hi guys. I've got a 04 f350 srw truck. I just bought a 30ft goose neck rated at 22400. I'm planning on buying a backhoe next, the ones i'm looking at weigh 15000 so the trailer is rated enough for the backhoe but i'm not sure if the truck will be legal to pull say 18-19000 lbs. Besides being legal i'm wondering how safe it will be. I've pulled some extremely heavy trailers from my oilpatch days and truck handles great and those weren't goosenecks. Marc
H, you'll probably weight more than 18-19K because the trailer should weight around 6K. I've hauled my 15K D4 on my 5,500lb. 3 axle trailer all over the state. This trailer has 8K axles instead of the usual 7K so it stops really nice and that the secret to towing heavy.... BRAKES. If you don't have strong brakes that make the back of your truck squat when you apply them don't try it. Your front tire will lock up and then you loose control and if you have an accident and hurt somebody the attorneys will eat you alive!
Ive pulled my backhoe( 17,000#) behind my dodge 2500 no problem. It'll be the hills that will give you problems. Whether you are legal or not can get complicated. The best thing you can do is take the trailer empty to a scale somewhere and get some axle weights on the whole rig. Then try to imagine how you would put the backhoe on the trailer without exceeding each axle's rating. If you can figure out how to do that, then you should be ok. The truck will pull it, no problem. That srw axle isn't as strong as you think though. Check you door sticker for ratings.
Thanx guys, that's a good idea watglen i never thought about going to a scale and checkin them all, will do that soon as i can. Nearest road scale is probably bout 140km away.
Watch your total gross weight, don't forget your tongue weight. The front of the trailer deck ain't allways the startin point.
Nah the nearest scale is in the trunk of the dot mans car
I try to steer way clear of the local dot. He's a super dink, He's actually been beat up pretty bad a couple times by truckers because he was giving them bullsh*t tickets and in general making life really difficult.
so i looked in my book and it says gcvw is 20000, and it says maximum trailer weight is like 13,100 or 13,700. that's not even the weight of the backhoe. it says even a f550 can only pull a 17000 trailer. That seems low