Yeah, thats not a weld, thats a deposit of metal on top of metal and held together with paint.

 

My Ex is sitting in the driveway, full tank of diesel with the camper attached to it waiting to fire up and head to the beach tomorrow. It will be a hot pull, close to 100 degrees tomorrow with high humidity.

 

So somehow a screw punctured the bottom of my fresh water tank. Today I pulled the rusty steel screw and replaced it with a stainless screw (a bit bigger) with some silicone on it.

I am going to give my a/c another looksy. When I was plugged in on my last trip I could swear I heard the a/c pump kick on but the blower fan was locked up again (sits all the time). I will free up the fan again and see if I can get the pump to run again.

Strange I couldn't get the pump to run before and now it sounded like it was running every now and then while turning the switch on and off repeatedly.

 

We are currently in the middle of a nine day camping trip. One of our two summer vacations. The first two days were a little rough, but now that the weekenders are gone we have the whole north section to ourselves....... literally.





That's us waaaaay back there.

 

Temp outside hit 100 on our trip with the travel trailer to Hunting Island, SC. The Ex did great, highest temps were 215 ect, 229 eot. I need to figure out how to post pics from the phone, the beach is beautiful.

 

View for the weekend.

 

Well.... headed home today. Back to reality tomorrow.

 

Reality Sux.

 

This weekend we drove down to Hunting Island State Park, SC outside of Beaufort. It has an awesome beach, a nice pier, a lighthouse you can climb and sand bars galore. The roads in the campsite are tight but they are planning on redoing some of them this winter. It was a 6 hr drive down but well worth it.


Oh, the Ex performed perfectly in the hot, humid weather pulling the camper.

 

After returning home from Naugara Falls last Friday I noticed a problem with our TT's front right tire while installing the X-chocks. That tire's tread face was rounded, like a wheel barow tire vs nice and flat across like a tire should be, upon closer inspection I found a tear in the inside sidewall also. We were very lucky to have dodged a bullet this time as that tire looks like it was just about to come apart. The tire was exactly 2 years and 50 weeks old and was the 5th ST tire failure that I've had, first on this TT, lost 1 on the boat trailer and had three fail similarly on the old toyhauler at the same time...........I'm done with them. I plan to upgrade to LT tires before next camping season (we are currently done with our longer trips for the year, maybe a few short hauls still to go). It will be more expensive then just buying new STs and continuing this short (2/3 year) life span circus, but hopefully in the end the much longer (8/10 year) life span of the LTs will balance out the cost as well increase the safety, efficiency and peace of mind over our planned ownership cycle.
I started a thread looking for LT tire on trailer experiences over in the Fith Wheel Forum, it seems this upgrade is more popular with that crowd, but I wanted to share it with you guys a well. https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...ts-please.html

Rounded tread face


The inner sidewall tear

 

wow nice save Tom, good find/info

 

Ewww, that's worse than I imagined. Wasn't expecting the tear in the sidewall like that.

Those are probably the same china bombs I have on my trailer. I'm planning to run them for a bit, but do plan to upgrade to 16" LT when I need new tires.

Do you have some wheels in mind?

 

Yeah, I was aggravated when I saw the round tread failure but I was actually pretty relieved when I saw the tear that it didn't come apart more and beat the trailer up in the process. It never lost any air or overheated per my TPMS.
For now I'll be rotating the unused spare tire off it's white wagon wheel onto the failed tire's aluminum rim then remounting another load range D ST I have in the shed onto the wagon wheel to serve as the spare to finish out this season for us.
I have begun looking for 16" (16"x7", 6 on 5.5", 4.25" pilot hole, 0 or -5MM offset) rims and would like to find something that compliments the EX's 18" Lariat 5 spokes somewhat. So far there a couple of 5 and 6 spoke ones I like, just need to find the best deal on them. The tire selection has a lot of choices, all have higher load capacity and speed ratings. I have to keep overall size in mind too, I have almost 6" between the tandems now but only 4"-ish of room above the tires to the trailer's floor, I may need to address that if I go with LT tires more than an inch taller than the current ones. I may wait until just before next camping season to buy the new tires to help ensure the freshest set.

 

What ply where them ST tires Tom??


I upgraded to 10 plys on mine. Sad part is a reg ST tire is only rated for 65 mph

 

The one that failed is a Load range D ST tire, on our old toyhauler I had 3 ST LR E tires fail in a very similar way with some tread chunking off, they were 2.5 years old and that trailer was only rolling at 9,500lbs!
Yeah, most of the ST tires that I have found that have a higher speed rating (up to 75 MPH) are 110 PSI Load Range G (Sailun S637 & Goodyear G614RST). Unfortunately to get rims that can run that pressure they have to be 8 lug, my TT has 5200lb 6 lug axles/hubs so it will be 16" LT tires in LR E for me.