Hi,
I have been through axles, hangers and axle alignment and may be able to help.
Something is not right if your axle bent. I looked up some of your older posts and in them you mentioned you ended up with negative camber. The usually way of getting negative camber is from an axle overload condition. And that can be by too much static weight which during a dynamic bump in the road, creates an overload and bends the axle permanently. Or it can be from loading the axle to the rating but hitting a very large bump and that dynamic event created the over load.
You mentioned the words light weight trailer. So I looked up what a Coachmen clipper is. What year and model do you have?
Coachmen web siteReason I'm asking all this is, some manufactures put on running gear, axles, springs and tires to hold the entire GVWR of the camper. This gives some level of safety factor to the loading of the camper at the axles as we all know the truck is holding some of the weight.
And some, manufactures size the GWVR so that the truck is holding part of the weight on the tongue and they size the axle to be less then the GVWR. In this situation they can down size the axle, they create an axle rating and the user has to manage to the number to not overload the axle even though he may be under the GVWR of the trailer. This might be what you have run into. Have you ever weighed the camper by the axles? and weighed it when you are using a WD hitch? That is a question too, are you using a WD hitch?
While you may be under on the camper GVWR, you may be over on the axle and then any fairly large bump can create a problem.
First I would make sure I understood how the first failure happened and confirm the weights of the camper axle and the tongue weight.
Putting a larger axle in may help the axle but there are other issues. What about the springs and the tires? They need to be sized correct too. The next the TT frame. These light weight campers have very thin frames. Your frame may not be able to handle the next size up axle, springs and tires.
You mentioned a bumper stop so the axle would not hit the frame. That is a concern. While you have softened the hit which can be a good thing, you have decreased the travel of the suspension and that is a bad thing. When the suspension bottoms out the axle can get into over load real fast. If you look at the axle ratings, when they have springs attached, the load ratings are almost 2 times higher then when no springs are used. A bottomed out axle looses load rating when there is no more suspension left.
I would start with getting actual scaled weights and see where the issue is. You might not like the answer that the camper cannot handle the weight. But putting heavier axles in and bending a camper frame is not a good thing either.
Hope this helps
John
2005 Ford F350 Super Duty, 4x4; 6.8L V10 with 4.10 RA, 21,000 GCWR, 11,000 GVWR, upgraded 2 1/2" Towbeast Receiver. Hitched with a 1,700# Reese HP WD, HP Dual Cam to a 2004 Sunline Solaris T310R travel trailer.
