trailer blown off jack stand

Frame is fine. Set it back up and chock the wheels better.

The wheels were chocked, but I am guessing the wind lifted the trailer and blew the chocks out from under the wheels. 107mph is what was recorded, hurricane 2 force winds in Colorado. Highest ever recorded here in Colorado Springs, so I would say not very regular :-) I was using black plastic chocks, but I guess I will look into something heavier. I have since added screw tighten wheel stops. I had no idea not to have the stabilizer jacks deployed. I only put them down because most of the RVs in the storage have them down, I wont put them down from now on. First RV, so I guess this was a fairly cheap lesson learned. New stabilizer jack was 25 dollars. Thanks for all the help and guidance.

Chris Bryant wrote:
Don't worry about it- every day towing puts far more stress than falling off the jack stand.
FWIW- 4 guys can lift the tongue of a 34' Airstream :)

:) Hi, that would be about 200 lbs each; Yes, possible, but not just any normal four guys. My 25'er has a 900 lb. tongue weight. And an Airstream can be towed by a guy on a bicycle too. Not that 34'er and not my 25'er either.

westend wrote:
I'd suggest to use a block of wood under the tongue jack and under the stabilizers.

I guess I don't understand how you had it set. Mine sits on the ground on the disk foot on the tongue jack, so it really can't slide off of anything. I down put don't my stabilizers, because they aren't designed to carry the load of the TT. If a tire goes flat, or sinks into the ground (very unlikely here), then I still want the weight on the suspension and the tongue jack, not on the stabilizers. I do chock the wheels even though I'm parked on dead level ground.

We get some fierce winter winds (summer too, for that matter) out here on the Great Plains, and my TT doesn't move an inch.

One of these things, right?



In the 100MPH wind, the trailer probably lifted off the ground, which is why the stand wasn't damaged.

Unless you get 100MPH winds regularly, I would not worry about it.

Frame is probably fine. In the future, keep the stabilizers up in storage and put the tongue jack on the ground.

Stabilizers are for the purpose of reducing movement while inside the trailer. The jacks serve no purpose in storage except provide additional pathways for mice.

At home I use a pressure treated 4x4 under the tongue jack to prevent sinking into soft ground.

100 mph is quite a wind. Many owners get their TTs blown clear over so you are lucky in that respect.

Wondering - did you have chocks in place? If you didn't, it would be a lot easier for the tongue jack to get pushed around. Scissor jacks or elec. stab. jacks? Scissor jacks aren't very stable in a fore/aft and left right direction, esp. the higher they are off the ground. If you happened to have stabilizer struts for the stab. jacks, that might have helped.

You need to have the tongue jack deployed but it will help to have it extended as little as possible and can use blocks, cribbing, etc. From an engineering point of view, the most stable setup would be to have the base twice as wide as the height of the jack's foot is off the ground in a pyramid shape. For ex., if the foot was 24" off the ground the base of the built up "stand" would be 48" x 48". Could be a pyramid shape and should have a lip so the foot can't slip off. Just stacking up some layers of 6x6 or 2x6 will not help. If the ground is not a hard surface and is soft material, putting down some crushed gravel would be a good idea.

Also, if you look at how a tongue jack is bolted to the A-frame, it is only held in place by 3 bolts through a flange sitting on top of the A-frame tubing. This is not all that stable and the foot of the jack can move around as a result. If you were handy and can weld, you could make up another flange that would be at the height of the underside of the A-frame tubing and attach there. I'm planning on doing this to our TT.

Frame is unlikely to be damaged.

kandkbrand wrote:
this past weekend I went out to my storage lot to check on my trailer. It looks like my trailer blew off of the tongue stand, over stressing my stabilizer jacks, and the right front jack failed and the trailer was resting on the front right corner of the trailer.

Just curious - but if your trailer is parked at a storage lot why were the stabs deployed and why was the tongue jack sitting on a cone? :h

I'd suggest to use a block of wood under the tongue jack and under the stabilizers.

DutchmenSport wrote:
More than likely, the trailer frame is just fine. If your tongue jack did not get bent, then there's nothing going on there. If your stablizer jacks got bent up, they are really very week and will "give" much sooner than your main frame they are attached to.

The tongue jack is fine because when the cone got pushed over, the stabilizer took most of the pressure and crumpled and was pushed into the ground and the tongue jack, once pushed over, never hit the ground.