Truck Camper Dolly by Rieco

I am the old guy in the video, if anyone has any questions about my experience, feel free to pm me. I don't scan rv.net regularly so sorry for not catching this sooner.
I will say as I did in the video, that Rico Titan was awesome to work with to find a solution for the difficulty in getting the front castors to swivel, without any additional cost on my part. I did a video of the difficulty that I posted on YouTube but replaced it with the one showing what they did to correct the problem. If there is a way to email it, I'd be glad to share it. Lots of nice creative ways to solve this as shown in this topic, but I don't have a welder nor would I trust anything I came up with to support the heavy TC. Not to mention I probably would have not guessed to try an offset pair.

Here is my camper dolly Its made out of a shipping pallet and 8-900lb capacity casters

In my view, a 200 buck used single axle boat trailer with small wheels and tires (12" rims is what they usually have), is ideal especially for the p;rice plus it already has a tongue.

In fact I leave my TC on the trailer all winter, I just run the jack legs down 'till they touch the floor and call it good.

Old boat trailers are pretty easy to come by. Craig's List is full of them.

As a side note, I've always been suspect of Harbor Freight products. Their Predator engines aren't bad (they are actually Lifan) but the rest of their stuff is questionable.

Yes, if you're rolling over gravel or grass, you'll need a boat or utility trailer type setup and a tractor of some sort to move it. The downside is that the camper may sit too high to get into a garage. Moving over a concrete surface is much easier and the dolly is much cheaper to make. I'm fortunate. I can back my truck with the camper attached into my concrete-floored barn. I unload the camper onto the dolly in the barn and roll it out of the way fairly easily with just four 5" casters.

Forget a camper dolly if you're rolling over gravel. It doesn't work. As soon as you try to pivot the wheels, they dig in and get stuck. That's with my little 1750lb camper on ten 10" Harbor Freight pneumatic casters with a total capacity of 3000lbs. Not to mention that only one out of ten held for more than a few hours.

I suppose if you get big enough casters, but you're talking big $$$. In my case almost as much as I had invested in the camper at the time. $150 on HF casters was too much in my book.

I have at least 5 flat racks sitting in the yard (Hay wagon), I farm but my issue with a hay wagon (flat rack) is, one. they are a pita to back up (I do it all the time), 2, used ones are usually well used and the king pins and tie rod ends are shot and most importantly three, too high up. I went with the boat trailer because the camper sits plenty low, in fact, on the trailer, it's around 12" off the ground and lower is always better when storing. I have a 12 foot high door on the storage barn so it goes in and out nicely, plus it was cheap (on Craig's List and I can use it (boat trailer) as a street legal utility trailer. Cannot do that with a flat rack...you can pull them down the road up to maybe 25 mph. After that the weave back and forth gets dangerous.

In the tech folder, there are a few threads discussing camper dollies. I looked at just about every design, including pre-fabricated and decided to follow another member's (Spott) path ... using a farm wagon running gear as the platform for my TC dolly. I didn't go with a wood frame like he did but instead chose to have one welded up. See linky for Spott's dolly:

Farm Wagon Running Gear Based TC Dolly

I'll post a pic up in the Spring once I paint mine. I wanted something that would handle (and not damage) asphalt, cement, gravel, grass and whatever else with ease. That pretty much knocked out any caster based dolly. Here's what I did:

1. Bought an old (circa 1940's) 6 ton farm wagon running gear - $100
2. Needed 4 new tires ... bought 4 almost new used, low profile snow tires for - $100
3. Welding (incl. materials) to fabricate an angle iron box frame (open bottom) - $250
4. Still to go, paint, maybe a plywood floor - $100'ish

Total investment will be around $550 with a plywood floor, less than $500 without the floor. BTW - I'm thinking a platform floor to help keep the critters out.

I ran out of time to finish it (paint & floor) this fall but still used it to load and store my TC on this winter. It is super solid, very easy to maneuver by hand or hitch with the running gear pin tongue, rolls over everything on the 15 inch passenger tires and ... the wheel assemblies and steering mechanism are grease-able.

After painting it to match my TC colours, I'll also be dressing it up with a set of Chebby hubcaps even though the TC is hauled with a Ford. It wasn't that hard to put the pieces together and everything I sourced came used from Kijiji (like CraigsList).

I agonized a while about a dolly for my Palomino and finally arrived at a reasonable cost solution, a used single axle boat trailer. Everything is already there, tongue and all plus I hook it to my quad and back it and the camper in the garage. It takes 2 (my wife guiding me) and me on the quad, but unlike a dolly with casters, I can move mine about on gravel or even park it on the lawn with no issue and a boat trailer has various tie-down points to secure a camper to.

Bought a used Tee-Nee single axle boat trailer on Craig's List for 200 bucks, plus, I can use the trailer (with a plywood deck for hauling my quads behind the truck and camper. All good.

The Reico dolly is only good on hard concrete or asphalt. I have a gravel drive and apron so that don't work.

I have an aluminum tube framed dolly for my 2000 pound Northern Lite which is very useful in moving it around without having to load it. However, it isn't the easiest thing to move on your own. If you are on a polished concrete floor I would say no problem. But, if you're outside on concrete (mine is a broom finished concrete) with ANY debris, sand, really anything, that gets in the way of the castors it will be difficult. Its amazing how small of a pebble will stop it in its tracks. Plus, if the concrete is sloped that is another issue.

I mounted a tow-bar on the front to help move it most of the way when I'm just going straight out and back.

I use mine primarily to shuffle spots between by fifth wheel and camper. My storage area is deep buy only one lane wide.

Artum Snowbird wrote:
I bought a 2000 pound 12 volt winch and bolted it to the floor in my shop. The camper would come off outside on asphalt and I would pull it into the concrete inside floor. Once on concrete it was no problem. I had four full swivel locking casters on mine.

Watching the OP's quoted U'tube vid, i was thinking the same thing as you have done.. use a winch! If i had a dolly to move mine, i would need a winch just to get it into the garage, but once it was in there, nothing else would go in it!