. We have some good stuff planned.