⛵ The Tiny House Trinity #24
Part 2 of 3: The parole board & tiny towing
This is part two on our tiny house journey - part one can be read here.
The tiny house trailer was connected to my Land Rover, in our attempt to move it slightly down the precariously steep drive in order to make life easier for imminent arrival of the tow driver - unfortunately, a tiny house of this size cannot be towed with a normal vehicle. We studied the camber of the driveway and Googled how to calculate a tipping point.
For a rectangular object, you can use the following equation:
Determine the object's center of mass (COM).
Identify the point of support.
Calculate the gravitational force acting on the object.
Determine the tipping condition.
Calculate the applied force required for tipping using the principle of moments.
In summary: F_applied * h_COM > F_gravity * d
Easy!
The day prior, I had used a large car jack to let the tiny house down off the blocks. The jack slipped as the tiny house fell the last few inches, as I dove for cover. Imagine: Four months of building this thing only to be squashed by it in the final days - what a way to go.
I was wary. Four months of hard work and perhaps $35,000 of materials (more on the costs in my next post) lay on this enormous trailer. My oldest friend was visiting from Europe at the time, helping me negotiate the driveway and mull over the principle of moments and centre of mass. We walked around this monolithic 4.5 ton structure on wheels, puzzling over driveway camber, trying to identify the point of support. Edging the Land Rover forward, the tiny house appeared to lean very heavily to starboard and we simply could not work out a way to straighten this 9m (30ft) trailer safely into position. So, we gave up - if it's going to fall, perhaps we'll let someone else do it and watch from a distance? The emotion of constructing this tiny house and then being responsible for destroying it, was too much to consider - this was a cycle of life scenario we were not yet interested in being part of.
Trying to find someone with the skills and truck to tow the tiny down the driveway and 100km to site, was not an easy task. The job required someone who had an instinct for experiential risk taking - someone who was not going to arrive and immediately put on their hi-viz jacket, cordon the area off with orange cones, perform a safety check on their iPad, give the site a negative risk assessment, only to politely decline and leave me with a 3 hour travel bill.
Through sheer luck, I found just the man:
Parole board decision: The Applicant was convicted of three counts of receiving stolen property contrary to Section 254 of the Criminal Code. The Applicant was sentenced to a period of imprisonment of 2 years and 10 months. It was ordered that the Applicant not be eligible to be considered for parole until serving half of that sentence.
Let's call him Walter: Former corporate spy, strikebreaker, industrial relations hard man, receiver of stolen goods (heavy machinery, luxury cars), trucker, friend of a friend of the Comancheros and all around master of mischief. Just the right skillset required for towing a precarious tiny house down a very steep driveway that no one else was interested in.
Walter arrived without an iPad and assessed the tow. He decided on towing the tiny around this difficult cambered corner by getting one set of wheels high up above the drain section of the drive, therefore keeping it as horizontal as possible while performing the turn. At first glance this looked insane, yet, looking at it more carefully, it was possible to see this was a smart solution. Hitched up, Walter was off with a slow and steady confidence around the bend and down the 30 degree driveway. We were off, 100km to go.
My next greatest fear, was that the tiny house would physically come off the trailer on the next major bend. I was absolutely terrified as I drove behind, never going above 70kmh, Walter politely & regularly pulling over to let traffic pass. Some narrow sections of the road left the tiny with no option but to fall off the tarmac and onto the gravel shoulder, my heart jumping. As the kilometres ticked by, I began to see how surprisingly stable the whole setup actually was - I did get my weights right, I did get my balance correct across the axles and I did build it well.
We approached Tasman Bridge, a 1400 metre arch suspended high above the Derwent River, where I had flashbacks of filming John Elliott leading his caravan of camels at dawn across the span - now I was towing an ostensibly large actual caravan across the same bridge - I wonder what’s next for the Tasman Bridge and I? With three lanes of traffic and a large bus driving in parallel, Walter required maximum levels of concentration to keep everything inside his white lines.
Approaching the end of the bridge into Hobart, their runs an offramp which takes off to the port side and crosses above the main bridge, displaying a vehicle maximum height sign of 4.3m on the low side - the lane Walter was in. Rapidly approaching, the bus was not moving, rather driving in perfect parallel unison, meaning Walter could not change into the lane which would provide more height - I built this tiny house extremely close to the maximum road height of 4.3m to maximise the internal dimensions - factoring in any suspension lift, it was actually quite possible the tiny could hit the bridge. I clenched the steering wheel and watched in fright. At the last moment, the bus shifted in realisation of the situation, as Walter then veered across to the taller lane. Driving from behind at car-level, there did not appear to be the slightest gap as the tiny passed under - at 70kmh I would estimate our little house on wheels scraped by with just 5-10cm of space between success and disaster.
During the entire build, I worried incessantly about the tow to site. One of the major reasons we built a tiny house on wheels was out of practicality - we could build a shelter in our backyard which we could then move to site when finished, as opposed to trying to build something temporary on the site itself, which was a three hour round trip from where we were living. I constantly worried about the tow and thought endlessly about mitigating any potential disaster throughout the build. As Walter pulled the tiny into our new driveway, I could barely believe the sight - we had actually done it - this mad plan was a success.
Weeks prior, a site was excavated and gravel spread. I towed the tiny the last 20 metres myself into position, unhitched it, jacked it up onto stabilising blocks and admired our new view - a forested valley, falling to bubbling spring fed creek, yellow-tailed black cockatoos hanging upside down from the Blackwoods - the very first step on our long journey to building our life and our home base from a bare plot of land.
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