HappyCamper123

I felt I should come back here, since this is where it all started - the horrible, gut wrenching trip down into reality, that dark place where you realize that no matter how much you want to, no matter what you do, you realize that you can't make it work. Can't fit a square peg in a round hole. can't have the trailer you want, with the truck you have and love. Acceptance was a tough, long road, but - i wanted to come back out here and say that we got there.

in the end, we traded (today) our F150 in for an F350 - and opened our towing capacities to almost saying the sky is the limit. Almost ;-) since we won't have the F150 anymore, this will be my last post here, but I wanted to at least stop out and say thanks to all that responded and pushed us into reality - regardless of how painful.

Now - here's the Beast (That we have named 'the Hulk')

Loki 5.0

Now you are talkin! Sweet truck. We did the same thing, not because of not being able to meet payload though, we needed a 4wd as the land we bought to retire on sits on a hill in snow country. I wanted the heavy duty transmission and driveline . I loved my RCSB 2wd as it was a blast to drive but the F250 is incredibly versatile. Another benifit of the the F250-350 is you can actually open the tailgate fully when when hooked to a trailer as it does not hit the tongue jack like a F150. With a 110 lb German Sheppard that was a major inconvenience .

Bigt8600

iTrader: (1)

Just finished reading this thread from start to finish. I too am in the market for a camper and afraid we will be limited despite what I thought when I bought my truck. Glad that you are going to truly be, a HappyCamper.

Don SC

I've always liked the Northwood Mfg. products. Their Nash line of travel trailers might fit your needs..

Ricktwuhk

It seems that despite your numerous posts, you never ended up understanding how to determine what you could safely tow, and ended up buying a vehicle that allows you to still not understand it.

Do you understand how to properly setup your WDH so you can safely drive?

HappyCamper123

my husband and I will work on that - but worrying about setting up the WDH would have been putting the cart before the horse. The truck we had, simply couldn't safely tow what we wanted it to. That's the bottom line.

now that we have the truck, and are looking at a trailer (we don't have it yet) - we can finally look into the details of setting that up. How to properly distribute weight in the trailer, monitor how much goes on the hitch, setup the weight distribution hitch, etc. Worrying about this piece before having the proper tow vehicle, would be like worrying about if you had all the ingredients for a recipe, without having an oven to cook it in.

HappyCamper123

Additionally, this wasn't the only forum I had posted in - there were others and I gathered a GREAT deal of information from a number of people.

On the F150 I found that we were able to have a hitch weight of 10-15% of our max tow capacity - which was 7700 lbs - giving us an acceptable hitch weight of 1155 lbs. With a payload of only 1582, we were only left with about 400 lbs. between 2 adults a kid and a dog, possibly a cooler too - at the minimum, the odds of us staying safely under payload under the circumstances were slim to none.

Most trailers that we looked at were upwards of 800 Dry hitch weight and some higher - of the ones we liked. I checked on one of them, and talked to people actually towing it, and loaded down with full tanks, and the package we wanted, his tongue weight was 1300 lbs. OVER our max. Even with the weight distribution hitch, there is just no way that the truck would have worked for what we wanted to do. Not safely. You can't make the payload capacity bigger. It's simply not possible.

That said, worrying about the details of hooking up a trailer and the how-to's wasn't even in the ball park of considerations at that point, because we couldn't tow what we wanted.

We certainly have a learning curve ahead of us in regards to hooking up and towing and will need to cross that bridge as the process moves forward, but we had to start with the right foundation before building on that, and that was the truck. a 250 would have sufficed, but we couldn't find one that fit what we wanted in terms of mileage, payload,price, year, etc. so we opted for the 350 when it came up - and it does make the process easier. there's an entire element of concern that is removed simply by upgrading the truck. That's not the WHOLE equation, I know, but it's a HUGE part of it.

Thank you!

LIExpy

I was going to chime in and try and guide you towards the White Hawk line that Jayco offers since you were looking at them. Specifically, the lighter weight 28DSBH with the double-wide bunks are a nice setup and simillar to what we ended up with (Jayflight 28BHBE) that we tow with our Max trailer tow. Trading up to an Super Duty opens a huge world to you now however and you can even consider 5th wheels .

HappyCamper123

Thank you!! Actually the jayflight 28BHBE is the one we wanted. We almost ordered one (since there weren't any local to us available) I called Jayco and in the next year or 2 or so, they are upgrading the queen beds to 60x80 which will be great for my husband since he is 6'1. we decided we didn't want to get the Jayco until they made that move. We opted to get an 'interim' trailer and found a fairly decent Dutchmen that is big, and will fit our needs for the next couple years. we also will take that time to make a wish list/general need list, so that when we are ready to move to a different trailer, we know exactly what we need. The Dutchmen we picked is decent enough that we can keep it indefinitely if we find it meets our needs long term, but I have a feeling in the next 5 years we'll downsize to the 28BHBE (the dutchmen is bigger).

thank you!