I recently finished up my build of the Harbor Freight folding trailer and I wanted to go over some of the things that I’ve added to it in case it helps some of you who are interested in this trailer, considering that it seems to be pretty popular.

First off, I want to preface that for this build, I was going for lightweight and minimal. I bought this trailer because it can fold and be stored away. I didn’t want to have a trailer sitting outside 24/7 ruining my house’s curb appeal. That means, that I would need to make everything be able to easily be put together and broken down for storage. As few things bolted in place as possible and some sort of quick connect is the way to go. I also needed this thing to be lightweight because I’m pulling it behind an average-size crossover that has a 3500 lbs max payload. The lighter I can keep the trailer, the more weight I’d be able to haul.

After assembly, the first thing I added was the flooring. The trailer is 4’x8’ in size so standard size 4’x8’ sheet goods work perfectly. I went with 3/4” pressure-treated plywood. This was something that I was on the fence about. I went with 3/4'“ for the added strength and rigidity but I wasn’t sure I’d actually needed pressure treated considering I never plan to hual in the rain and this trailer is stored inside. Pressure treated was more than twice the price of not but at the end of the day, I went pressure treated as a just-in-case thing since there might still be water on the road that gets flung up or something. With all the other wood, I went non-pressure treated.

Next up are the walls. For these, I went with standard construction lumber 2”x4” and 19x32” plywood. This size plywood was the cheapest, thinest, and lightest that they had at the store. Again, lightweight is important for me because I plan to take these walls on and off all the time. I originally planned to use 2”x10” but as I was loading them onto my cart for checkout at the store, I was telling myself that man this is already a pain in the ass here, I’m going to hate my life having to move these around all the time especially when it’s all screwed together and get even heavier. But that all depends on how high you plan to make your walls.

For my trailer, from the bottom of the brackets to the floor, it’s about 4”, and each plywood slat is 16”, with about 2” in between. That means that this 2”x4” is 38” long, but what’s actually functional above the flooring is 34”. I made all the walls with (3) 2”x4”x10’ and (2) sheets of 4’x8’ plywood.

Something that I want to note is that with the brackets, although they look like they were made for 2”x4”s and I’m sure they are, they’re actually just slightly too small on the sides. So you’ll have to trim the sides of the 2”x4” to get it to fit in the brackets. I used a jigsaw and found that if I removed the round-over edge on one side, that was pretty much the perfect amount to make things fit properly.

To hold all the 2”x4”s in place, I use these 3/8”x4” hitch pins. These allow me to lock the walls in place but still quickly and easily remove them for storage.

Once you get all the walls up, you’ll notice that they still kind of flop around and move pretty easily. To fix this, I used some trailer corner brackets. This is a pretty simple product that essentially just act like tongue and groove. One side slips into the other and locks them together. Very simple but absolutely does the job.

Lastly, my tied-down points. For this, I went with something called E-Track. This is a pretty widely available system that’s made by a bunch of manufacturers and comes in different lengths that offer a lot of tiedown and adjustment points. I personally went with single-slot tracks because I knew that I only needed a few points to tie down from and didn’t want an entire track sitting in my trailer for no reason. I just don’t need a million different possible tie-down locations. The nice thing about the E-Track system is that it offers you a quick release tiedown system. With the track, you use a connector that has a little trigger on one end. When the trigger is pulled, it allows the attachment to slip into the track and holds it in place when released. I have a ring that can be used with traditional tie-downs but there are other accessory options. There are even straps with these attachments built in which saves you on extra step. This is an extremely convenient option that still offers you thousands of pounds of tiedown force.

Lastly, I painted all the wood black in some exterior paint. For this, I just went with the cheapest option available because again, my trailer is sitting inside most of its life. The paint is really just for aesthetics.

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DJI Mini Pro 4 Crash Repair - No DJI Care

July 12, 2024

I recently crashed my Dji Mini Pro 4 drone. And if you didn’t know, DJI offers a paid service called DJI Care which is essentially an insurance plan that offers various types of damages protection for DJI products. With the drones, one of them being crashes. I personally did not purchase DJI Care and when I crashed my drone, I went through the whole ordeal of what do I do now? Do I just call it a wash and buy a new one or do I try and get this thing repaired? I’ve never dealt with this before so I had no idea how much repairs would cost. I mean just look at this thing, it hit a beam inside a building and shot itself like 40 feet to the concrete floor, which resulted in a broken propeller arm, a broken body casing, the camera and gimbal definitely took some damage, so I was personally expecting the worst. I thought that if I sent this in for repair they’d just tell me that it’d be scraped and maybe they’ll give me a discount on a new one. I was expecting like a $500/$600 bill so I was wearing but I decided to go ahead and contact DJI directly for possible repairs.

So in this video, I kind of want to go over my experiences with you and share my thoughts in case you happen to be in a similar situation, whether it’s with a DJI drone or another product.

So first off, I went to this DJI Service Request and Inquiry page where I selected the option to “Request Repair Service Online”. From here, we click “Repair Application Submission” and this portal essentially just takes all your information, damaged product information, what happened, what problems you’re having, what the damages are, and whatever it may be for your situation. This is a very straightforward application. Once I was done and submitted my application, DJI sent over a prepaid shipping label shortly after. I packed and sent the package off and the waiting process started.

It should be noted that DJI offers a portal where customers can track the progress of their service requests.

I shipped my drone off on June 26 and Dji received it on July 2nd, basically standard ground service. Now, even though they received it on the second, they didn’t check it in for repair and contacted me about it until July 4th. From there, they inspected the drone on July 5th and sent me a breakdown of the various problems that they discovered with photos and a quote for the cost of service if I chose to move forward.

Now this is what got me. Looking at the quote, you’ll see that the cost of parts for the repairs is basically a couple of dollars each. The parts were borderline free and the majority of the cost was in the actual repair service fee but that itself was only $65. Again, I was expecting to pay hundreds of dollars for this service and my total ended up only being $72. Needless to say, I was pretty happy about this and paid the invoice the same day that I received it.

If you look at this timeline, it says that DJI repaired my drone 3 days after they received my payment. But it also says that they shipped it the same day as completion and I know that’s not right. This is when they created the shipping label, not when it actually shipped but in any case, they finished everything pretty quick. We’re talking about when they logged the drone in as received to when the repair was done and ready for return shipment was 4 days. To me, that seems blazingly fast. And overall, considering everything, again I shipped my drone off on June 26th and received it back on July 11th, making the total time including shipping and weekends to be a total of 15 days. I don’t know about you, but I’m not complaining considering how much I paid to get my drone back functioning.

And here it is! I came back in a little plastic bag as if it were new, with new propellers because the ones I sent in were damaged and seemingly new everything else where things were broken. I mean from my eyes, I would never be able to tell that this drone has been severely crashed if I wasn’t the one that crashed it.

So overall, I’m overjoyed with the DJI repair service for my drone. It was quick and very surprisingly affordable. Obviously, I can’t say that it’ll be the same for you, but if you have a damaged DJI drone or other DJI product and are considering getting it repaired directly through them, I would say to give it a shot. There’s not too much to lose. You get a prepaid label to ship it to them, and at the end of the day, when you get your invoice for repair and you don’t like the cost, you can always refuse it. You’re not locked into performing the service.