K2500 and 12,500 lb Keystone Raptor 3712
Hello everyone. I am trying to prepare my truck to pull a trailer slightly over the tow capacity. I know it's not ideal but I don't have a choice at the moment. So please if you are going to tell me w...
Forum Discussion
IMHO, take personal responsibility and make sure you have done all you can to avoid problems. Recognize you are over loaded and go slow, allow more room to stop, don't use cruise control, don't ride your brakes, etc.
Make sure tires and brakes are 100%, when you put new rotors and pads on truck, did you properly "bed" them (not sure of terminology, but you can google it and figure it out, involves some repeated near stops to heat up the pads and bed them to the rotors)? Make sure you have spare tires in good shape, perhaps an extra.
On my 73 Chev C20, I added a deep pan on the trans to increase qty of fluid along with the large cooler up front. Those helped with the trans temp. We pulled a 10,000lb command bridge boat on 2,400lb trailer (12,400 total behind us) and then added an truck camper (8.5'). We could run with traffic no problem and the brakes were setup optimally and we could stop very well in straight line. Our biggest problem was side winds and we added some helper springs to resolve that. IIRC, our combined gross was 22,500lbs on DOT scales.
I know a boat is much different than a FW trailer, but with the truck camper and large boat, it was certainly a load. The FW is going to have more frontal area I would expect and be more impacted by winds.
Travel when it is cooler and try to avoid peak traffic times.
Make sure tires and brakes are 100%, when you put new rotors and pads on truck, did you properly "bed" them (not sure of terminology, but you can google it and figure it out, involves some repeated near stops to heat up the pads and bed them to the rotors)? Make sure you have spare tires in good shape, perhaps an extra.
On my 73 Chev C20, I added a deep pan on the trans to increase qty of fluid along with the large cooler up front. Those helped with the trans temp. We pulled a 10,000lb command bridge boat on 2,400lb trailer (12,400 total behind us) and then added an truck camper (8.5'). We could run with traffic no problem and the brakes were setup optimally and we could stop very well in straight line. Our biggest problem was side winds and we added some helper springs to resolve that. IIRC, our combined gross was 22,500lbs on DOT scales.
I know a boat is much different than a FW trailer, but with the truck camper and large boat, it was certainly a load. The FW is going to have more frontal area I would expect and be more impacted by winds.
Travel when it is cooler and try to avoid peak traffic times.
