RAM 3500 Frame Failure/Eagle Cap Camper

That makes this easy, see thread in camper forum!

Here's the thread in the appropriate truck camper sub-forum current thread And here is the closed thread from this sub closed

rjstractor wrote:

JBarca wrote:
Wow, that does not look good.

Not sure if there is a rating for overhung loads aft of the truck's frame. An evenly loaded bed weight up to the max-rated payload of the truck may act on the truck frame differently than some semi-large percentage of the payload beyond the end of the truck frame.

I wonder how Ford or GM handles this. That truck camper does not look like a new design, I have seen others with that rear overhang on it.

All the OEMs have very detailed information on truck camper ratings, including where the center of gravity needs to be in order to achieve the highest rating. Here's a Ram guide that details every single Ram model from that year (2016). It even drills down to whether the truck has bench or bucket seats. I imagine it was a similar (2020) guide that Ram referred to and determined that the owner was overloaded, denying him warranty coverage.

Never knew that before. I'm not a truck camper guy, yet anyway, but always on the lookout for why things fail and to try and understand them.

Thanks for posting, very helpful.

John

Back to deleting posts again eh?
Someone here on this forum must be the idiot who is trying to get internet famous for being a dip chit!
Who is it? Lol

KD4UPL wrote:
I don't know why anyone would expect warranty coverage as it's obviously overloaded. The owner was not only ignorant of the truck's payload but couldn't give anything other than a ballpark estimate of it's loaded weight. Further, just because a truck has a certain payload it still must be distributed correctly on the axles. A responsible truck camper owner would have a scale ticket or two to prove axle a d total weights. I always did when I ran my Chevy dually over it's GVWR with a TC.

Campers that extend beyond the bed have been around for decades. I don't know what they weighed way back then but almost certainly heavier than the GVW of the trucks they were put in at the time. While I don't disagree with the positioning of the load to achieve a GVW matters, I don't think it mattered as much then due to overbuild, things used to be designed with P for plenty on the end numbers. I doubt that happens much if at all anymore. RAM builds that truck for a certain weight in a certain configuration with little "P for Plenty". This type of load certainly isn't typical and likely not accounted for, hence the failure. You see these slide ins all over. Perhaps all not as big as this one, but they are out there. If there was an issue with all of them putting a truck over GVW, the internet would be full of pictures like this. Doesn't appear that they are. RAM will likely walk away from this without paying. But clearly RAM has some shortcomings. There are companies here that have snapped RAM frames. The well drillers down the road from me for one. They don't buy them anymore.

JBarca wrote:
Wow, that does not look good.

Not sure if there is a rating for overhung loads aft of the truck's frame. An evenly loaded bed weight up to the max-rated payload of the truck may act on the truck frame differently than some semi-large percentage of the payload beyond the end of the truck frame.

I wonder how Ford or GM handles this. That truck camper does not look like a new design, I have seen others with that rear overhang on it.

All the OEMs have very detailed information on truck camper ratings, including where the center of gravity needs to be in order to achieve the highest rating. Here's a Ram guide that details every single Ram model from that year (2016). It even drills down to whether the truck has bench or bucket seats. I imagine it was a similar (2020) guide that Ram referred to and determined that the owner was overloaded, denying him warranty coverage.

I don't know why anyone would expect warranty coverage as it's obviously overloaded. The owner was not only ignorant of the truck's payload but couldn't give anything other than a ballpark estimate of it's loaded weight. Further, just because a truck has a certain payload it still must be distributed correctly on the axles. A responsible truck camper owner would have a scale ticket or two to prove axle a d total weights. I always did when I ran my Chevy dually over it's GVWR with a TC.

Wow, that does not look good.

Not sure if there is a rating for overhung loads aft of the truck's frame. An evenly loaded bed weight up to the max-rated payload of the truck may act on the truck frame differently than some semi-large percentage of the payload beyond the end of the truck frame.

I wonder how Ford or GM handles this. That truck camper does not look like a new design, I have seen others with that rear overhang on it.