Family of 6 tow vehicle ?? What works?

Oreonut wrote:

atwowheelguy wrote:

Oreonut wrote:
A salesman just told my husband we could get a Tahoe. Really?

The trailers has a dry weight of 6615, dry hitch of 875. The entire payload of the Tahoe is only 1745 with a max hitch weight of 990 and a towing rate of 8600. I guess technically we could do it but I think not.

Apparently you have owned and towed this camper for some time. What is the actual "loaded for camping" tongue weight and axle weight of the camper?

We don't really know as we have never weighed it. We have a truck that can tow 12,000 lbs so we knew we were never even close to pushing its max. I would be concerned to go with something like a Tahoe where we would be at the top of the max as far as payload, hitch weight and trailer weight. I would just prefer to have some more wiggle room.

I do tend to be more cautious after being in an accident while towing a trailer when I was young. We were in a Suburban pulling a trailer that really wasn't super long and a truck passed us at a very high rate of speed and we got to swaying. The Burb ended up flipping over hence the Hensley hitch and the larger truck.

I'll throw this out there for everyone's benefit y
Who is inexperienced with towing.
There are 2 good ways and one "hope it works" way to stop trailer sway once it gets going (which is 99% of the time, a bad weight dist on the trailer or SEVERLY overloaded).
The good ways involve putting tension on the hitch.
Best way, manually crank the trailer brakes while maintaining speed or accelerating a bit.
If trailer brakes are not an option, floor it! You need to "pull" the trailer back in line. This will do the trick but you need to be prepared to white knuckle it as its not intuitive to go faster when you already think you're gonna crash! You also need to have the run out room and top end speed to do this or you'll just pile it up in a more elaborate fashion.
IE this is not a great maneuver if you're going down a long downhill stretch which is usually where folks pick up too much speed and get into a trailer whipping as the trailer is pushing the truck down the road.
It also helps if you have both lanes and maybe the shoulders to get er back in line. Again white knuckle but you can "lead" the trailer in the direction it's swaying and reign it back in but you need to take some road way width up to do it. Maintain speed/tension on the trailer. And you can't follow the trailer direction or it will exaggerate the condition.

Ok so that was 2 good an 1 not so good way. The other not so good way is get on the brakes and if you're not going too fast you can sometimes bring the trailer back in easily and others you'll bring the trailer around where you can check the trailer tires from the front seat!
In short, with good trailer brakes there is never a reason to get an out of control sway.