Had a 25% off Hazard Fraught coopin, decided their $400 trailer was worth $300 as a foundation for an oddball project.
Brought kit home, discarded the lighting kit, assembled the trailer, partially disassembled it, modified to flip axle to lower the deck a couple inches, reassembled:
Made deck & 3 walls from second-hand 3/4" plywood & reinforced deck w/ salvaged 3rd world tread plate + angle-iron lip:
Made a flippy-grabby arm thingamajig from 5/8" threaded rod, 1" galv. pipe, and some 1/2" x 2" C-channel:
Pivot washers^ are 1/8" UHMW (made with super-advanced, NASA-inspired . . . hole saw + Unibit technology
)
That fine piece of Appalachian American engineering
® allowed me to load bigass walnut logs solo using the trailer as a tool:
1/2" x 2" C-channel ties pivot point vertically to frame rail; 1/8" x 2" aluminum flat bar in tension braces pivot forward to frame.
Short scraps of PEX slit lengthwise & snapped over the channel edge prevent metal-to-metal contact when the bar arms crash down onto the angle iron.
- I shot hot-melt glue into the PEX to keep it from sliding around on the channel (yes, I feel like a dirty fuckin' hack for doing that
)
Added bonus: I was able to back the trailer up to the destination pile & get some big logs on the 2nd level w/o blowing out a knee:
After a second life moving large rocks smaller than the biggest logs, the arm-thing will likely get hung in the rafters.
It may not be
interesting stuff I made, but you can't argue that it's not
random 
