Trailer Towing

Trailing towing is a common reason why people camp with truck campers.   A truck camper can be used to haul a boat, horse trailer, or utility trailer.  

If you plan to do this often, you might want to think about how this will affect your stairs into your camper if you have a center rear door like I have.  My plan is to build a folding platform and angle my stairs off to one side and add a handrail for safety.  I'll explore this more in the future as I have not get refined my design.

The other issue is how to attach a tow to a pickup with a camper extending over the back. I my case, I bought a Torklift hitch which has a provision for rear tie downs, and will also accept a hitch extension up to 48". I opted for a 32" hitch extension, which is about four inches longer than my overhang.  In addition to this, I will also need a wiring harness extension to match.

I have two trailers I'd like to tow.  One is a boat trailer carrying a Wellcraft Fisherman 20 center console.  In the course of rebuilding this trailer I replaced the springs which were sagging 2.5".  I replaced the hubs which were somewhat rusted and needed to be resurfaced--I intend to keep at least one of these loaded up with the best of the old bearing as a hot spare.  Along with the hubs I replaced the bearning, races, and seals.  My galvanized wheels were still in good shape, but the tires showed sidewall rot.  I replaced these with new load range D tires since I have a single axle trailer.  At some point I'd like to add a spare wheel, tire if I start taking longer trips.

Here is Spur with my sail boat in the background.

 

My last project was the trailer wiring.  I chose split-tail wiring, and LED rear lamps.  I decided to check the width of the trailer and found it was 91" wide.  I knew the trailer was not too wide by eyeball measurement because the boat is 8' wide.  Thankfully, this is under the 8.5' width that if exceeded adds in all sort of wide load towing permits.  However, when I checked online, I found that the lighting rules seem to have changed for trailers.

I would need seven more fixtures to comply with the law.  Frankly, some of these seem ridiculous to me.  I will need to add clearance lights on my fenders, even though it would be relatively simple to move my tail lamps outboard 2 inches to meet the clearance requirements.  Also I will need amber front facing clearance lights, and wide load lights under the trailer in the back.

Finally, I'll need side facing front lights---these lights are required on any size trailer.  That makes no sense to me.  Short trailers have no need for these, however, the law requires them for all trailers.

Any of these lamps will be prone to failure due to submersion. One option I have to is mount these higher up, but that will require fabrication flanges to mount them too.

In addition to all these marker lights, reflectors are required everywhere, and 

For your information:

http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/standards/conspicuity/trlrpstr.html