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On my way to bed, after an entertaining evening of binning, meeting the locals, talking with them, rooting through their garbage, I felt a disturbance in the ether. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the trailer's hitch arm had ripped quite a bit where the original weld break had left a big oval hole. At that spot the arm was bending, rather, folding sideways -- hard to describe, but an untenable situation, to be sure. One hour later, using, a handful of hose clamps, and one re-purposed pair of steel salad tongs, out of a nearby dumpster, I'd effected a patch which got the trailer to my sleeping spot, and then to the bottle depot today. I was lucky about the salad tongs -- cheap, stamped out stainless steel -- I flattened one half into a thinner, more rigid strip; I was aiming to use it to both splint the tube, and transfer force from the tube to the frame.

I made it to the depot. A binner, noticing the desperate fix, paid me a compliment, "Way to MacGyver it!" The patch job failed just as I made the two additional blocks to my storage locker. Whew! I dug out of my locker, the double tubed, aluminium hitch arm I had kept from my first trailer. I'd already worked the installation through in my head last night. I need to add some larger diameter hose clamps in the front. This is, to my mind, a superior hitch arm design. The double tubing forms a right angle connection to the trailer frame,  meaning greater strength, rigidity, and better transfer of force from the arm to the frame.

This rust-bucket trailer is apparently a very old kind of Burley trailer. My previous two aluminium tubed trailers were Burley also. The first, I found out, was a 1990 "Roo;" with a neat, never-repeated, wheel quick-release system. That was the best, and strongest of the three, but I couldn't source new wheels. The double-tubed hitch arm, and the Burley "classic" connector, on the end of the arm, are from that 1990 trailer. New Burley trailers do not impress me. This is something, I think, you should only buy second-hand.