New screen door coming!

[Bill]

Many of you know that I have been part of the Trail Manor Owner’s forum since 2001, when I bought my first TM. It has always struck me as puzzling that in that time, no one, including the factory engineers, was able to develop a satisfactory screen door for the trailer. I consider myself reasonably handy, so a year ago, I decided to invent one and make it available to all TM owners. I drew dozens of sketches of concepts, graduated to engineering drawings, made a first prototype, improved it with a second, and then a third. When I felt I had a good design, I tried it out on a couple carefully-selected TM owners, who agreed that it works well, is easy to use, and solved the problems seen in earlier doors. Like Den-and-Sue before me, I applied for a patent, and my wife and I invited Bob and Cleo Eickhoff, owners of the TM company, to our home to see what they thought. They spent half a day with us, agreed that it was a needed and very welcome step up from what existed, and immediately expressed a desire to include it in all future-production TMs. We are now working out the details of how to do that.

Realizing that owners of existing TMs (not just new ones) might want to add a good screen door to their rigs, I designed a retrofit kit that can be built and installed by nearly any owner. This kit was likewise sent out for small-group controlled evaluation, and the results were just what was hoped for. The current plan is for the first release of the retrofit kits to a larger group of owners to happen in early fall. If the results in this test market are what I expect, we will go big time.

It has been a long and paintaking process - that is how engineers do things - but I will keep you all up to date as things progress. I hope and expect that there will be great interest in this door, and we can all be breezy and insect-free soon.

Bill