Need advice for towing downhill....
Hello, I pulled me 30' fifth wheel up a 10 mile grade with 6-16% slopes. Like a cat that climbed the tree, I'm wondering the best way to get down. My trruck is an '01 F250 with an auto tranny. To keep...
Forum Discussion
Would you rather take 100 miles life off your engine but descend safely or wreck your truck in a corner you can't make because you're brakes faded to oblivion?
It will NOT be even remotely hard on your tranny to travel the entire slope in 2nd, or even first gear. It will put a teeny-tiny-completely unprove-ably greater amount of wear on the engine to do the entire thing in 1st gear.
And frankly, the key here is doing it slowly so the brakes (as much as you have to use them) get lots and lots of time to cool. And preferably cool while the wheels are turning. Cooling while you are stopped on the side of the road, grateful for having survived THAT slope and the last corner, is likely to either burn your brake linings or warp your rotors/drums. If you spend 1 minute on the brakes descending and 5 minutes sitting to cool, you would have been much, much better off taking 3 or 4 minutes descending slowly, but moving the whole time.
My daughter laughs at my son-in-law still over the time he caught his brakes on fire, having used them so hard the disks were glowing red when he stopped beside the road. He'll probably never live it down. And Porsche brake pads and rotors (which he had to replace afterward) are not cheap.
I'd also recommend taking the start of that descent really slow, lest you find out half-way down that you weren't quite slow enough.
It will NOT be even remotely hard on your tranny to travel the entire slope in 2nd, or even first gear. It will put a teeny-tiny-completely unprove-ably greater amount of wear on the engine to do the entire thing in 1st gear.
And frankly, the key here is doing it slowly so the brakes (as much as you have to use them) get lots and lots of time to cool. And preferably cool while the wheels are turning. Cooling while you are stopped on the side of the road, grateful for having survived THAT slope and the last corner, is likely to either burn your brake linings or warp your rotors/drums. If you spend 1 minute on the brakes descending and 5 minutes sitting to cool, you would have been much, much better off taking 3 or 4 minutes descending slowly, but moving the whole time.
My daughter laughs at my son-in-law still over the time he caught his brakes on fire, having used them so hard the disks were glowing red when he stopped beside the road. He'll probably never live it down. And Porsche brake pads and rotors (which he had to replace afterward) are not cheap.
I'd also recommend taking the start of that descent really slow, lest you find out half-way down that you weren't quite slow enough.
