The next phase in the development of this concept took a new direction. My focus changed to building a portable workshop that served a different purpose. Instead of a shop to do carpentry work, the new focus was a shop that I used while I was installing radiant heating systems. I kept the central idea about tool organization, but I now abandoned the the main idea of a "Portable Workshop" per se. I reverted back to the concept of a "giant closet" concept. The main reason for this change was that I now spent very little time constructing projects with wood. At this point of my career, all of my work was with radiant tubing and prefabricated copper manifolds. I installed these systems for 4 years. During this time, I used a different concept of portability. I built four portable modules that I kept in my trailer and moved them inside the buildings when I wanted to use them.

The concepts that I learned about were mechanical concepts. My traveling took on a life of it's own. As my business grew, I started traveling further and further from my home. The miles of wear and tear soon took their toll on the tires, hubs, bearings and suspensions of my trailers. I fixed the broken down parts as soon as I could afford to. I was not aware, at first, that the basic trailer frames that I was using, just weren't heavy enough to support the weight of the tools, equipment and supplies that I was transporting in my trailers. On one memorable trip I was 12 hours from home with very little mad money on me and not much more extra money in my checking account either. I broke down in the middle of the highway and needed to call a tow truck and have some repairs made at a repair place that took advantage of my...um....out of town situation...well, let's just say that 400 dollars later, we were back on our way. I learned the first valuable lesson.