BRAND CROSS OVERS ?

Without the oven there's an enormous amount of kitchen cabinet space. I wish there was a set of drawers in place of the cabinet door where the oven would be.

I'm still considering a Viking 17BH.

hohenwald48 wrote:
Without an oven how do you get biscuits and gravy for breakfast?

MY Coleman does not have an oven, I either use a Dutch oven or in bad weather or if I am just plain lazy, I use a medium size toaster oven
I like to do most of my cooking outside on a Coleman stove that I converted to LP or a LP grill and also over a fire with the DO

Oasisbob wrote:
We are saving up for a new trailer. Thought I wanted a Coachman 17 BH. Today I see a Forest River Viking 17 BH.

I realize this thread is almost a year old... but this might help others,

I have noticed the same when looking online. Some dealers are calling it the Forest River Viking 17BH, when it really is a Coachmen 17BH.

Forest River is the parent Company of Coachmen.
As near as I can tell (read my previous reply) the FR units are not built in the same plant as the Coachmen units.

I have looked at a lot of the 17xxx series trailer over the last 2 weeks or so, in the Pacific NW, all over online, plus in person at dealers near Spokane, WA.

The Forest River brands appear to all come out of the plant in Dallas, OR, or Harrisburg, OR.
Dallas, OR is a re-purposed saw mill. Harrisburg, OR is the old Safari Motorcoach factory.

FR builds the Salem Cruise Lite, Cherokee Grey Wolf/Wolf Pup, and the Wildwood.
175BH is one model number they use.
There's also a 167BH Sonoma, with a higher price tag and hard sides instead of aluminum siding.

Coachman builds the Viking 17BH and Viking Saga 17SBH. The ones I've seen in person came from Indiana.

The Saga has no front window, no rear shower, no cargo door at the lower bunk. If it has an A/C, it's a household unit mounted through the wall.

The Viking 17BH uses a roof mounted RV style A/C.

Gulfstream make the Amerilite in the same floor plan.
Pacific Coach Works makes the same floor plan too.

Of all the above, I like the Coachman the best. There's a little more thought that went in to the engineering and construction of them, such as:

Water heater is located under a dinette bench bench instead of under the bed, which gives a bigger cargo area under the bed.

The cargo are under the bed is accessible from inside - there's a nice handle to lift the bed platform up with.

The cabinet doors are far nicer - they are as nice as the doors in my Arctic Fox truck camper.

There's more cabinet space. The road-side over head cabinets span the entire side wall and join with the front bed overhead cabinets.

Inside, at the lower bunk, there's a cabinet door that opens in to the storage area under the lower bunk.

Outside, there's a cargo door that opens to the lower bunk. The lower bunk can be folded up away from the exterior wall, pinned in place, so you can store big stuff like lawn chairs, bikes, etc.

The cabinet doors open vertically, towards the ceiling (which in itself isn't a benefit) but unlike one of the Forest River models that open the same way, there's struts on the Coachman models that hold the doors open.
At first I didn't like the idea of vertical opening cabinets, until I remembered how many times I leave a cabinet door open in my truck camper, then bonk my head on them.

More light fixtures.

More cabinet space in the kitchen counter area.

There are two major players and a few minor players in the RV field. Model and cost differentials are determined by features, so Brand A down the assembly line may have a two burner stove, while Brand B has a three burner stove and Brand C has a stove with an oven.

This is no different that the appliance industry that assembles products with different add-on under various trade names on the same assembly line. Or, the old Ford, Mercury trade labels.

Each company has a marketing niche to fill and adapts the assembly line to those items that are unique to their product. Even the smaller TT players with their own facilities still buy from the same raw products vender pool. It is not unusual to see the same drawer pulls and flooring in a different brand TT that is five years older or two years newer than your own TT.

Viking, for years, was a brand built by Coachmen RV, a company located on the north side of Middlebury, Indiana. Clipper was a model line in the Viking brand.

Forest River Inc (which tends to look like a holding company owned by a holding company) has since bought Coachmen (and Dynamax, and Carriage, and a few others that were struggling financially during the last recession). Forest River RV, one of the manufacturing companies held by Forest River, makes many different brands of RV carrying the "by Forest River" logo

Immediately after the Coachmen purchase, F-R allowed Coachmen to continue operating independently, but as they did acquire the Coachmen brands, they started using some of those brands for products built by Forest River RV. In the past couple of years I've noticed more badge engineering, with some Coachmen branded products coming out of Forest River RV plants. If you are seeing Shasta, for example, that was a brand Coachmen acquired when they bought that company, and now it can be Shasta by Coachmen or Shasta by Forest River, however F-R Inc wants to do it.

If the travel trailers look almost identical, chances are they have been assembled in the same plant. I'm not going to venture a guess which plant for those specific models. There are several F-R plants in the Elkhart-Goshen-Warsaw area. I'm not even sure the Coachmen plants are still operating, as the last time I came through Middlebury (September) I came in from the east and went out through the south toward Goshen. I can say there is still a lot of Coachmen branded product coming out of that town. I didn't pay a lot of attention to what was sitting outside at the Middlebury Forest River RV plants I passed that day.

If F-R has plants in Oregon there is a chance that the Coachmen-branded trailers you are seeing in the Pacific NW are assembled there, rather than at the Coachmen plant in Middlebury, because transportation costs from Indiana are high relative to the prices of those trailer models, even moving 2-3 at a time on flatbeds. But no guarantees.

You'll see something similar among the Jayco lightweight trailers and foldables, and the Starcraft brand. Starcraft is a separately operated company wholly owned by the owners of Jayco, and Starcraft builds some product for the Jayco brand, and Jayco builds some models sold as Starcraft. But there is not complete product overlap, as you see among some Forest River brands, the Flagstaff/Rockwood twins being one example.

Without an oven how do you get biscuits and gravy for breakfast?

Tank sizes, thats one to watch out for if you do a lot of boon docking. My little Coachmen has 30 gallon tanks for all three, some will be as small as 10 gallon which makes it tough to boon dock for more than a night or two.

I have been happy with the construction of my Clipper it is holding up well to my abuses.

Compare width, too. Some 17' TT's are narrower at 88", supposedly to be easier to see around. Also compare black and gray tank sizes - some are 25 gallon.

I found moving up to an 18' was a bigger difference than just one foot longer on the models I was comparing.

I ended up with a Shasta Oasis 18BH that was 96" wide. Can see around it just fine, and those extra inches make it a bit easier to turn around in the bathroom :) I was happy with the size of the tanks, too.

2016 Shasta Oasis 18BH
Dry Hitch Weight 349 lbs.
UVW 3,144 lbs.
GVWR 3,830 lbs.
CCC 686 lbs.
Exterior Length 21' 9"
Exterior Height 10' 5"
Exterior Width 96"
Fresh Water Capacity 42 gal.
Gray Water Capacity 36 gal.
Black Water Capacity 36 gal.
Awning Size 12 ft

Newbie here. After shopping for a little TT, it appears that you can find "the same" trailer from various brands. There are differences in build quality and finishes, but the basic idea is the same.

17bh looks similar to Jayco 174BH and some other makes/brands. Can't really comment on finishes or build quality as I am not familiar with Coachmen.