After seeing a story we published about Ron Paulk's new tool trailer, Andy Gullion of Gullion Design & Renovation sent me some photos of his trailer. Gullion lives in Huntsville, Alabama, and through the miracle of YouTube knew all about the things Paulk was building in Anacortes, Washington. In fact, the design of Paulk's previous trailer was the inspiration for Gullion's.
When I asked what made him decide to build a tool trailer, Gullion told me about an auto accident he had in 2013. He was driving a Ford E-350 loaded with tools when a car swerved into his lane, hitting his vehicle head-on and flipping it. Had the van not been equipped with a partition and rolled onto the passenger side, he could have been killed by his tools. As Gullion put it "seeing how close my miter saw came to my head got me thinking about other options for transporting tools."
Gullion went online, and after weeks of searching for better ways to haul his equipment, decided to build a trailer along the lines of Paulk's. So he bought a used 2009 Haulmark soft nose trailer for $1,650 and began to fit it out, with a place for everything and everything in its place. The compressor is bolted to the deck with a hose attached to the tank so it can be bled through a hole in the floor. The primary power and air leads also pass through the floor. This allows the trailer to be closed without the need to roll in hoses and cords. The trailer has 110-volt wiring throughout. Lights, microwave, pencil sharpener, and radio are always plugged in and ready to go when the trailer is connected to power.
One thing Gullion did differently than Paulk was build in a work bench/table so there'd be a place inside the trailer for making quick cuts and servicing tools. The bench and nearly every flat surface in the trailer has the kind of dog holes used for clamps on Festool's MFT table and Paulk's various work stations. The holes have worked out well. The bench includes a rack to hold individual tubes of caulk—because caulk is surprisingly hard to manage and identify when stored in a bucket or bin.
Gullion enjoys the reaction of customers, who perceive the quality of his work as better when they see how organized he is, "people love to see that you thought about the work well before you got there." Click the photo on the left to see the details of Gullion's trailer.
