Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%..
Partly cloudy this evening. Scattered thunderstorms developing after midnight. Low 67F. Winds light and variable. Chance of rain 40%.
Orange County resident Patrick Harrell converted a rotting 1968 Shasta Compact Travel Trailer into his Lil Brew Bird mobile beverage dispenser.
Orange County resident Patrick Harrell converted a rotting 1968 Shasta Compact Travel Trailer into his Lil Brew Bird mobile beverage dispenser.
It started innocently enough, when Patrick Harrell was visiting his home town of New Orleans, when a friend asked him to take a look at something he had been working on. What he saw, initially was a junky old camper. His friend told him it wasn’t going to be a camper, and walked him around to the other side to show him where he had cut out a space for taps, and then revealed the refrigeration setup inside the vintage camper.
“Tell me more,” Harrell said to his friend. “What’s happening here?”
His friend was retrofitting the camper and repurposing it as a mobile beer dispenser, able to switch out a variety of craft beers and wines and set up at events and parties, because New Orleans is good for a party any time of the year.
“And I got to thinking about it, and talked to my wife, Jessica, about it and we thought, ‘We could do this,’” Harrell said. “But then I was, like, ‘Why do I think I can do this? I’ve never built a trailer before.’ But I’ve worked on boats and I’ve worked on houses and I’ve always been pretty mechanically inclined in handy. We could do this.”
The Harrells researched how they could make this mobile beer dispenser a reality. Step 1, obviously was to find a suitable travel trailer. One of the appeals of the vintage campers is it isn’t complicated. They’re low-tech by today’s camper standards. But they’re also, in all likelihood, in disrepair. Such was the case with the 1968 Shasta Compact Travel Trailer Harrell found.
“We found one at a price we’re willing to pay, from a fellow in Asheville, and went out to Asheville and looked at it and said, ‘OK, I think this is going to work for us,’ and then prayed that it would stay together as we brought it all the way back down I-40 to Hillsborough. And it did,” he said.
With his campsite fossil now dropping rust in the driveway, Harrell set about deconstructing the camper to sketch out templates for rebuilding walls, fortify the flooring because the weight distribution will be completely different once the camper is equipped with heavy kegs refrigerators. Hoping to salvage as much of the original structure as possible, Harrell worked slowly and methodically. He soon learned there wasn’t much that could be saved.
“You lift one panel and it’s rotten, which leads to the next panel and it’s rotten, which leads the next panel and it’s rotten,” he said.
The day the rotting roof collapsed on him, Harrell began seriously questioning his decision to take on the project, realizing he may have been in way over his head.
“Like most things, you just have to persevere and take it little by little,” he said. “None of it was hard. It was all really time consuming. If you’re willing to put in the time, the effort, it can all be done. You gotta get dirty and you gotta get sweaty.”
And, apparently, you gotta start over. After about six weeks of trying to carefully take it apart to rebuild it, Harrell and his wife took the camper completely apart, all the way down to the bones. He rebuilt and bolstered the frame for the new weight distribution, adding crossmembers and a new cross channel. Harrell rebuilt the camper using the same outline template as the original, so the end result looks very close to what the Shasta Compact Travel Trailer looked like off the line in 1968, with slight modifications for aerodynamics and ease of putting it back together.
The project has been full of setbacks and frustrations, but one pleasant surprise was when Harrell found the camper’s “wings,” a decorative piece that’s attached to the side and near the back. The pieces are rare.
“When we bought the camper, the wings were not on it. It wasn’t till we got home and we were digging around in the cabinetry. They were sitting in the bottom of the closet.”
Harrell is originally from New Orleans. He and his wife moved to Durham when his wife enrolled at UNC-Chapel Hill. The couple later moved to Hillsborough where they now live and have raised their two children.
Another challenge Harrell faced in his mission to repurpose the camper was his neighborhood’s homeowners association. It turned out, using your driveway to take apart and rebuild a vessel older than the moon landing was frowned upon by the HOA.
Harrell’s two-car garage was large enough to accommodate the camper — if he could get it in the door. The Shasta was too tall, and again, Harrell questioned the choices he made for how to spend his spare time.
“I couldn’t actually wheel it into the garage so I took the axle off and the springs off, and actually put the whole camper itself on casters, little three-inch wheels and rolled it in so I could work on it in the garage,” he said.
The threat of cold weather in winter pushed Harrell to look elsewhere to work on his camper. Through a mutual friend, he learned space being available at the former NC Drainage location at the back end of the Eno Mill. The owners of the property, who plan to turn the site into Eno River Brewing, knew it would be a while before they broke ground on their brewery, and rented it to Harrell in the meantime.
“I’m probably about 85 percent done at this point in time,” Harrell said. “What still has to be done is some of the the lighting to make it roadworthy, attaching the door, and I’m working on the louvered windows, which had to be taken apart to fix the broken panes. I anticipate by mid to late August we’ll be on we’ll be on the road.”
Harrell’s plan is to be able to help host parties. With Covid still hanging around, many events are indoors, but have an outdoor component to it. Or, depending on the weather, they’re entirely outside. Harrell’s camper, which is now called the Lil Brew Bird (the wing of the logo matches the “wing” of the Shasta camper), will be able to bring favorite craft breweries directly to an event. It has four faucets, and can have up to six sixtels refrigerated and four pouring at any time. The Travel Trailer weighs about 1,700 pounds, and can be pulled by Harrell’s Jeep Cherokee.
By the time the Lil Brew Bird is fully functional, the process will have taken Harrell a year. He is now at a point where he can say the experience has been “fun.” He’s had help from his wife, mother-in-law, and his two kids.
“You start to question what you’re doing when you hand your 10-year-old an angle grinder to start grinding rust off a frame but you know, she did fantastic,” he said.
He also had a lot of help from friends and, of course, he consulted with his friend in New Orleans, whose own project inspired Harrell. For his beer trailer to work, Harrell had to install a complicated electrical panel. The refrigerators run on 120 volts and everything else runs on 12 volts.
While craft beer will likely be the predominant beverage running through the Lil Brew Bird taps, Harrell said other drinks will be available, depending on requests.
“Anything that can that can be pressurized, so that’s carbonation with CO2 or nitrogen,” he said. “We could run nitro cold brew through this, we could run kombucha through this. You can run wine through the faucets, as well.”
Depending on the level of demand, Harrell said he expects to be the sole employee, given he knows the equipment well. And he’s excited to get it rolling. But, given what he went through to get the project to this point, would he do it all over again?
“I was looking for a project during the middle of the pandemic, to really stretch me creatively,” he said. “I worked in a field where I was in front of a computer, on Zoom meetings and team meetings from 8:30 to 5:30 at night, and I was just exhausted. Mostly because it’s staring at a screen but I wasn’t exercising my creativity. I wasn’t using my hands. I was using my keyboard and a mouse. Didn’t require a lot of effort. So, this has been a great project for me to get back to being creative and really be hands on with a project that, truthfully, quickly got out of hand and over my head. But time, patience, and some perseverance is usually the recipe to success.”
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