Trailer Defect Repairs

Since we couldn't buy direct from ATC, we ordered, and took delivery of the trailer from the dealer that ATC recommended we work with, Poulsen Trailer Sales in Logan, Utah. As is turns out, the dealer was very good at helping us with logistics and getting the necessary paperwork for us to pull the trailer home and register it in Canada. We collected the trailer on our way back home from a winter stay in Arizona. Unfortunately, the trip home was not uneventful. Something we were expecting because of what we discovered at the dealer in Logan.

A Rather Significant Defect

The way the two rear doors were latched in place was shockingly unprofessional. One door had two slam latches, one top and bottom, to secure the door to the body. This in itself is not a problem, and is an accepted way of securing doors on trailers and trucks. However, those latches only gripped their latching points with 1/8" of overlap. So when the trailer bounced enough the right way, the doors would open up while we were driving. In order to get the trailer home without having to stop every ten minutes to close the doors, we had to hook a ratchet strap to the inside handle, and then pull it back to a cleat on the floor. Sadly, this was only the first of a number of quality problems we discovered on the trailer. For the full report that we sent to ATC, click on the PDF above. Since we never got a response back from them, I guess ATC doesn't like customer feedback.

Rear Door Latching

Our planned additions for the trailer interior had to wait until we fixed the defects from the trailer manufacturer. The most important of which was the rear door latching system. Aside from the bad latch installation, what exacerbated the problem was that the gap between the large opening where the rear doors were, and the edges of the doors themselves, was too big. This meant that as the trailer swayed from side to side, that gap allowed the body of the trailer to distort like a parallelogram, and this forced the slam latches out of their catch position. The two doors weren't doing their job of acting like gussets for the rear opening. So on top of the door handle catch hardware repairs, we had to reduce the gap in the door opening.

Rear Door Centre Latch Plate

The center door latch striker plate was only held in place with two sheet metal screws that were driven into the thin aluminum extrusion that framed the doors. To shim the striker plate out from behind the protruding lip of the door frame, a piece of high density polyethylene was placed between the striker plate and the door extrusion.

There are two problems with this. First, the polyethylene is somewhat slippery, so there wasn’t sufficient friction to hold it in place between the two surfaces that it was sandwiched between. Secondly, the manufacture of this spacer was of such a shoddy nature that excessive hole slop allowed the screws to be pried from top to bottom as the swaying of the trailer caused the doors moved past one another vertically.

The technician at Poulsen removed the two sheet metal screws that had essentially stripped their fixing, and replaced them with other screws of a more substantial nature. But as we found out after about 50 miles of highway travel, they too came loose and the doors opened up.

As you can see from the photo to the right, the correct fix was to create a proper spacer out of aluminum bar stock, and rivet this to the door extrusion (we had to add the aluminum angle, shown below, to cover the swiss cheese shown above). 

Slam Latch and Door Slop Fix

The problem with the slam latch was fixed by simply making the hole in the floor plate bigger. This way the nose of the latch could penetrate deeper, thereby offering enough engagement to prevent it from bouncing out.

To reduce the gap between the doors and the opening surrounding them, we made some shims out of Delrin and installed them top and bottom of the opening, on the centre line of the trailer width. For additional piece of mind, we also made an exterior safety catch that we mounted in the rear "bumper" of the trailer. When lifted up into the safety position, a shaped piece of Delrin nestled into the shape and space of the door frame extrusion. We never again had to worry about the rear doors opening on their own.

To read about all the other quality deficiencies, and how we fixed them, download the PDF report shown at the top of this page.