Questions?

How do you approach business? Answer: best practice

Customer Focused: Best practice in business is to have the best product, lowest price, best relationship with the customer and give something away for free.

• Best Product: Ours is an industrial design intended for mass-production factories. It must perform, be welded to top standards and do the job right.
• Lowest Price: We get volume prices on steel that we pass on to you. We cut labour costs by investing in industrial tooling. And we keep the business simple so we are not paying clerks to process paper. That’s why we offer one size, one price, no options other than chassis only (if you plan to hiab it home).
• Best Relationship: We make it simple. Order with a deposit, pay on collection, tow it home. We guarantee our work, but don’t expect any claims. KISS
• Give something away for free: The first time you build a tiny home, selecting each component can be a painful education that burns money. So, when you order your trailer, we provide you with a pdf booklet that has the components the factory used to finish the first four units when the manufacturer moved into its new, all-weather factory. That first customer wanted a higher-spec finish that set the standard for a better tiny home at an affordable price. 
  • The most important is the FrameCad order. By going to Steel Frames Direct, they will already have the master plans in their computer. You can either order from those plans, or pay a nominal fee to have them change the size and placement of the joinery openings.
  • Then, you go down the list and order the other components that were used. You don’t have to, but it gives you a good starting point. Of course, if you are a master artisan who will be making a brilliant work of art, just promise to send us photographs of the finished product we can post on this site.

Why are your trailers so inexpensive compared to other offerings on the Internet?

1. The complex floor is not built into the trailer frame.
2. Stronger, more rigid universal beams (I-beams) that need less steel and labour to do the job.
3. Only one axle set needed to tow home, saving you the cost of two more unless later you decide you need them.
4. Purpose built for mobile homes, not an adaptation of a caravan trailer.
5. No excess overhead. We only offer one design, keep the process simple, so your dollars go to materials and labour not a back office.
6. Mass production. To turn out three a week in the factory, we invested in expensive, specialised tooling to reduce labour costs.

Floor: If the floor structure is part of the trailer, it needs many more cross beams, which adds steel cost, labour and dead weight. But if instead LGS (light gauge steel) or conventional floor timbers are fixed on top of the trailer to make the floor, then all the trailer beams are doing is carrying the load. There is an additional cost for the separate FrameCad floor that you buy direct from FrameCad; however, FrameCad uses light gauge steel precisely engineered to support the floor, walls and roof. This costs less than heavy steel and leaves more of the 3,500 kg maximum towing weight for your home, not dead-weight trailer steel. This has an additional benefit in terms of NZTA and WOF regulations (see the comments under purpose-built below).

RHS vs UB: We use universal beams (UB or sometimes called I-beams because of the cross-section shape) for the long rails, not rectangular hollow sections (RHS). UB are stronger, more rigid. We then use perpendicular RHS cross beams at each end, in the middle and internally at the inner end of the drawbar. This means less steel, less labour and less weight.

One Axle: Why buy three axles, two of which have to be braked, to tow home a 500 – 1,500 kg trailer? If you plan to move your tiny home on public roads once you make it, add the additional axles then. We weld the brackets for the springs, but don’t sell you three axles because that adds cost you may not need. When you need them, just bold them on, but if you plan to keep your tiny home in one place, pull off the tyres, store them with the removable tow bar, and put the home on stands.

Purpose-built: Many trailer makers offer tiny home trailers as a side job. They come from the trailer industry, not the tiny home industry. So they do what they know – building a trailer like a caravan trailer, intended to be towed all the time by amateurs, rather than a tiny home which at most (if it is a rental unit) that might be towed once a year by a skilled professional driver. This adds considerable cost of no value, and results in a large shin-banging drawbar permanently welded on the front – taking up space. We make a removable tow bar that does the job of infrequent moves; purpose-designed, not an adaptation.

Which brings up a point. Towing home a 500 kg 2.4 m wide, 9m long (plus towbar) trailer is within the skill level of a reasonably-proficient amateur who has towed long & wide trailers before. But when it becomes a 3m wide, 3,500 kg tiny home on a trailer that is up to 4.25m high, safety demands a skilled professional who is experienced in safe towing of large loads. First, there is the LTSA problem. The 3-year WOF on a new trailer is given provided it is under 2.55m wide. A 3m wide trailer will fail on WOF. But you can legally carry up to a 3.1 m wide x 12.5 long load on a 2.55 trailer as a Category One oversized. See details below.

