Carrying a cycle/bike

FIRE UP wrote:

Tom/Barb wrote:

FIRE UP wrote:
Tom/Barb,
I have done exactly what you're thinking about. The coach we did it with at the time was a '99 Fleetwood Bounder 34V with the F-53 chassis and the 275HP Triton V-10. The V-10 had the Banks kit on it when we bought the coach. We'd towed Jeeps all over the planet for years and had zero issues with three different coaches, up to that one. But, I acquired two TW 200s and wanted to take one with us when traveling.

So, I built a hauler for it, to be attached to the receiver of the coach. While it was a tad crude for my normal fabrication, it worked, and worked very well. I designed it not only for carrying one TW, but also to tow our '04 Jeep Rubicon. It was a good system all except for what it took to get the bike up on to the rack and back off. That rack was a bit high for manual loading of the bike and, it was impossible to ride it up. But, we did it and survived.

Since Photobucket robbed us all of being able to post pics, I can't show you the system. It was not hard to build. One thing you want to make sure of, (there's actually more than one) is, making sure you have adequate tie-downs for the bike. You don't want that bike rocking around.
Scott

Thanks for that, we know that the longer the rear over hang is the easier to exceed the turn radius of he Jeep, and we are pretty long now.
There is no easy answer, But we know the trailer hitch on the jeep will not carry the weight with out major modification.

Not exactly sure what you mean by that.
Scott

When you have a long overhang behind the rear wheels, the whole coach pivots on the rear axle, as the front swings left, the rear of the coach swings right, this causes the jeep to be right angles to the coach when the coach is ready to pull straight ahead, this will exceed the turn radius of the jeep and pull the jeep sideways thru the corner.
The longer the overhang the worse this gets. We are now longer than I'd like to be, When we get in places that require short turns or sharp corners our jeep gets punished, we've already broken 1 tow bar, I really don't want to go thru that again.
We own a 8.5' X 18' flat bed trailer that we have hauled the jeep on plenty times before, I think I'll simply load both on the trailer when needed, or just take the bike on a hitch carrier on the coach when we need to.