I’ve learned during the years to pay attention to (most of) my wife’s ideas no matter how goofy they may seem at the time.
Since we’re rifle hunters, we usually hunt deer from some sort of ground blind or stand. One morning last season after struggling to erect our little ground blind against a stiff north wind, Joyce suddenly blurted out, “Why not build a blind on a pickup bed trailer?”
I didn’t embrace the idea much at the time, but the more I thought about it, the better it seemed. Although deer patterns usually stay somewhat the same in any given area, yearly crop changes and rotations can alter their travel routes just enough that a mobile stand might be handy. It would give more protection from the wind, we would sit higher and it could be moved easily from place to place with little set-up needed.
For $180, we purchased a trailer made from an old Ford pickup that needed some work, but was just fine for our project. Someone gave us a perfectly good fiberglass topper with sliding windows on the front and both sides, and we had the main components for a dandy mobile blind.
From there, it got put on the back burner while we worked on a permanent blind that was subsequently destroyed by a freak wind storm. In early September, construction of the mobile blind became the theme of a week’s vacation, and the deer blind- on-a-shoestring was off and running.
In keeping with the “on-a-shoestring” theme, cost and using materials already on hand were considerations throughout. About half a can of penetrating oil succeeded in loosening up the frozen, inoperable trailer jack attached to the tongue. We bought a gallon of good Rustoleum paint, and every inch of exterior surface got a good thick coat.
By sitting in the bed of the trailer in our hunting chairs, we determined raising the topper 12 inches would put us at about the right height to use the bottom window ledges of the sliding topper windows as gun rests, so 2-by-4’s and pieces of exterior wooden siding left over from building our workshop became 12-inch-tall walls for the front and both sides of the trailer.
A layer of leftover foam sill-sealer was laid on the upper rails of the trailer, and the walls were bolted down. A piece of indoor-outdoor carpet saved from the dumpster where Joyce works was cut to fit and glued to the floor of the bed. Another layer of sill-sealer was laid on top of the wooden walls, and the topper was centered and bolted down. No matter what we tried, the trailer tailgate refused to work properly, so we took it off. Leftover deck material cut into 2-by-4’s and more leftover siding enclosed one-half the back and made a door to cover the other half.
