As the old proverb goes, necessity is the mother of invention, and when Greg Fleetwood had a particular need that couldn’t be filled with what was readily available to the public, he set about fabricating it himself.
“The idea was already there,” said Fleetwood, a custom paint and body man who also boasts 17 years of experience in fabrication. “About 15 years ago I built a miniature version of this for my brother to haul a junior dragster on top of his car. It worked on a winch, and the junior dragster is pretty light so we could muscle it up there if we needed to.”
Fleetwood had already built a smaller version of the open stacker trailer a little over 10 years earlier.
Fast forward to 2023 and Fleetwood’s daughter, Dorothy, had turned 18 and he thought it was time that she graduated to a full-size dragster. The problem was that the new dragster, combined with Fleetwood’s 1972 Chevelle, would not fit in their existing trailer, and he didn’t have the room to store a longer trailer at Phoenix, Arizona-based home.
“There were no stacker trailers for less than $30,000 used,” Fleetwood explained, “so I decided at the end of 2023 that I would build an open stacker.”
For the foundation of the build, Fleetwood started looking around and bought a 26-foot open trailer with a 10,400-pound capacity. He and his father began researching what they would need and how they might engineer such a feat.
“I didn’t know anything about hydraulics. I tried to do some research online, but found it hard to find the right information.” They watched numerous videos on car haulers and Fleetwood found a local business that constructed car haulers for 18-wheelers.
“I told him I was looking for pumps and rams and explained to him what I wanted to do,” Fleetwood tells us. “He took me for a tour of the whole shop and I saw how they built them and that helped me out.”
After getting a quote from the company for the parts he would need, Fleetwood thought it best to shop around and found better deals. He even bought the hydraulic pump right off of Amazon.
“Myself and my dad built the upper deck from scratch and I built the ram supports and sliders. It was just the two of us. My dad is 76 years old and was chomping at the bit to do some welding, as he’s a lifelong welder. We built and painted it and it was out of the shop in 14 days.” Fleetwood built the hinges for the upper deck from hey square tubing steel with a 7-inch by 1-inch thick…
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