If you are converting a van, a cargo trailer or an overland rig, you already know nothing is square and nothing comes off the shelf. Every cabinet, drawer and panel gets made to fit. When TrailCurrent goes in, those cabinets do one more job: they are where the modules live and where the wiring disappears. This is the machine we built to cut them, and our honest verdict on whether you should build one too.
Cabinets with the electronics designed in
Most builds add the electronics last. A control panel gets screwed to whatever surface is left, and wires get zip-tied along the back of a cabinet and hoped for the best. We would rather design them in from the start. That means a pocket in a door so a control panel sits flush, a cavity behind a panel sized for a module, and a hidden path for the wire that runs out to the sensors that tell you a cabinet door came open on the highway.
Doing that by hand, panel after panel, is slow. A machine that follows a drawing does it the same way every time. Our trailer cabinets are HDPE panels on an aluminium frame, so they shrug off water and there is no wood to finish. The machine that cuts them is the LowRider V4, an open source CNC you build yourself, sized to take a full sheet.
Not just sheets
We expected a big sheet cutter. We did not expect it to pocket solid aluminium or cut the traces on one of our circuit boards. It did both, with some limits. Our first try on aluminium ended with a snapped bit, and the cheap part was not the machine. Which bit survived, and the trick for holding metal down without clamps, are in the video.
Should you build one?
Not everyone should. The video is a straight verdict: who it suits, who is better off with a small desktop machine, what our full sheet build really cost next to the commercial machines, and the one upgrade we would not skip. If you are pricing out tools for a conversion, it is worth the fourteen minutes.
Open source, both directions
Thank you to Ryan at V1 Engineering, who has refined this design through four versions and keeps giving it away. TrailCurrent is not affiliated with V1 Engineering. We just know what it is like to have someone skip you a year of trial and error. If you build one, the build instructions are free, and buying what you cannot make from his shop is the best way to say thanks.
We give back the same way. The cabinets for the trailer get published like everything else in TrailCurrent, so you can cut your own with room for the modules already in them. Catch up on how we got here with the warped table and the table that replaced it, and follow along on the open source channel. Tell us in the video comments what you would cut first for your build.