Since our RV isn’t self propelled (called a pusher, or class C, or about 100 other names) we need to consider the vehicle needed to pull it.
My wife’s 24 year old son has a big 1/2 ton Chevy pickup. At first we thought it would pull the Travel Trailer (we’ll call the trailer Puma). But its not that simple. What we found out is that it is harder than you think to line up the specs and no one wants to commit to saying what can and can’t meet the specs.
We also thought about just renting a pickup for a weekend or a week or two when needed. That way we would not have to keep up a truck, licensing, insurance, etc. We haven’t entirely counted out this idea, but it seems a bit inconvenient.
After we thought about it though, we thought that it might be very inconvenient to always borrow someone else’s pickup.
Also, we didn’t want to spend a ton of money on a truck. We’re trying not to bleed money in our RV fun.
Well, we found a Chevy 3/4 ton 2500 Sierra Crew Cab with an long box. This pickup is so big, that we call him Mr. Big. We bought him for $1200 and put in $800 of maintenance. It turns out that Mr. Big has a 5th wheel hitch already installed and an extra strong custom towing bumper. We think this will be all the truck we need to pull the Puma.
Just before we got Mr. Big, my wife’s dad hooked up to Puma with his big 1/2 ton Ford w/ the extra heavy package and Puma dropped his truck to the ground. In fact we had to engage the leveling jacks to get the Puma off of the Ford.
When we put Puma on Mr. Big, Mr. Big handled it with aplomb, barely bending under the weight. The Puma manual says it puts about 800 on the hitch, but I think it might even be a little more. I’m using 7,000 pounds as the towing weight.
Well anyway, thats the tow vehicle. I’ll update this as I learn more.
