@noelm thanks but I might not be able to do that at my place.. i have a relatively shallow front yard and where I was planning to put the boat is horizontally across, and I don't have the luxury of a wide frontage that'll fit the car, trailer and the boat sideways, at best it'll fit the length of the boat and trailer, meaning the trailer needs to be pulled out by hand... I can potentially do this at my parents place but that means the boat will be blocking their garage which they won't be happy about... also one of the things i need to do is change the trailer skids to rollers. At the moment it's sitting on wooden sleds wrapped in offcut carpet (i'm not sure if it's a previous owner thing or the fact the trailer was made in the 80's thing)... cos with the sleds as is, I literally cant even winch the boat onto the trailer unless it was completely boyant in water, there's just way too much friction... hence that was one of the few things I wanted to address with the trailer...
omg @frankS can I take you up on your offer? The ideal solution for me would be to find a time that's not too inconvenient to you and I keep the boat on the gantry whilst I get the trailer done.. so I just need to make sure i have all the parts/welder etc all ready to go so they can all be done in one go and minimize gantry-use time...