Broken Frame on a RAM 3500

mkirsch wrote:
I find this whole thread hilarious. This forum has been dedicated to beating down "weight police" for years... "You don't need to worry about weight! GVWR is meaningless! It's a DUALLY! The AAM axle is rated for 11,000lbs! Just add up your tire capacities, slap in a set of airbags, and GO! If the tires don't add up to enough, get 19.5's! Nobody that's anybody pays attention to weight! It'll be fine!"

Now all of a sudden everybody's a weight police. "Oh he was 10lbs over GVWR! That's why his frame broke!"

Lol, you’re kinda right! Although to be fair I’ve generally been in the camp of srw trucks chassis can handle about what duallies can save for tires wheels and springs. Therefore they are under rated and no issue overloading to an extent. But if 1 ton Dooleys were under rated the same then they’d look like their class 4 and 5 cousins and those trucks wouldn’t have the much stouter chassis that they do have.
But in this guys case he was waaaay over the 14k gvw number which is still a very safe number for that truck. And he likely wasn’t over the real axle or tire/wheel rating. No flat tires and bent axles in that pic. Just a taco’d frame. Which even someone like him got 25k miles out of…..
He’s the reason that ratings exist, because not enough working material between the ears to know when he was pressing his luck.
That setup was likely around a full ton over the gvwr. Or 2 tons over a srw or 3 tons over a srw 2500. All with the same basic chassis.
See now why I’m not worried about 4000lbs in the back of a 2500 hurting the truck itself?