How to be road legal at 3m wide: It’s a bad regulation, and we hope government will change it, but if you plan to move your tiny home on public roads and don’t want to risk getting pinged by the police (which also means any insurance will be denied in the event of a mishap), consider designing your “box” to be removable. In other words, instead of welding or tek-screwing the FrameCad floor to the trailer, buy a FrameCad design so the floor can lift with its 3,000 kg box without distorting. This means accessible bolts and jack points. Unbolt, jack up, drive away the 2.5 m wide trailer. If you can show that the box is removable, then you have a 2.5 trailer with a legal oversized load. The alternative is to just pay a hiab driver to load the box trailer on a truck or trailer. Coastal Cabins used to tow its 3.1 m wide trailer on dealer plates in what they said is a grey area in the law, but probably was illegal… lucky for them, it was never tested and we don’t recommend it. To be clear, this is not legal advice, just a heads up as to the confusion government has around tiny home regulations. Consult your own engineers and lawyers for expert advice, not us. We just do trailers that will pass warrant and be legal on the road when you tow it home.

KISS: Keep it simple stupid is a moto that came from the Skunk Works in World War II, when Lockheed had to invent and churn out aeroplanes for the war effort. By limiting our offering to one product with one fixed price and a very simple ordering process, we don’t need to pay for an expensive back office to keep track of orders. If, due to lack of room on your site, you need a shorter trailer frame, we’ll make it shorter, but the price is the same. We do this because, as much as we love you as a customer, the less time we spend answering questions or keeping track of which design, the lower the price of the product.

Tooling: We invested in expensive tooling when we were churning out 3-5 trailers a week in the factory. That contract amortised the tooling so we don’t have to build the tooling cost into the price we charge you. 

Flood: This over-floor design has an additional benefit for those living in potential flood zones. You can order large 150 mm deep polystyrene foam blocks from Expol that fit into the five large chassis openings, and in a flood turn your mobile home into a floating dock. Just be sure to anchor it firmly to keep it from floating away. Hint. If you intend to do this, order it for collection as soon as you get your WOF to save on delivery. And do the same with every other component until you hit the 1,500 kg towing limit. Strap them on the trailer to give you a head start on fabrication.

Hint: If you go this route, be aware of the legal definition of chattel (personal property) versus realty (real property or real estate). It goes like this… All buildings are structures. All structures are realty. All realty is land or that which is fixed to the land, annexed to title and loses its independent identity. A box trailer not fixed to land is chattel, not realty, and this is why the Building Act and RMA have such tortured definitions of building and structure. However, precedent-setting case law found that a floating pontoon, which is permanently in position as a landing stage beside a pier is ‘in the nature of a structure’, So ensure the anchors you install to keep the box trailer from floating away in a flood do not fix it permanently in position, but are easily removable to relocate the box trailer.

Finally, of course, there is another reason ours cost less. We want to sell at volume. We want to be busy five days a week, filling orders. Our price covers what we need to pay our bills, the mortgage and take weekends off to enjoy life. No commute, no loud or miserable conditions, and we get to do what we do best: weld.

How can I ensure the box trailer is road legal once I add the box on top?

Understand the LTSA rules. It is an automatic fail of the WOF if the trailer is over 2.55 m wide. However, a trailer can be towed as a Category One oversize (up to 3.1m wide), if the load is not part of the trailer. When you attach your FrameCad floor, bolt it on with connections that are easily removable later on and document what you have done, making it clear the superstructure (the box) is not part of the trailer, but a load safely riding on top of it. And, if you have any political connections, lobby them to change what is a bad regulation. The width rule should be modified to allow WOF approval of Category One oversize trailers on the road, or a ruling that a 3m wide box trailer is a specialist overdimension vehicle that will not fail a WOF on width up to 3.1m.

Do you sell the FrameCad floor, wall and roof components?

No, but we do provide a full set of FrameCad drawings specifically designed for our 9m trailers. You can order the floor/wall/roof set from Steel Frames Direct for $8,836 inc and have them load them on your trailer to tow home for your DIY project. Steel Frames Direct can modify the stock design for a nominal cost if you want different openings – or have sourced your joinery from surplus sites. From the drawings, the FrameCad machine automatically cuts every piece to the right size.  Typically, if you want to make a change to the drawings – most often due to size or location of joinery, there is a one-off drawing charge. The 18 drawings Steel Frames Direct made for Box Trailers NZ are provided in PDF form at no extra charge. Below is the first page.

Can I buy it painted or unpainted?

Either. We recommend you buy it unpainted because unlike welding, which requires high skill, painting a chassis so it will not rust can be done by a DIY person capable of building a tiny home on wheels. We would rather you save $517 on paint and labour and do it yourself over a weekend. But if you want us to do so, it adds $450 plus gst ($517) to the price.

Note: we prefer paint to welding galvanised beams. The galvanised beams are good in theory, but welding breaks the galvanic surface at the most critical points. Those welds must be sprayed with paint, which defeats the purpose of galvanising. If you expect to be in very harsh conditions where you need galvanising, you are better to tow your new, fully-welded, mild-steel trailer to a galvanising specialist, remove the axles and have the chassis hot dipped. But before you take on that expense, get advice from a certified engineer who can determine if your destination site merits such treatment.