Dodgezilla |
10-05-2009 07:10 AM |
Adventures in towing....... Pretty long..
So a friend of mine was gonna move to Tampa Florida from the DC area. That's usually farther than I want to go but I went to look at how much stuff he had. He didn't have much furniture but had a lot of boxes and a lot of outdoor stuff. I knew we would fill this trailer and still have to use our 10' flatbed too. I decided I would do the job. We showed up on moving day and they were all ready to go. It's nice to have an organized person to move so you aren't having to pack stuff into boxes for them as you go. We had to go to their storage unit which didn't appear to have too much in it but as it was being unloaded it just seemed to keep coming and coming and coming. I loaded it super tight and it ended up using about 1/3 of the trailer. At that point I started getting worried that everything may not fit. :o We got over to the house and walked through and all of us agreed that we would never get it all in the trailer. Well, for me that is a challenge. I had committed to do this so we started loading up. This was about the tightest load I have ever put in the trailer. I had just put 4 brand new Carlyle D-Rated bias ply American made tires on the trailer so I was not worried. We continued loading and in the end I got everything that was in the house onto the trailer. This was definitely a feat, I can tell you that. Even with the Timbrens the truck was squatting bad but the trailer tires were not squatting at all. I just knew I had made the right choice with my trailer tire purchase. We loaded all the outdoor stuff on the flatbed and got everything on just as I had promised. This is where the adventure begins.....................[guitar]
Dodgezilla pulled the load to my house just fine but for some reason I had no trailer brakes. It was raining and the first intersection I came to the trailer started pushing me around. Luckily I was going pretty slow. I decided to take it very easy so I would have no incidents and did indeed make it to my house safely. We were not leaving for a few days so I had time to figure out the problem with the brakes. It turned out to be a simple adjustment that I would have known about had I bought a new brake controller with instructions with it. So, problem one was no problem anymore. Egts stayed in check and the truck pulled the load just fine once I got rolling. It did take about 2000rpms just to get the trailer rolling from a stop. I was very unhappy with how much it took to pull this thing. Lots of stop and go traffic caused my trans temps to stay up in the 225 degree range in the pan. The trans light never did come on in the dash though.
Thursday morning rolled around and we pulled out about 4:00am. I knew I was overweight but did not think it was more than 2000lbs or so. I decided that we would just take it easy and start the trip at 60mph and move up to 65 mph once we determined that the truck would handle it. BTW, the little trailer was being pulled by our friend's Ford Lightning. The truck was pulling just fine for about 30 miles when BOOM!!!! one of the tires explodes and blows off the rim! I pull over and immediately get a bad feeling in my stomach. We are able to follow the plume of smoke coming from the tire to retrieve it from the brush on the shoulder. When we get it to the front of the truck to inspect it in the headlights I notice something strange. It has the same part number as all the other tires but the thing only has a C-Rating on it!! I put my first spare on and decide that maybe it just gave out because it was too low rated of a tire for this load. Back on the road and all seems well. We are only doing 60 mph at this point and have decided that is as fast as we will go even though we have 900 miles to drive. 20 minutes later and BOOM!!! tire # 2 lets go. My stomach is like [yuk]! I tell my brother we have to go back. We put on the last spare which happens to be a radial. That is scaring me now too because it is squatting a good bit. We exit the highway at 35 mph and start driving back home on a rural highway at 35mph all the way (About 70 miles or so). About 2/3rds of the way home we pass a moving company with a scale and I just have to know how much this thing weighs. I pull on and am amazed that i am tipping the scales at 26150lb!!!:o That puts my 10,000 gvw trailer at 18,000lb! I swear I don't know how these 2540lb tires are handling this even if there are four of them! And they are not squatting at all but the leaf-springs are pretty much straight so the tires are absorbing every bump I hit and getting very hot. We call a tire place and he says he can get us some E-Rated tires that will fix this problem but those are only rated at 2820lb so I know that is still not a safe option. I continue on my way home... We decide to get a rental truck and to put as much of this stuff on it and then pull the Ford Lightning on a car carrier. Then all the stuff on our little flatbed will be floated at the back of the big trailer. This ends up taking all day to do plus I still had to go back to the trailer tire store and complain about the C-rated tire. They deny it came from them and refuse to replace it because they don't even sell a C-rated tire in that size. I don't complain too much because I know the trailer is so overweight. I ponder over replacing all of the tires with the E-Rated ones but since I have pulled a bunch of weight out of the trailer I just buy two more D-Rated tires and one rim because the first blowout killed the one when it dragged down the highway. We get all done and decide to leave at midnight...
We pull out and all is well getting to the highway when we come upon a copper with someone pulled over. As we drive by, one of the cops decides to pull my brother over and hassle him because he says he did not move over far enough into the other lane to avoid the officers. He decides to just give him a verbal warning and lets him go. At this point the truck is pulling the trailer much better and we start out at 60mph for a couple hundred miles. After the first fill-up I decide we will go 65mph. That goes fine too for a couple hundred miles. Next fill-up I decide to makeup some time and go 70mph. The tires were not getting hot but they were kind of warm. Well, 70 mph was just too much and I blew one more tire!!![verymad] That was it! I saw a billboard for a tire store and pulled in to that exit and bought my E-Rated radial tires. Wow! what a difference they made. They are a much beefier tire and do not get warm at all. I still kept it at 70 mph tops and we eventually made it there 17 hours later. My EGTs never once during this entire ordeal got over 1100 degrees. Even when the trailer was sitting at 18,000lb. I think I have it set up just right except that it could use a better converter. I need to change the fluid now too.
Coming home I was not messing around. I set the cruise at 76 mph and hauled my behind all the way home in 14 hours exactly. I got 11.5 mpg going down loaded and about 10.5 coming back empty.
The moral of my story is that I had planned on putting 7000lb axles on the trailer and using my spare Dodge Ram wheels but just kept putting it off and now I have spent on tires what the axles would have cost me....[duhhh][duhhh]
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