I bought a mechanical gooseneck trailer at auction. It is 48 ft long and its well is about 30 feet long. Air ride. More pictures are here: https://www.machinerymoverschicago.com/blog/Mechanical-Gooseneck-Trailer/ I would like to solicit some words of wisdom on operating it. Specifically, I wonder if I can use a air-operated hydraulic jack, which is inexpensive and easy to operate, to raise and lower it to ground instead of welding on on-ramps for the rollers, to my trucks.
Ramps will be cheaper in the long run. It won't take long to get into a routine for loading and unloading. The best part is that mechanicals don't run out of gas when you need them or have a load over the gas tank, they don't have feet that sink into the ground/asphalt when you're trying to hook up loaded. There are lots of ramp patterns floating around out there.
Thanks. I will definitely make some ramps. But my question is, is there some way to unhook the mechanical gooseneck without having to use truck approach ramps? Or to avoid ramping up a heavily loaded trailer? I am sorry if this is a stupid question.
Not really, you have to pull out from under the trailer to unlock the neck, then recouple to the neck and block it to the truck frame to pull it away from the trailer after pulling the rear neck pin. Then reverse the process to reconnect. A good free sliding 5th wheel is your friend doing all this, I liked to have the 5th wheel up forward to remove the neck and reinstall it, then pull it to the rear when I dropped the neck to lock the lift links, that left it closer to the ramps for lifting and coupling the trailer. After doing it a time or two, you will get the idea. Back in the day (early 80's) I could take the neck off a Cozad mechanical in about 5 minutes. But that was a lot of sprinting from the cab to the trailer...
Air ride truck and good ramps help. It's not bad. It also helps to have a truck that isn't geared real tall so you have some grunt to get under it. Here's a couple pics of the ramps I used to build. Very similar to Cozad. Upper part slides with 5th wheel so you can detach regardless of where your 5th wheel is and keeps the ramps from getting caught by neck when you make a turn where the truck nose is down or trailer is down where clearance is tight. The removable pieces were on there so I could get really low under something and also to remove them if I have to choke up under a trailer with a short swing.
I carried 2 28ton Sava air lifting bags- only 1" thick so they would slide under the outer beams & pick it up & run off truck air. Only used them once in 5 years.
Nice, those should make a smooth lift. The truck I drove way back when dinosaurs roamed the earth had a steep section just behind the mud flaps and Hendrickson rubber biscuit suspension. Sometimes you dumped the glovebox picking up the trailer. lol.
I've watched some guys detach and when they're ready to get under a loaded trailer they'll pull way up and get a run at it..... If the rollers are good, you have a fairly low gear you can back right up to them and they'll climb right up. Once you hear the 5th wheel pop you can stop and then gently backup until it latches. Some of our very first lowboys were folding neck and we operated them with a winch. That was always fun
I played with this RGN trailer a little bit today and watched a bunch of youtube videos also. I think that it is not bad overall. When the body of the trailer is on the ground, the neck drops intimidatingly low. But, at the same time, the free play in the neck is over 5 inches and once the neck (which is light) gets up, it would become high enough and should slide easily on the truck's frame. I have to be careful adding ramps in the back, as I have another trailer with little space between the trailer body and truck's rear, I know this as we got burned on this before.
One thing to think about if you build ramps is how much frame there is behind the last airbag support or crossmember. We always cut the frame before we added ramps, it gave us a better angle as well as got rid of any extra sticking out you don't need. Some frames and suspensions get so low you'll only need a ramp from frame up to 5th wheel. A little measuring will tell you that. Also, how far will your 5th wheel slide back? Would adding some slide help with clearance issues?