New to me 2006 Fleetwood Wilderness

Congrats on your new trailer. My first TT was a Fleetwood Wilderness and we have a lot of great memories using that trailer. Mine was a 2004 and I also had some water intrusion problems and ended up rebuilding the left front corner of the roof and wall. Later we found some wall cracks in the opening of the slide out which I never tried to repair. I hope you have as much fun with your Wilderness as we did. There's a lot of good ideas and advice to be found on this forum.

I love the floor plans on the FQS series and plan on keeping my 27FQS as long as I can. The 30FQS gives you an added 1' of counter space and a bigger bathroom than mine. Pull the wheel skirt off the right side and make sure the sheet metal wheel well is sealed against the wall. Mine was not and rotted the floor under the kitchen. I just now found a soft spot under the tv cabinet that I will have to deal with. Maybe the door is leaking or window.

I will definitely check out the right side wheel well sealing when I pickup the trailer, thanks for the suggestion.

The floor all throughout the trailer felt very strong, even where the water damage near the slide is. The water got in where the slide trim separated near the top of the roof. The hardest part about repairing the delamination has occurred will be figuring out how to clamp it properly to cure the epoxy. The delam is down low towards the bottom of the slide.

Of course I will be uploading pictures when I bring the trailer home. Tuesday is so far away, lol

treesbro wrote:
The trailer has weight distribution hitch mounting brackets on it already, and I will be researching a lot to find a good quality WD hitch for the longer term. I will be upgrading the load D tires to Load E tires before I hit the road as well.

Congtats, I wish you all the best in your repair and mod adventures, please do keep us posted with pics.

Re the WD brackets, don't limit yourself to matching a hitch to use those brackets, they might be for a low end hitch.
Research them and be open to an Equal-I-zer 4 point sway hitch, Blue Ox Sway pro or Reese dual cam which are all affordable ballpark hitches that do a very good job .

Tires: upgrading the tires might change the tire size, wheel and the bolt pattern must match OEM. Make sure they fit under your TT, measure your clearance.

I am thinking it wouldn't be worth it to upgrade the wheels, I just want the peace of mind that getting new tires a bit overrated will give for my cross country move that I will be making in the next few months.

I searched for tires with the stock size, really only two options, but will probably go with Load range E Goodyear Endurance tires.

I still have research to do when it comes to the hitch, but I like the design of the Reese setup.

Actually if your looking for the best tire long term its a LT tire especially in 16" sizes on 5.2k and 6k axles.

If your trailer has 7k/8k axle the Sailun S637 load G tire is tops.

For 15" load D or E tire sizes your stuck with a ST tire.

Congrats! Your going to have a blast!

we have a 270FQS Fleetwood and our slide has some delamination, it feels like the plastic siding just came unglued. i'm a complete DIY'ER an i'm going to take the skin off hopefully this summer. but times running out I have a trip planed for the end of July to the end of August. i'm going to check my wheel opening though. the trailer was in dry heated storage most of its life, and in a inclosed car port now.
Jay D.

JIMNLIN wrote:
Actually if your looking for the best tire long term its a LT tire especially in 16" sizes on 5.2k and 6k axles.

If your trailer has 7k/8k axle the Sailun S637 load G tire is tops.

For 15" load D or E tire sizes your stuck with a ST tire.

Hmmm you got me reconsidering on the wheels. If I am going to be buying tires, it would be a good time to upgrade the wheels. Extra ground clearance definitely isn't a bad thing.

Can anyone recommend a budget friendly source to find some 16" wheels? I have no idea what bolt pattern they are though, hopefully it will be in the owners manual? (fortunately my trailer will come with the manual)

Just an update - One setback, and a nice addition!

My trailer wasn't ready for pickup today :( dealer wanted more time to go through the trailer before pickup, so I have to wait a few more days.

On the brighter side, I bought a Suzuki DRZ400S Dual Sport motorcycle in great shape with very low miles for the year!

I think this will be a great asset to have on the back of the travel trailer! No need to break down the whole rig or take the whole rig for a small trip away from my RV when I am out on the road.

My neighbor is a great welder and fabricator and has quite a bit of experience modifying trailers, and he offered to help me build a receiver/rack/ramp to strongly mount the Suzuki on the back of my Wilderness.

So once I pick up the trailer we will be getting together at some point soon to start drawing up plans. I know I want a solid receiver with a standard hitch mount, but I don't intend to hold a whole lot of weight on the rack. The bike will probably weigh about 350-375lbs once I have it all set up and fueled up. It would be nice to also carry my Specialized mountain bike on the rack as well.

So I would like to have something built that can hold about 750lbs. I doubt I'll load it up that much very often at all. I know it will have to be counterweighted in the front at least a bit to counteract the weight so far rearward, but I have plenty of wiggle room with GVWR/GCWR on my TV/TT and several ideas to accomodate this.

I have a few pages bookmarked where others have done this, but any advice/links you guys could provide also would be awesome! Especially anything to do with good things/bad things when it comes to welding to the frame of the trailer.