jujububbajr wrote:
How did anyone ever tow a camper safely before Internet forums. They must have littered the side of the road in heaps of smoke and debris. There are lots of armchair engineer and bean counters giving towing advice. Don't be stupid, but don't get too caught up in the numbers. You'll drive yourself crazy. Good ol common sense goes a long way.
Back in the "Bad Old Days" we had a very simple formula in Northwestern Montana:
1. Will it move?
2. Will it stop?
If the answer to BOTH questions was "Yes", we were good to go.
If the answer to EITHER question was "No", we fixed the problem and then we were good to go.
Of course, back then, Weight Distributing Hitches, Sway Control, Receiver Hitches, Auxiliary braking for towed vehicles, etc. had not been invented! Trailer brake controllers were fully proportional, being teed into the tow vehicle brake hydraulic line (That old Kelsey-Hayes was the best controller I ever owned!)
Advance a few years, to when we were full-timing in a 32 foot fifthwheel, towed by a 3500 dually. After reading all about weight hassles on these forums, on the last trip back to Montana I decided to take it across the scales in Idaho. Keep in mind, this rig had been across the Continental Divide, the Cascades Range, and the Sierra Nevada range several times. the tires on the truck had been upgraded from Load Range D to Load Range E.
The rig was UNDER all GAWRs. It was UNDER the GVWR of the truck and trailer. However, it was 1,280 pounds OVER the listed GCWR of the truck! There were two more Continental Divide crossings to do. the rig was flawless the remainder of the trip.
Nothing bent, nothing broke, no person was injured or died.
In 1968 I towed a 1963 Corvair Spyder (with the tv set and the "good dishes" in it) from Northwestern Montana to Seattle with a stock 1951 Ford half ton pickup, using a tow bar that I welded up from an old Model A front wishbone, clamped to the front bumper of the Corvair with clamp-on trailer hitches. The truck weighed 4900 pounds, IIRC. I don't know what the Corvair weighed. We got 10 MPG, and used one quart of 30 weight oil on the trip. The legal GVW of the truck was 6000 lbs. GAWR and GCWR were unknown.
Again, nothing bent or broke, no person was injured or died.
Now don't get me wrong. this is not to say the numbers should be ignored. BUT, perhaps, just PERHAPS, sometimes we get so wrapped up in the numbers we forget what we are doing this for!
"When one is up to his butt in alligators, it becomes very difficult to remember that the initial objective was to drain the swamp!"
