Help....advice on purchasing truck camper
Hi everybody, Looking for some advice. We just sold our 33 LCDTS Silverback fifth wheel and are downsizing to a camper. We have a 2010 heavy duty 2500 diesel with Firestone air bags. We have taken a ...
Forum Discussion
dezldog1, it sounds like you also want to pull a trailer. Just to get it out of the way, I’m not the weight police. Trailer tongue weight impacts your payload. The weight listed is usually dry weight and sometimes dry weight without options. Also doesn’t include what supplies you carry with you.
You can certainly haul really heavy TCs with trailers and be overloaded. Likewise, you can have blowouts of rear tires. The easiest choice for stability is always going to be buy a DRW. But, many of us were able to get by or are getting by with SRWs. I went 8 1/2 years with a pretty heavy double slided camper with a SRW with 19.5 4500 lb capacity tires.
However, I also carried minimum water never pulled anything but a very small light trailer and tried to leave most stuff at home. With my DRW which happens to be a F450, we don’t have to worry about that any more. We bring what we want, and have a much more capable truck. DW likes it much better even heaviliy loaded, and she drives it a lot.
Summary is use your current truck and barely get by or change to a DRW and leave those problems behind. It’s your choice, but realize what you are trading off. Keep in mind that anything you add like tiedown mounts will have to be added to your truck, so if you are thinking about going DRW, do it before you add the tiedown mounts.
One more note about towing with a longer than bed length TC. You’ll probably need an upgraded hitch and hitch extension. That’s something you want to do “once”.
You can certainly haul really heavy TCs with trailers and be overloaded. Likewise, you can have blowouts of rear tires. The easiest choice for stability is always going to be buy a DRW. But, many of us were able to get by or are getting by with SRWs. I went 8 1/2 years with a pretty heavy double slided camper with a SRW with 19.5 4500 lb capacity tires.
However, I also carried minimum water never pulled anything but a very small light trailer and tried to leave most stuff at home. With my DRW which happens to be a F450, we don’t have to worry about that any more. We bring what we want, and have a much more capable truck. DW likes it much better even heaviliy loaded, and she drives it a lot.
Summary is use your current truck and barely get by or change to a DRW and leave those problems behind. It’s your choice, but realize what you are trading off. Keep in mind that anything you add like tiedown mounts will have to be added to your truck, so if you are thinking about going DRW, do it before you add the tiedown mounts.
One more note about towing with a longer than bed length TC. You’ll probably need an upgraded hitch and hitch extension. That’s something you want to do “once”.
