I carry a 9 foot Northern Lite camper on my '87 F150 300 cu in 4 spd manual with no problems. Camper weighs 1200 lbs. mty.

 

I have a Four Wheel camper that only weighs 985, dry. Very few slide-in campers will work in an F-150. Total payloads are typically 1500-2000lbs, mine is 1800. Even the Lance "Light" is over 2000. Axle capacity is the limiting factor. You can add overload springs and oversize tires, but a 3800lb axle cannot reasonably be upgraded.

Jim

 

With an F150 you are limited and it's mostly due to the axle but you can get a pretty well appointed camper these days that an F150 can handle. The older campers were heavier and I know what folks are saying about GVWR and all but believe me, in the old days there were some big heavy campers and there weren't any duallys - folks were using Camper Specials and a lot of them were over gross. I've been hauling campers on the back of my trucks for over 25 years. The first was an 8 footer on an F100 with clamp on overload springs. Our last is a Lance 880 which weighs 3000 lbs and has been hauled by our '78 F250 Camper Special all over the western US for the past 10 years. The truck originally had frame contact overload springs and with the camper loaded the overloads would engage and disengage as you rode over bumps and dips, giving a pretty lousy ride so I removed them and installed a set of AirLift springs. I also installed 16.5x9.75 wheels and 12.50x33 tires. The truck handles the camper well and has been on just about any type of road you can imagine but, in legality, it is over its GVWR by at least 200 lbs and has been for over 200,000 miles of travel over mountains, deserts, winding coastal routes and dirt roads.

My suggestion is stay within the published GVWR, I'm only telling this to say that my hat is off to those folks at Ford when they built this old Camper Special - it's been one hell of a truck!

http://home.comcast.net/~kcabpilot/F250/

 

3/4 ton "Camper Special" trucks from the 1960's and 1970's only had a 7500lb GVWR. BUT, the empty truck was so much lighter than today. Back then they were all regular cab with very few luxuries, mostly 4x2 and tipped the scales at less than 4500lbs unladen. That left over 3000lbs for two people, gas and payload. That was plenty for most of the slide-in campers back then.

Todays crew-cab, 4x4, turbodiesel, dripping with luxury options, even at 8800lb GVWR, has less net paylod capacity with butts in the seats and full tanks.

Jim

 

Yup, you're right about that Jim. Our Camper Special was an XLT and has a bench seat with roll down windows. The GVWR is actually 7900 lbs and I figure that the oversized wheels and tires add probably 100 lbs to the original empty weight so I don't consider that as weight that is a load on the chassis. Even so, I'll admit that I'm operating over the limit and although I feel confident the equipment can handle it I'm not endorsing or advocating that anyone do it. Just to be clear - stay within the limits specified and you can be confident that your rig will be okay.I'd love to get a brand new turbo-deisel dually but man, I don't have $50k laying around

Paul