Hello all -
My wife and I bought our first travel trailer today. We live in PHoenix and have been tent camping out of the back of a Jeep for decades and finally decided to come in out of the rain.
Thank you to all who have posted tips and tricks here...I've already spent quite a bit of time on the forums and have learned quite a bit.
Stupid newbie questions will be inbound shortly. Right now we're peering into empty cabinets and making lists.
Cheers!
My wife and I bought our first travel trailer today. We live in PHoenix and have been tent camping out of the back of a Jeep for decades and finally decided to come in out of the rain.
Thank you to all who have posted tips and tricks here...I've already spent quite a bit of time on the forums and have learned quite a bit.
Stupid newbie questions will be inbound shortly. Right now we're peering into empty cabinets and making lists.
Cheers!
Good morning everyone, and thank you for the welcome.
icanon - Yes, it looks that way to me also. I asked about the nose high appearance after the dealer set up the hitch and was told that a) it's an optical illusion and the trailer/truck are level, and b) everyone else is doing it wrong. :h
I can tell you that it follows wonderfully at 65mph with no sway or bouncing. The truck rides quite a bit better with the trailer on than it does empty. It may be that the hitch and sway bar are covering up a set up that would wag all over the place with a standard hitch.
My plan is to spend some time experimenting with the hitch height after loading the truck and trailer to see what actually works best. I'll try it this way for a bit to establish a baseline and then drop the hitch down a notch and reset the tension with a tape measure.
My first real question is about the brake controller. My dad taught me to pull a trailer by setting a full coffee cup on the dashboard and throwing a fit if any of it spilled. This was in a '71 Mercury station wagon towing a trailer with surge brakes. The result is that I use the gears to slow down as much as possible and the throttle/brake transitions are very smooth. I have to have the Prodigy P2 dialed up to 6.5 and set to B3 in order to get the brake feel I like. Is it possible that the smoothness of the transitions are "fooling" the inertia mechanism in the Prodigy and requiring what appears to me to be a setting higher than normal on the controller?
By the way, the trailer brakes will stop the entire rig without using the service brakes on the truck if I hit the panic bar on the controller, so they seem to be fine.
icanon - Yes, it looks that way to me also. I asked about the nose high appearance after the dealer set up the hitch and was told that a) it's an optical illusion and the trailer/truck are level, and b) everyone else is doing it wrong. :h
I can tell you that it follows wonderfully at 65mph with no sway or bouncing. The truck rides quite a bit better with the trailer on than it does empty. It may be that the hitch and sway bar are covering up a set up that would wag all over the place with a standard hitch.
My plan is to spend some time experimenting with the hitch height after loading the truck and trailer to see what actually works best. I'll try it this way for a bit to establish a baseline and then drop the hitch down a notch and reset the tension with a tape measure.
My first real question is about the brake controller. My dad taught me to pull a trailer by setting a full coffee cup on the dashboard and throwing a fit if any of it spilled. This was in a '71 Mercury station wagon towing a trailer with surge brakes. The result is that I use the gears to slow down as much as possible and the throttle/brake transitions are very smooth. I have to have the Prodigy P2 dialed up to 6.5 and set to B3 in order to get the brake feel I like. Is it possible that the smoothness of the transitions are "fooling" the inertia mechanism in the Prodigy and requiring what appears to me to be a setting higher than normal on the controller?
By the way, the trailer brakes will stop the entire rig without using the service brakes on the truck if I hit the panic bar on the controller, so they seem to be fine.
