Re: [RC] Advice on trucks..... - Michael LewisThanks, David. Awesome post full of good facts. Reminds me of the guy I saw tooling down I-10 some years ago with an S-10 pulling a 35' RV... Talk about unsafe!!! Mike ----- Original Message ----- From: "David LeBlanc" <dleblanc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: <Chipnml@xxxxxxx>; <ridecamp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, July 05, 2008 7:13 AM Subject: RE: [RC] Advice on trucks..... Chipnml asked: am wondering if I really need a 1-ton (I got a really good price on this one when I bought it new). I haul a 2-horse slant with a dressing room, but not built in LQ. At the most I would upgrade to a 3-horse slant with a small "weekender" type LQ....but not anything bigger. It's time to consult the towing guide. First thing is 1/2 ton, 3/4 ton, full ton is outdated, and doesn't really indicate anything. Just because it is an F-250 (or whatever) doesn't say much about what it can handle. In the F-250 line, there can be around 6000 pounds variance. I'm sure Dodge is the same way. The key number is gross combined vehicle weight. A trailer like you're talking about is around 6000 pounds empty for a good aluminum trailer. Add 3 horses, water, hay, and a bunch of stuff, and you're up to 10,000, maybe 11,000 pounds just to be safe. Now figure around 6000 pounds for the truck, more if it is heavy-duty, another 1000 pounds for people and stuff. Call it 18,000 pounds all together. Now figure that you'd rather not be running this right at the limit all the time, so add in some safety factor, and what you want is a truck that can handle a combined weight of around 20,000, and could maybe get by with something a little smaller. Something most people don't figure is that the most important part of a truck used to haul horses is the suspension and brakes. As GCWR rating goes up, these get better. It's also true that the longer the wheelbase, the better off you are. So some F-250's would safely do the job, some would not. I'd bet that some of the lighter F-350's ("full ton") won't do it. You have to consult the towing guide for the truck line you're looking at buying. People ask "will it pull it", when what they ought to worry about is "will it STOP it?" They say both the 2500 and 3500 Ram trucks can handle a GCWR of 24,000 pounds, so they should be OK. The other problem you get into is whether the suspension handles the weight on the axle. When you go to stop a gooseneck, there is a lot of down force on the nose of the trailer. We have a big Featherlite, and what that did to our Chevy 3500 was cause the front wheels to violently shake, so I wasn't in control, and all this while smoke was pouring out the wheel wells from the brakes overheating. My wife was seriously NOT amused. An F-550 deals with all this nicely. What tells you about this is the payload capacity. Your Ram 2500 line will handle anywhere from 1.5 tons to 1.25 tons (so much for the 3/4 ton designation). The 3500 line handles close to double that.
Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
|