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Question for a friend, his gooseneck almost hit the bed of his truck
He has a 18 XLT, stopped by today to see if I'd had that issue, but I don't even have my hitch installed yet. He said he had his gooseneck hooked up and was coming out of a field, happened to look and saw the neck so close, he let the tailgate down, if he hadn't, the neck would have hit the bed rail of the truck. I mentioned lowering the hitch of the trailer, he said the front tires were already almost off the ground.
The neck would need to go up. I use a Gator and Big Tex. Gator has a ton of space. I had to adjust the Big Tex up about 6" from where the height it stayed at with my 2012 to achieve comfortable spacing coming in and out of fields. Do you have any pics of his setup?
This truck is stock with 20" wheels, the trailer is lifted 2" at the axles and I still have it a tad nose up for clearance and not as much as I'd like off road.
Just raise his GN. They are adjustable and he just needs to lift it high enough to clear his bed rails. I keep mine about 8" higher than my bed rails. But I thiink 6" is good for most folks.
Trucks have gotten taller, Leveling kits, bigger tires etc and these trucks just keep getting taller.
My GN horse trailer went down the highway 6" higher in the front than rear for years. (19" front of bed and 13" at rear trailer bumper) with no problems for probably 60,000 miles. Last summer I swapped out the 6k axles or 7k and put the torrision arms down instead of up and that lifted the trailer 6" making it level now. But the horses now have a 19" step up instead of 13".
Its easy for your buddy to loosen a bolt and drop the GN another few inches.
Trailer with new axles that leveled the ride<br/>
Trailer before new axles. Front of box is 6" higher than the rear bumper of box
Maybe a little better view of the trailer slope. It worked fine for a number of years, but I just worried I was putting more weight on the rear axle than the front.
I had the same issue and rather than raising the horse trailer I did drop the rear of the truck 2”. This worked well but I’m going to add airbags to keep it at normal ride height even with the trailer on. There’s a pretty extensive thread on here about lowering the rear of the truck. If I wasn’t on my phone I would link it for you.
Edit: https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...-rear-end.html
Here's the link, I needed the clearance unloaded, once loaded it was fine. Our trailer is a 2015 trails west trailer so it's not like it's a really old trailer. We haul everything from mini horses, to hunter jumper ponies, and western reining horses to shows so raising the trailer isn't the best option. Plus we sometimes pull other peoples trailers so getting the truck lower was the best option. I dropped mine 2", it's a lot and I just ordered air bags this morning because it does really squat with the weight of 8 bales of hay and all the show gear in the goose neck.
The truck is actually facing up a slight incline which sort of exaggerates things but you can tell from the wheel wells that the truck is squatted down pretty good. Empty it sits with about 1" of rake vs. the factory 3" of rake.
Yup.. older trailers especially (like your friends) are going to have low goosenecks. I just got rid of an older Kauffman equipment trailer because I only had about 2 inches of clearance. And in order to get the clearance I needed, I'd have to raise the front a lot, and flip the axles. And have new ramps made so that they weren't too steep. So instead, I went and bought a new PJ with extra tall risers on the neck.
He can probably flip his axles to gain a little more height at the axles (being such a short trailer - I wouldn't want to just lift the front. The back will probably drag) and drop the coupler to raise the front. He could also lower the rear of the truck. I believe the standard blocks are 3 or 4 inches.. and you can get a set of 1 or 2 inch blocks to gain 2 or 3 inches there..
He is going to have to lift his trailer or cut his hitch off the trailer and raise the height of the entire A frame of the trailer hitch. FYI I will not even hook up to a gooseneck with the tailgate still in the truck. Most of our farms have sharp breakovers coming out of the fields that the trailer will hit the tailgate no matter how much clearance I have. Taking off the tailgate is not that hard.
02-11-2018, 02:35 PM
