cribbing for under TC jacks
I like to lift the weight off the truck when my TC and truck are in the shed. I also don't like extending the jacks all the way down (close to 3 feet). I was wondering what kind of blocking you all ...
Forum Discussion
dave17352 wrote:
Okay after thinking about the last couple of posts I have come up with this.
1. I agree the hitch is not built to be stressed in the direction I am stressing it by leaving it on a floor jack. I will still lift it there briefly to slide in my stable load quick connects, of course when doing this the truck bed is empty so not to much weight in the first place. But I will not leave it sitting on a floor jack.
2. Seeing as we seldom use any jacks at all while on the road as it is pretty darn firm with the jacks up, I will probably still use four chunks of 6x6 on end to take some load off. Just avoiding lowering the jacks much. These I will just keep in the shop.
3. Now I won't lift it all if I can find conclusive evidence that leaving a heavy load on the springs basically causes no early loss of strength. But it still seems to me if you would take your average spring and stretch it a good amount and leave it in that position it is going to lose its strength over time. Now is there a engineer on here that can explain the dynamics of leaf springs.
But thanks for the advice and as you can see you have certainly changed this guys mind on the hitch being a good place to support the weight.
Not to belabor the point but if you hardly ever use the jacks when camping then running them pretty much fully up/down during your storage process is a GOOD thing to do to make sure the lube stays distributed along the screw shafts.
The spring thing has been pretty much beat to death over on gun forums by actual mechanical engineers. As long as the spring is properly designed for the load and isn't hyper-extended by a load (the overloading I previously mentioned) it will do no harm to leave it loaded.
That being said, while it doesn't do anything for your springs, the jacking up does make sense to take the load off your TIRES and you will see a benefit from that. The normal tires on pickup trucks are not designed to have their max load constantly on them. Hence why tires for things such as Class C's (that are always near their GVW) have all steel tires (steel belts AND sidewalls) instead of the poly sidewalls of pretty much all non-commercial pickup tires.
The 19.5" wheel/tire combos people running heavy campers switch to are a beneficial upgrade since the tires (while still poly sidewalls) are designed for commercial use to carry the weight constantly.
