<VV>Trailer Incident

[Padgett]

>First and foremost is that anything short of a FULL-sized truck is too
>small for towing a car on a trailer, even an open trailer.

Back in the day I towed a B/P Corvette all over the midwest with a LeMans 
station wagon and used the same rig to pick up my toy. 
http://padgettp.com/cars/rig3.jpg . The friend who owned the trailer in the 
picture brought a  69 TransAm back from California behind an S-10 blazer 
(though the 2.8 was really tired when he got here). The key is to have a 
properly equipped tow vehicle (I had AirLifts in the back but anly 
automatic levelling system will work, a properly rated hitch, and a trailer 
with good trailer (stiffer than passenger car) tires, its own braking 
system, and a load that is balanced properly (low tires or an unbalanced 
load can cause sway that will pick tires off the ground).

Done properly and checking carefully at the first 50 miles and every gas 
stop thereafter, long distance trailer towing can be accomplished without 
excitement. After a while you develop a sense of when something is changing 
(which means pull over NOW and find out what).

Now for a time it was popular to build car trailers from mobile home 
chassis which often resulted in an unbalanced and top heavy load which is 
not what you want. The other failure is not to put 10% of the load on the 
hitch. For a 6000 pound car&trailer this means 600 lbs on the hitch (why 
the air lifts). Less and you are liable to get sway. Too much can cause 
problems also but the most common is too little.

Often what happens is that with the proper tongue weight, a tow vehicle 
that does not have the proper load-leveling hitch or other compensation 
that when the trailer is hitched up, parts of the tow vehicle will bottom 
on the suspension and the nose will point at the sky. This is not good. 
Worse is unbalancing the load to gain some ground clearance because the 
trailer will become unstable.

One interesting thing is that you drive a rig much the same as a race car 
when going really fast - gently and make no sudden moves. Driving about a 
1/4 mile ahead of the rig is a good idea also.

Plan ahead. Enough surprises will occur in life that you do not need to add 
any.

For some good guidelines see 
http://www.purdue.edu/transportation/vehicle/TowGuidelines.DOC

Padgett