burningman
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Joined Apr 26, 2003
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Re: Will a truck camper fit over the 5er rails in the truck bed?
About the Northern Lite 10-2… great choice, after owning six or seven campers since the ‘80s I’ll only own a Bigfoot or Northern Lite fiberglass non-slide. But about the weight, 3360 is pure fantasy. Loaded to go in the real world it’s around 5000 pounds. Not to scare you off, your truck will be fine. I’m just bringing you up to speed on what it really weighs, and the same is true for every camper. They’re all a lot heavier in the real world than the “dry weight” spec. I have a Dodge diesel dually and I sometimes tow a 10,000 pound trailer behind it.1.2KViews0likes0CommentsRe: 1979 Lance TC
mkirsch wrote: Want weights? Weigh it. Unless you're trying to haul it with a short bed F150 you've probably got plenty of truck. Be aware that it probably won't fit in a GM made after 1987, a Ford after 1996, or a Dodge after 1993. Those are the old "squarebody" style trucks that were being built in 1979. Fords kept the old body style through 1997. Chevy/GMC trucks are still the old square body through 1991 if they’re a crew.cab.598Views0likes0CommentsRe: Tailgate support rack
There’s a very simple solution. Cut a 2x10 to fit across left and right into the slots your truck bed already has for that reason. It will do double duty. Put it across the front of your truck bed when the camper is in… that something you should be doing anyway, it helps spread the load across from the camper if you have to do a moderate to hard brake slam. The front walls are very thin and delicate and bend easily. Then when the camper is off, move the board to the slots at the rear of the bed and it becomes your tailgate.579Views0likes0CommentsRe: Camper looks like its not level
I’m pretty sure the issue being asked about has nothing to do with the suspension, or the truck sagging.below level. It’s the optical illusion that the camper is actually sagging at the rear IN THE LEVEL TRUCK BED. It’s the illusion the the camper is sagging relative to the truck, not the whole truck sagging relative to the ground. And it’s an illusion. You need to measure it yourself… get a straightedge, board or whatever that reaches left and right across the tops of your bed rails. Measure from it down to the bed floor at the front and at the rear. I’m pretty sure you’ll figure out why the rig looks the way it does. You do not want to put a board under it at the rear, because the camper is built to be supported sitting flat on the floor. You’ll put all the weight and stress right where the board is, which isn’t good.272Views0likes0CommentsRe: Tailgate for a truck camper
The only REAL issue is the cables or straps that hold the gate when it’s open usually interfere with the camper because it widens out right behind the truck bed, and/or the camper has holding tanks below the rear overhang area, or a black tank dump port. As for the notion that the gate will be damaged because it isn’t designed to support much weight, how much weight is really on it if you can remove the tailgate and carry the camper without it?!!1.3KViews0likes0CommentsThe only real SRW “One Ton” that isn’t really a 3/4 ton
Just for the heck of it, here is the only real one-ton single rear wheel pickup ever made that is NOT just a 3/4 ton with a different sticker on it. The 1973 to 1979 Ford F-350 Super Camper Special. Not just the common “Camper Special” but the Super Camper Special. These things had a 5355 pound payload. Way more than any new SRW pickup. Notice the set-back rear axle. They had a special bed to fit. They were made to haul big campers, and that set-back rear axle also let the front end take more of the weight. No camper center of gravity issues at all. They came with 12.00 x 16.5 rear tires. They came with frame tie down points, camper power connectors, trans coolers, and a spare tire under a big door on the passenger side of the bed. No crawling under. These were the best single rear wheel camper haulers ever, and the only single rear wheel one-ton pickup that wasn’t just an up-rated 3/4 ton.9KViews0likes35CommentsRe: CB Antennas?
There’s no magic antenna that works better than another, it’s all about size. They need to be a quarter wavelength (or half wave or full wave, but that’s huge at 27 MHz). A 1/4 wave CB antenna is 9 feet long. The way shorter antennas are able to tune and resonate like a full 9 foot 1/4 wave is by coiling up the length of it. If you look at a short antenna like a Firestick, you’ll see it’s a fiberglass pole with a wire spiral wrapped up it’s length. That’s called continuous loading. Other short CB antennas have a coil at the base or in the center about halfway up. It looks like a cylindrical lump, but there’s a coil of wire making up the rest of the required length of the antenna inside it. That’s “base loaded” or “center loaded”. The coil just allows it to tune and resonate correctly for the frequency it’s being used for. The shorter the antenna, even if it’s loaded correctly, the worse it works. The longer the better. They also need a groundplane. The metal car body they’re mounted on acts as the groundplane. Electrically, it mirrors the antenna to make it behave as if it were a full half-wave antenna. Without it, the radiation pattern is upward toward the sky. It needs the groundplane to lower the pattern so it’s stronger in a more line of sight pattern where it’s more useable. Note, a groundplane isn’t a “ground”, totally different thing. The radiation pattern becomes directional toward the mass of the groundplane. If you mount the antenna at the front of the vehicle, it will be more directional and strong toward the rear of the vehicle, following where the groundplane is. Ideally you’d use a 9 foot whip on the top and center of the vehicle, but obviously that has practical problems. You want it as high as possible, as long as possible and as centrally located as possible, and you compromise down from there as needed. You also need to tune it with an SWR meter. Standing Wave Ratio. That’s the amount of power that just bounces back at the radio rather than efficiently resonating and radiating out from the antenna. Most CB antennas have a set screw and a fine height adjustment to allow this. You want the reading on the SWR meter as low as possible. 1.5 to 1 or less is great.1.4KViews0likes0Comments
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