Towing a travel trailer with a truck camper?
My wife and I are looking for ways to move up from our current popup camper to something more comfortable and all weather. Thing is, we are a family of 5 although the oldest is soon to leave for coll...
Forum Discussion
texasdiver wrote:twodownzero wrote:
You should not consider any non-dually truck, and should even consider an F450 or 550.
The HUGE difference betweeen an F250 and 350 is payload...and you need to maximize that to be able to tow ANYTHING with a camper on.
Geez....I'm talking about dropping a 900 lb camper onto an F350 SRW truck and pulling a 5000-6000 lb camper with it that has a tongue weight in the 700-800 lb range. Obviously those are dry weights and there will be people and gear but still.... that should be well within the range of any properly equipped 350/3500 SRW truck.
I bet there are a bazillion guys out there towing camping trailers with trucks that have that much weight in gear and fuel on the bed.
My 1 ton SRW has about 2700 pounds of payload. But it is a diesel, stick, 4wd, and 4 doors. A regular cab 2wd with no options could probably do a whole lot better with single wheels, but where have you seen one of those trucks for sale or on the road, anywhere? They're not common anymore. They once were the norm!
My truck would probably be overloaded even with the camper you describe if I had loaded it for even a 5 day trip. That said, I'm also skeptical that there exists any 900 lb hard side camper for a full size of any kind, and even a pop up with a bathroom is going to probably be several hundred pounds heavier than that.
Newer trucks have higher payload ratings, but if you have a 4 door truck with 4wd and a diesel engine, it's hard to stay within the GVWR with any trailer and a hard side camper.
A DRW is the answer. Especially a 1 ton so you can get a numerically lower rear ratio so as not to waste too much fuel, since carrying a camper doesn't really require deep gears.
